When selecting the specific influencer marketing channel that companies prefer, 34 percent of brands wish to focus their strategy on blogs. A majority of brands (65 percent) say they are planning to increase their influencer marketing budget this year, according to a Buzzoole survey of the more than 200 brands on their platform.Compared to other strategies, such as display advertising and affiliates, companies plan to invest the most in influencer marketing, the survey results indicated.When comparing the amount companies plan to spend on different promotional strategies, a mere 6 percent of companies wish to focus their investment on display advertising, 15 percent want to focus on affiliates, 3 percent on organic search, 29 percent on paid search, and taking the highest percentage is influencer marketing with 30 percent."The most surprising finding was not the fact that many companies claimed they would invest on influencer marketing more in the following months, but the size of the budget they claimed they would allocate," Fabrizio Perrone, CEO and founder of Buzzoole, told eWEEK. He noted 23 percent of respondents said they would allocate between $15-25,000, and 17 percent $26-50,000, which he said proves influencer marketing is a trend and people trust the value coming out of it. "Social networks diffusion is huge, everybody is aware of that. And mobile devices account for 76 percent of all the time spent on social media," Perrone said. "The great change coming from mobile technology regarding brand-building is the fact that now even small businesses can afford reaching their target without spending a fortune on commercials and similar methods."When selecting the specific influencer marketing channel that companies prefer, 34 percent of brands wish to focus their strategy on blogs, 29 percent wish to focus on Instagram, 23 percent on Facebook, 8 percent on Twitter, 5 percent on Youtube, and one percent on Snapchat."Consumers can be reached wherever and at any time. This is a revolution. Indeed, with influencer marketing, which runs across social media and blogs, and appears as organic and spontaneous to users, there is not only a higher chance to reach your target audience, but brands can do so in a more impressive and trustworthy way," Perrone noted. "Through involving influencers, small businesses can communicate to a wider audience, speeding up their process of brand-building."Additionally, the results revealed that a large portion of companies wish to use Instagram, an image-based channel, to promote their brand.However, the results also suggest that Snapchat, which is also a visual-based channel, still isn’t viewed as a major marketing channel."The role of traditional marketing strategies has definitely changed. This doesn't mean that it doesn't work anymore, it's just that its role has evolved over time. Old strategies have to be integrated with other kinds of activities," Perrone said. "It would be right to imagine marketing as omni-channel, a funnel where both traditional and digital strategies combine and integrate one another. This is the only way to make things work out, as consumers interact with multiple devices, and receive stimulus both offline and online."
- eWeek