By Sapna Singhal
Influencer marketing has become a leading organic marketing strategy. Recent data shows that 90% of marketers find it effective, with the industry’s market value skyrocketing from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $21.1 billion in 2023.
But why is influencer marketing so popular? There are many factors at play here. Influencer marketing is a breath of fresh air for consumers worldwide, tired of traditional advertising and brands promoting themselves in an unrealistic way.
It is basic science.
With the advent of social media marketing, people found people they could connect with on an elemental level and trust for recommendations. Ones who suggested great products and brands consistently built credibility and grew their audiences into communities, and thus, influencers were born. Studies indicate that 64% of social media users discover new brands via influencers and 61% trust influencer recommendations more than branded content.
The reason why influencer marketing generates great results lies in the psychology of influence that guides the thoughts inside the human brain. That’s why businesses are investing in influencer partnerships, aiming to enhance brand credibility and authority, leading to greater sales and revenue.
In this blog, we’ll delve into the science and psychology of influencer marketing, including emotional triggers, examples, and future trends. Let’s dive in.
Why Is Influencer Marketing So Powerful?
Influencer marketing taps into the power of relatability and the natural reactions hardwired in the human brain. There are many other factors that make influencer marketing powerful:
1. The Rise of Social Media
Social media has reshaped our world, with user numbers jumping from 2.73 billion in 2017 to an expected 5.85 billion by 2027.
Earlier, brands could only promote their products and services on their company website or through paid ads on mainstream media. However, social media has given brands a better avenue to not only provide information about their offers but also gauge how customers are reacting to them by measuring metrics such as impressions, engagements, and more.
As for consumers, social media is a source of connection and information they can access anytime. This is where influencers come into the picture. Creators on different platforms create different kinds of content that give consumers an in-depth understanding of what they should buy and why.
Moreover, people with the same interests and purchase needs find each other within an influencer’s community, and these connections further influence and reinforce decision-making, leading to increased sales for the brand.
2. Traditional Advertising Feels Overbearing
Traditional advertising is more like a spray-and-pray approach. It simply targets anyone and everyone through a visual medium. This is why the current audience demographic, especially millennials and GenZ, does not trust celebrity endorsements and brand-sponsored content.
Influencer marketing fulfills a base need—the right to choose. People can choose to follow influencers and the brands they endorse. Since they choose to follow their favorite creator, the occasional promotional offer from the brand does not annoy them. In fact, the audience welcomes it.
3. The Role of Trust
Studies conducted at Stanford revealed that people remember stories up to 22 times more than facts alone. Influencers leverage this power of storytelling to increase brand recall for the products they promote. 81% of consumers have reported that social media posts from their favorite creators have driven their interest in a product or service. This shows how storytelling translates into brand trust, ultimately leading to favorable business outcomes.
This is Psychology 101. A well-told story affects your brain in many ways, including:
- Neural coupling: This lets you feel the story as if it’s your own experience.
- Mirroring: Watching an influencer creates a familiar feeling, as if you’re sharing their experience.
- Dopamine release: Good stories trigger emotions, and the release of dopamine in our brains helps us remember the story and associated brands longer.
Together, these elements make audiences feel deeply connected to influencer stories. This connection can then be used to influence people to take action.
4. High ROI Increases Affordability
Influencer marketing generates 11x greater ROI than traditional advertising methods. Research indicates that for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, brands make $5.20 in sales and revenue.
This further increases the affordability of influencer marketing as an organic promotional strategy for your business. In fact, you do not even need to partner with influencers who have millions of followers. You can partner with micro-influencers (those with 10,000-100,000 followers) and have a 60% higher engagement rate when compared to macro-influencers.
Note: You cannot expect influencer marketing to generate immediate substantial ROI. It is a long-term game of profit and loss, and you can only benefit from it if you stay consistent with your brand’s values and partner with the right influencers.
The Psychology Of Influence—What Are The Main Trigger Factors?
Psychological triggers are the cocktail recipe for maximizing the potential of creators in your niche industry and channeling their influence into success for your business. These include:
1. Social Proof
The psychology of influence, especially in influencer marketing, succeeds primarily because it offers social proof.
Let’s face it. People want to fit in. Individuals believe that they should also be doing what everyone around them is doing. They perceive these actions as right. This is why seeing your favorite fashion influencer buying her clothes from a new brand makes you want to mimic their behavior and purchase your next outfit from the same brand as well.
Since consumers trust influencers, they perceive their conformity as something that someone in the know validates. Influencers instill a strong point of view about the products they use and promote it in the minds of their followers.
Even though interactions are primarily one-way, viewers feel a strong personal connection to their favorite creators. This is known as a parasocial relationship. The followers of an influencer can relate to them as if they were close friends. This increases engagement and leads to more product and brand endorsements.
Example
Lululemon has used influencer marketing judiciously as social proof to skyrocket its brand awareness, build a strong community, and bring in millions in revenue.
Unlike other traditional athleisure brands that usually partner with big-name sportspersons for promotions, Lululemon collaborated with fitness and yoga micro-influencers, providing their biggest fans a chance to contribute to building the brand. These micro-influencers don’t have access to fancy equipment or do something drastically different with their lives, just like general people. They are suburban moms, corporate girls, or spiritual instructors. The general audience relates to them on a deep level, making it much more likely for them to invest in something they recommend.
As a result, Lululemon saw a higher share of Earned Media Value (EMV) generated by micro-influencers: 36% of its total from April 2019 to March 2020 came from smaller-scale bloggers, outpacing Gymshark’s 8% and Alo Yoga’s 16%.
2. Authority
Influencers can effectively influence their audiences into buying your products because of the concept of authority. We have all been taught to pay attention to professional counsel and take it at face value. Therefore, if a business uses industry leaders and authoritative figures of influence, customers are likely to embrace their advice without hesitation.
Let’s dive deeper into how this psychology works.
You may be thinking, if we are talking about authority figures, why don’t celebrities make the list? Celebs have something called ascribed authority, which inherently relies on social status. This is also the case for mega influencers. However, micro-influencers have achieved authority, which is industry expertise gained through knowledge, skills, and achievements in a particular field.
While achieved authority delivers specialized knowledge, ascribed authority offers broad appeal and initial attention. Both can help you achieve success with your influencer marketing campaigns, depending on your objectives.
Authority translates into cognitive shortcuts through the mental heuristic known as “authority bias”. People have a tendency to trust the ideas and suggestions of authoritative personalities, whether they are attributed (celebrities) or achieved (experts). Thus, leveraging authority in influencer marketing can result in quicker decision-making and greater trust in a brand and its products or services.
Example
The Italian luxury fashion brand Moncler wanted to attract the attention of the Gen-Z audience, so they partnered with popular TikTok stars such as Charli D’Amelio and Bella Porch for their #MonclerBubbleUp campaign on TikTok.
With the songs “Bubble” by 24 Hours and Ty Dolla $ign playing in the background, participants were invited to wrap themselves in anything that resembled Moncler clothing. The classic Moncler bubble coat was displayed as the winning entry in the challenge.
This influencer campaign helped Moncler get significant brand awareness and promote their products. They gained 2.3 billion views, giving Moncler what they wanted—a refreshing way to engage a new generation of buyers.
3. Reciprocity and Scarcity
Reciprocity and scarcity are two of the main principles of persuasion under Cialdini’s Six Principles of Influence.
Reciprocity states that humans are hardwired to repay debts and reciprocate favors—to treat others the way they have treated us. When it comes to their influencers, most followers feel indebted to them for several reasons.
The strong personal connection people feel towards their favorite creators makes them feel like they belong. Moreover, followers of an influencer often band together into a community that fosters friendships and relationships and gives them a sense of purpose in life. Based on the principle of reciprocity, when your favorite creator recommends a product, you will most likely feel compelled to make a purchase from the brand.
The principle of scarcity, on the other hand, directly elicits a fear of missing out (or FOMO, as GenZ calls it). Influencers capitalize on the fear of missing out by making their content seem urgent and exclusive. They draw followers who do not want to miss out on what’s hot or intriguing by showcasing limited-time deals, uncommon experiences, or trendy goods. To prevent feeling left out, their audience feels encouraged to interact, buy, and advertise their loyalty by sharing them with other followers on social media.
Example
MKfit, a fitness subscription app developed by YouTuber Mitchell Khare, is a great example of the reciprocity concept. Mitchell gained over 2.46 million followers through her Challenge Accepted series, where she records herself attempting various challenges, including undergoing FBI academy and Navy Seal training. To demonstrate that anything is achievable with enough effort and perseverance, she broadcasts her adventures on her channel, turning them into a novel and immersive experience for her viewers.
As an influencer, Mitchell inspires her audience, and this inspiration easily translated into reciprocation when she released her MKfit app.
The app includes guided workouts, diet plans, and exercise videos for her followers who would like to emulate her. Mitchel’s fans also have the opportunity to message Michelle directly on MKfit and gain access to a members-only Facebook community. Last but not least, the app offers a 7-day free trial so members can try it out before fully investing.
This increases trust and incites followers to reciprocate the trust by buying the subscription for their favorite influencer’s app.
Now, here’s an example of scarcity. Justin Kan is a B2B tech entrepreneur and has co-founded several successful startups. The man is an influencer in his own right, with hundreds and thousands of followers on LinkedIn and Twitter. Leveraging FOMO across his massive follower base to get them excited about his next release, Justin released SocialCam, a mobile video platform, in March 2011. He only opened it up to a select group of individuals who could invite others.
This strategy worked wonders, and his dedicated audience didn’t need any more persuasion to jump on the bandwagon. SocialCam acquired over a million users in only four months and surpassed 16 million downloads by 2012.
4. The Halo Effect
The halo effect is a subset of the concept of cultural conformity. With the innate drive of humans to blend in and an influencer exercising a certain level of authority owing to their subject matter expertise, the latter’s opinions on what is valuable to use and purchase are taken seriously. From a psychological standpoint, consuming the same things that the most popular and prominent individuals do will resemble the others who follow them.
The best influencers know how to create a great first impression. Moreover, an influencer’s good first impression lends to a transfer of positive traits from the creator to the brand. This means that favorable qualities in an influencer, such as reliability, authenticity, and likeability, transfer to the brand they are endorsing, elevating their image in the audience’s collective eye. This results in consumers engaging with the recommended brand in large numbers and with more vigor and may even lead to quicker conversions.
Example
Hirect, India’s leading chat-based direct hiring platform, leveraged influencer marketing to connect more high-growth startups with top-notch talent. Hirect partnered with more than 2,500 micro- and macro-influencers and created a halo effect on LinkedIn, leading to thousands of professionals signing up to explore the platform.
This level of LinkedIn influencer marketing was a first of its kind in India. With campaigns such as #BeyondHiring, #YourOnlyHiringSupport, and more, Hirect significantly elevated its brand image and increased brand awareness for furthering its business objectives and growth.
Are You Ready To Leverage Influencer Marketing for Your Brand?
Businesses have used the psychology of influence to acquire and retain customers for decades. However, modern times call for modern measures—and influencer marketing is the best strategy for brands to attract the attention of the modern audience.
Partnering with the right influencer can help your brand gain instant access to an audience that resembles your ideal buyer personas. The best influencers know how to capitalize on the most natural human emotions, behaviors, and desires through storytelling.
When this storytelling mastery translates into promoting your products and services, it automatically attracts attention from the influencer’s followers. Moreover, the influencer’s credibility transfers to your brand, and their audience feels much more confident investing in your offers than your competitors.
So what are you waiting for? Leverage influencer marketing to gain authority in your niche industry, supplement your business objectives, and amplify your brand’s market value today.
About the Author: Sapna Singhal is a Freelance Content Writer specializing in writing data-driven blog posts around B2B Marketing and SaaS. She writes content that generates millions of traffic and helps clients double down on their revenue. You can find her chit-chatting with her sisters or reading books when she’s not writing!