DIGITAL MARKETING AND E COMMERCE GAURAV KAPOOR

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of gaining market online by
purchasing Ads on search engines, say Google, Yahoo, or Bing. SEM involves the
promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in Search Engine Result Page
(SERP).

Search Engines

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The search engines use algorithms to provide the most relevant results to every user.
For producing best suggestions to the users’ queries, they consider not only the search
keywords entered by users but also users’ location, type of device and operating
system they are working on, users’ preferences, and their identities.

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The better the search algorithm is, the happier the user is with its results.

Search Marketing Approaches

Search marketing works with two approaches −

•
•
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Earning traffic through unpaid or free search listings (SEO Methods)
Buying traffic through paid search listings (PPC Ads)
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In the first type of search marketing where advertisers earn traffic through unpaid
listings, there are two popular methods − organic and non-organicsearch.
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Organic SEO Non-organic SEO

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It takes more time to create as more concentrated

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towards content creation, building hyperlinks, meta-tag It is speedy.

optimization, keyword enhancement, etc.
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It yields late effect. It brings immediate effect.

It focuses on short term

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It focuses on long term results.

results.

It is inexpensive. It is very expensive.

They cannot be affected financially. They can get affected

financially.

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Once the design of the website and its content is It required high degree of
good, it requires less management. management.

Inorganic search is Black

Organic SEO is called White Hat search tactic.
Hat search tactic.

How to Get Organic Results

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Organic results can be achieved by Search Engine Optimization. You need to invest
time and expertise in creating an appealing yet efficient website that can work to build
long lasting trust in your business.

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You need to build your business website according to SEO techniques which
use White Hat Tactics for rank improvement. The SEO techniques are described in
chapter SEO Friendly Website.

How to Get Inorganic Results

They can be
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improved in two ways:
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• Improving your quality score
• your bids for keywords and Ads

Inorganic results are instantly reflected. Here is a checklist for inorganic search
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optimization:

• Mine keywords properly. Group them into relevant themes.

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• Use correct match types. Estimate bid on all match types. Choose the benefiting
one.
• Keep testing your Ad copies and landing pages.
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• Strive constantly to improve CTR.

• Aim for higher quality score.
• Target relevant locations. Only look for the places that seem to give you business.
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• Run search query report. Filter prominent keywords. Bid higher on most searched
keyword.
• Bid your keywords accordingly. Calculate and strategize methods to achieve ROI.

Organic versus Inorganic Search – Which is Better?

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It is better and safer to start with Organic SEO in case of small business because it
requires low-cost investment. In addition, it builds your internet presence gradually and
creates a solid foundation for your business. It is found that the organic search results
are very much likely to get attention of the viewers.

Inorganic SEO is good for customer targeting. For example, PPC advertising. While
opting for this, you need to make sure you are investing in the appropriate advertise.
You need huge funds to hire a management or your own dedicated expertise, which
can take care of your paid searches.

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Though organic and inorganic results are independent of each other’s performance,
yet you need to perform well in both to boost up your business. Paid Ads boost your
business and website ranking. Organic results marks trust on your business.

Steps Involved in Search Engine Marketing

These are the general steps involved in search engine marketing −

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Step 1 − Define Effective Strategy

• Define your target audience.

• Identify their needs and motivations.
• Highlight how your product is best to serve their needs.

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• Review your business position in the marketplace.
• Identify your competitors.
• Identify your specific goals and benchmarks, such as search ranking, sales,
website traffic, and other ROI metrics.

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Step 2 − Choose Right Keywords

• Select most important phrases relevant to your business.

• Also select the phrases that are frequently searched by your target customers.
•
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Conduct brainstorm sessions for potential terms your customers use when thinking
about your products and capabilities.
• Interact with your sales and customer service teams, and best customers to know
the frequently used phrases.
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• Employ a keyword research tools to compile a list of highly searched terms.

Step 3 − Optimize Your Website Content

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• Focus on your website structure. Keep it simple.

• The search engines looks for the underlying code of your website when they visit
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your website.
• Create crisp, clear, and correct content that can retain users’ attention.
• Use your keyword phrases relevantly in pages title tags, heading tags, directory
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names, file names, alt tags and meta tags.

• Pay attention to meta description. It is shown in the search results below your link,
providing a great opportunity for you to bring visitors to your Website.

Step 4 − Submit Your Website for Indexing

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To be visible online to the customers, ensure that all the pages of your website are
completely indexed by the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

For speedy process of getting indexed by the other engines, submit your website to
the DMOZ.org, an Open Directory Project. Once DMOZ accepts your website, Yahoo
and other search engines have no problem indexing your website.

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Step 5 − Add Quality Links to Your Website

• Build links to your website from valued links of other websites that are frequented
by your targeted visitors.
• The more quality inbound links you have, the more popular your website is with
Google and other engines.
• Make your website content is link-worthy. Create interesting and informative
content on your website such as a library of best practices articles, blog trends in

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your industry, etc.
• You can also garner links from vendors, customers, business partners, and trade
associations.
• Distribute press releases and articles online.

Step 6 − Manage Paid Search Advertise

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• Bid on the most relevant keywords. Do not pick them based on only popularity.
• Make sure your product offer is interesting to the potential customer.
• Tie the bidding strategy to business results. In many cases a lower Ad position will

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produce a higher ROI.
• Finally, include a compelling ‘call to action’ in the Ad and send traffic to a relevant
landing page tied to the Ad.

Step 7 − Measure Success of Advertise

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• Check how well you performed in the past.
• Measure CPC, CPR, Clicks, Bounce rate, Impressions, ROI, etc.
• Employ Web Analytics to monitor progress and problems.
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• Monitor your position regularly in the search results.

• Identify problems and plan strategies to improve your results in the future.
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Mobile Marketing: Meaning and Types

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Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching a

target audience on their smartphones, tablets, and/or other mobile devices, via
websites, email, SMS and MMS, social media, and apps.
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Mobile is disrupting the way people engage with brands. Everything that can be done
on a desktop computer is now available on a mobile device. From opening an email
to visiting your website to reading your content, it’s all accessible through a small
mobile screen. Consider:
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• 80% of internet users own a smartphone.

• Mobile platforms, such as smartphones and tablets, host up to 60% of digital media
time for users in the U.S.
• Google anticipates search queries on mobile devices to surpass desktop searches
by the end of 2015.

Effective mobile advertising means understanding your mobile audience, designing

content with mobile platforms in mind, and making strategic use of SMS/MMS
marketing and mobile apps.

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Types of Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing has proven to be effective as now, the consumer has an increased
control over the kind of advertisements that are sent to him. There was a time when
most messages sent to consumers were not very useful, posing a serious threat to
mobile marketing.

Corrective actions, both by corporations and network providers have helped to weed

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out unscrupulous elements, making mobile marketing an ethical way of promotion and
publicity. Some types of mobile marketing are as follows.

1. Short Message Service (SMS)

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Short message service initiated the concept of mobile marketing and still is used to
promote a variety of products and services. Although, it has been put to a lot of abuse,
regulations in the past few years have meant a revival of this form of mobile marketing.

The biggest advantage of SMS marketing is its reach and the low cost of marketing.

target audience for corporations.

2. Multimedia Message Service (MMS)

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Every cell phone has an ability to receive an SMS, which essentially means a larger
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Multimedia messages score over SMS as being a more effective form of marketing as
it provides the user with images, audio and video. MMS can also be used to run
advertisements as one gets to see on a TV, and offers a more efficient way of
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marketing a product, however, the cost of sending an MMS is more than that of an
SMS.
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3. Mobile Applications
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Mobile applications have proved to be a great tool for mobile marketers, as these are
innovative and offer the user a host of features. There are certain widgets that are
displayed on the home screen of mobile phones, allowing the user to directly log into
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them, and advertisements can be placed on these applications to promote a product.

4. Bluetooth Mobile Marketing

This type of marketing helps in customizing the type of advertisements a user will
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receive, and most of it is based upon the geographical location of the user. This is an
effective form of marketing as it helps in delivering relevant information to the user,
and helps in filtering the advertisements which may not be useful for the user.

For example, the probability of a person enrolling for a dancing or a yoga course is
more if the venue is closer to where he stays. This is the prime reason why Bluetooth
mobile marketing is an effective tool for serving custom ads to the user.

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5. Mobile Internet Advertisements

When you are online, you might have seen several advertisements popping up on your
computer screen. Mobile Internet advertisements work in the same way, and deliver
high-quality content to users. These are mostly built for smartphone users who have
a reliable Internet connection.

Apart from the general consumer advertisements, mobile marketing has also helped

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entrepreneurs to expand their business and network with people. The QR (quick-
response barcodes) allow interested parties to know more about a business project.

Today, iPhone is equipped with Near Field Communication, which allows users to buy
stuff online, as one does from a computer. Truly, there are more exciting times ahead,

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and innovations in technology can provide some magnificent options to corporations
as well as consumers.

Video Marketing on YouTube

claim as an essential tool for marketers.

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YouTube has always been a source of entertaining content, but it’s also staking its

Not only is your audience on YouTube, but as the internet’s second largest search
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engine, YouTube can help improve your SEO and overall brand presence. YouTube
allows marketers to present unique content that’s easy for viewers to consume and
share.
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YouTube marketing can be an intimidating tool for brands. That’s why we’ve created
this complete guide for YouTube pros and newcomers alike. Below we’ll walk through
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each step of marketing on YouTube from how to create a YouTube channel and
optimize videos for SEO to how to run a YouTube advertising campaign and interpret
video analytics.
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Before advertising on YouTube, you’ll need to upload your video to your YouTube
channel. Once it’s uploaded, simply paste the video’s URL into the box provided.
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The next step is to choose the text that’ll communicate who you are and what you
offer. This includes a headline and description. The aim of your headline is to grab the
attention of potential customers and highlight the product or service you’re trying to
promote. Use the description text to feature your key messages (for example, the thing
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that makes you unique or a limited-time offer) and encourage people to watch your
video ad.

In this section, you’ll also be asked to choose a thumbnail image for your video
advertisement. These images are the first thing YouTube users see before they click
on your ad. You know your business better than anyone else – choose the image you
think best represents you and your content. If possible, you should try to match the
image you choose to what you have mentioned in your ad text. For example, if your
video text talks about surfing, choose the video still that captures someone surfing.

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Marketing on YouTube is like marketing on other social platforms: the first step is to
create your strategy. In order to create your YouTube marketing strategy, you’ll want
to start by defining your goals.

• Clicks/traffic
• Engagement
• Reach/subscriber numbers

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Commit to a schedule

Consistency is very important on YouTube if you want to keep growing your channel.
As with blogging, the more content you put out there, the better the chances you’ll
reach a wider audience.

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Most successful YouTubers have a very strict publishing schedule and they stick to it.
These YouTubers also promote new videos to their audience on other social media
platforms so that even those who haven’t subscribed to their channel can still know
when a new video is coming out. While you’re setting up a YouTube marketing strategy

content and make sure you can stick to it.

Some key differences to highlight this:

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for your business, consider how often you can realistically commit to posting new
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• People are most likely to find your videos on YouTube The by searching for them,
or when viewing other relevant content. On most social media sites (Pinterest being
the exception) they’ll see you from ads, if they’re following you, or from
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engagement of a friend on your content.

• The emphasis of YouTube is on watching videos, not discussing them. You don’t
really see people tagging each other in the comments like you do on other sites.
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It’s about the viewer’s experience, not a social one. If people want to do this, they’ll
share the video onto their own social platforms
• Many people come to YouTube with the intention of sitting down and watching
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some serious video. They don’t necessarily get on idly and scroll through a feed
the same way they do on Facebook.
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Introduction to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn,

YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest; their channel
advertising and campaign
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How to Use Facebook for Marketing

It’s important to start by building your fanbase on Facebook. Publicize your page and
post a link to it anywhere you can, including adding a social icon onto your website.

Once you’ve created a strong following it’s important to use status updates or photos
to share your products, offers, services. You should also post things that get your
audience to engage with your posts. Things that they will click, “like,” comment on,

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and share. The more people are engaging, the more frequently you’ll appear in others
timelines.

It’s important to keep in mind that many use Facebook as a personal network to
connect with their friends or loved ones. Your brand needs to fit into this atmosphere
naturally in order to keep people interested in what you’re posting. So don’t make it
solely about selling.

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Tool to Utilize: Advertising

Facebook Advertising is really picking up speed in the business world.

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It uses social graph and activities to pinpoint those who fall into your buyer
demographics, making Facebook Ads incredibly effective. Facebook ads are more
likely to bring in strong leads that are actually looking for your services.

They help make sure your advertising budget isn’t wasted on those who aren’t really

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interested in what you’re offering and helping to put product or service put into the
hands of the exact person who wants or needs it. To go much deeper into mastering
Facebook, download this free guide.

Twitter
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Twitter is fast-paced, concise, and easy way to connect with your audience. With over
310 million registered users (and growing), Twitter is a sea of information of 140
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character or less content waiting to be read, clicked, followed, and re-tweeted.

How to Use Twitter for Marketing

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Twitter generates over 175 million tweets daily and allows you to share quick pieces
of information and photos in an effort to drive people back to your site or landing pages.
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You only get a small amount of characters, so make them count!

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When marketing on Twitter, you need to have content that is enticing enough for
people to stop and click through. People are normally scrolling through quickly so it
takes more than just simple text to stop them in their tracks. Make sure when you’re
constructing your tweets, you’re making people want to click through.

Try using quotes, statistics, or questions related to the link you’re tweeting as a way
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to people wanting to read more. Incorporate photos, polls, gifs, or even short videos.
(All of these are now natively supported by the platform!)

While Twitter is a great way to share quick thoughts and generate traffic to your
website and offers, it’s important to make sure you’re also building relationships with
followers.

People follow you because they like what you have to say, but often also to engage in
conversation. Like you would on Facebook, ask and respond to questions, respond to

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mentions and direct messages. Twitter is as useful for driving traffic as it is for
customer service.

Tool to Utilize: Hashtags

Hashtags (#) are you key tool on Twitter. These tags allow you to reach a wider
audience than just your followers by getting involved in existing conversations.

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People searching for specific information will often check hashtags to see what’s out
there. Do some research what your buyer persona is hashtagging to make sure your
posts are going to be found by the right people.

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Our free guide “Tune Up Your Social Media Marketing” will teach you everything you
need to know to master Twitter for business. You can get it here.

LinkedIn

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How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing

LinkedIn is different from the rest of the social media outlets because it’s specifically
designed for business and professionals. Users mainly go to LinkedIn to showcase
their job experience and professional thoughts, making it one of the more important
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platforms to use for those in B2B.

Between features like LinkedIn Pulse, Company Pages, InMail, Groups, and “Get
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Introduced” and the ability to see who’s viewed your personal profile, LinkedIn is a
valuable tool for not only driving traffic, but prospecting, establishing thought
leadership, as well as recruiting.
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Content Marketing
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Advertising uses the content to describe the business, brand, and business
reputation. The content can be in various forms such as news, webpages, videos,
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white papers, infographics, podcasts, blogs, case studies, and photographs.

Content is what is sold or accessed on the Internet. Content developers create the
content to provide the information to the viewers. It can be in the form of text, graphics,
and animation.
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Content marketing refers to the approach of creating and sharing of informative,

relevant, valuable, and consistent content to convert a group of audience into
customers and retain them. Content marketing is non-interruptive way of marketing.

Good content helps customers become more knowledgeable about the product or
service and make better buying judgment.

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Goals of Content Marketing

The goals of content marketing are as follows:

• Brand Awareness: It marks the presence of your brand.

• Sale: It boosts lead generation at quicker pace.
• Customer-Vendor Relationship Building: It helps in creating engagement

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between buyer and the company.
• Customer Retention: Pleasing content attracts customers and helps one in
retaining him.

Types Of Content

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Let us see what each type of content gives −

News

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They contain news about new product release, updates on products, etc. For example,
news of releasing new mobile handset on website of NDTV gadgets.

Webpages
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SEO webpages can hold the content in the best possible way and sell the content.

Videos
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They say, video is the second best thing to pursue a viewer in person. Creating crisp
and compact videos can bring good market at doorstep. Promote your business videos
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across multiple channels, and ensure that your videos are optimized for mobile
viewing, as an increasing number of users view them from their mobile devices.
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Infographics

These are long, vertical graphics or columns that include graphs, charts, statistics, and
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other information. Infographics makes use of the fact that 90% information transmitted
to human brain is visual, which makes people perceive it faster than text.

Podcasts
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They are digital files available in the form of episodes, which can be downloaded on
the PC. They can come in various formats such as audio, video, e-Pub, and pdf. It
allows people to subscribe and it can prove as a powerful medium to communicate a
range of ideas, products, and information to audience. The businesses engaged in
podcasting are − IBM, Oracle, Yarn Craft, etc.

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Blogs

Business blogs deliver excellent content marketing. Blogs are required for a business
to survive in the race of content marketing.

Case Studies

Case studies are detailed studies pertaining to a particular problem, action, individual,

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organization, event, or action, existing at a specific place at a given time. They
encourage content marketing to build trust in the product and in turn business.

Photographs

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A picture speaks a thousand words. Pleasant and relevant pictures can stand as a
good content for content marketing and boosts the business.

Designing Content for Social Media Marketing

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Social media networks support multiple content formats and there has been rapid
growth in the use of interactive formats, for example, carousel ads on Facebook. This
flexibility of format (text, image, multi-image, video, carousel etc.) gives marketers the
ability to experiment with different types of content to gauge how best to attract and
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engage social users.

If people are the heartbeat of social media, content is the blood. It’s your content that
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people see and respond to, and that communicates your values and messages.

But what content works? How do you plan what to talk about, on which platforms and
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in what formats?

Producing and sharing content is no guarantee of success. Smart content marketers

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understand the need to align social with other channels to ensure there is a consistent
style of communication with customers and the stories they are telling, and that is
driven by a clear plan rather than scrabbling each week to find something to share.
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Why is it important to get your content right for social media?

Social media is most often used for personal reasons to connect with friends and
family, or to be part of conversations that align with your personal interests and
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passions.

If you serve content to people with this mindset that isn’t appropriate, relevant or
useful, it can have the effect of turning people off and driving them away. Similarly, if
you blast people with a constant stream of content, it can be overwhelming and come
across like a shouting match.

You need to take the time to learn what people want to read/watch and make it
digestible via the formats and channels they find most useful.

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Why you need an over arching comms & content plan

Start with a clear comms and content plan that is aligned with business goals. This
isn’t social specific; it should govern how you communicate with customers across all
channels. Social can then inherit this plan and adapt it to suit social networks.

For example, you may have a campaign launching a new detailed guide and social is
used to seed snippets from the guide over X weeks with a hook to download the full

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content. So the overarching plan guides what is being talked about and when, then
the social media plan decides how to tell the story to a social audience based on
content format, style and execution.

Before you start posting content, you need to answer the following questions:

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1. What are we trying to achieve on social media and how does this align with core
business goals/objectives/targets?
2. What stories do we want to tell and how can we make them relevant to our social
audience?

to
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3. What is our social customer profile and what types of content to they respond best

4. What’s the current state of the market – how do competitors and comparators
perform socially and what content works for them?
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5. Who needs to be involved in content production and marketing?
6. How will we measure the success of social content?
7. How will we optimise and improve what we’re doing?
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Competitor analysis for social content

Imitation is flattery.
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By this, I don’t mean copy what your competitors are doing, but if you are fighting for
mindshare amongst a similar audience, it pays to know what content that audience
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currently consumes and responds to. You can then factor in popular topics and content
formats into your social content plan.
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By knowing what competitors are doing, you can also quickly identify content gaps:

1. What topics aren’t they covering?

2. Which topics are they covering poorly, with low-quality content?
3. Which topics are they covering but not comprehensively, so there’s an opportunity
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to establish a niche foothold?

Originality is inspiring.

We decided to create inspiring content through other people. We ran a series of

inspirational events featuring speakers who had a success story to tell, to demonstrate
that success is unique to each of us and what makes each person successful varies
but people who achieve have some things in common e.g. drive and ambition.

This helped generate unique content that drove social engagement:

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• Announcements of new free events at our London base (with Eventbrite

registration)
• Announcements for new speakers and a profile (amplified by them sharing with
their personal networks)
• Live tweeting to share quotes and insights from the speakers, via the hashtag
#shedevents
• Post-event write-ups and photos for visual content
• Quotes from the speakers for short social posts
• Post event interviews with some of the speakers around topics related to

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inspiration.

Creating a social media content marketing calendar

Keep this simple. Work on a quarterly basis and build out the content plan month-by-

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month aligned with your overall content calendar.

You should have a set of stories that need to be told, then break down for each month
which story components are the focus and the content formats and social channels

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that will be used to distribute the messages.

Optimising content for a social audience

Businesses produce a lot of content; don’t restrict your social channels to content the
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social team produces. Think laterally.

For example, customer service teams create a lot of helpful content for users,
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answering FAQs and enquiries. They often add to the business knowledge base, and
this information can be really helpful to social customers e.g. care instructions for a
product. However, the content may not always be in a format and style that’s suitable
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for a social audience, so you can take the raw content and repurpose for your social
channels.
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Let’s use the example of care instructions. You could turn this into ‘Tip of the day’ for
Twitter, using short-form, take-away advice that can link to more detailed content on
your website.
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Creating regular hooks

Find a content format that can be used to create regular posts that encourage people
to come back for more.
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ncreasing content reach

You want the biggest reach possible (amongst relevant audiences) so that you
optimise your investment. This means finding ways to encourage other social users to
share your content with their wider network. Below I look at 3 techniques to enable
this:

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Scarcity
You’ve got something but there isn’t much left and people have to hurry to get it.
Scarcity is often a marketing veil but if used well can drive social activity. A good
example is popular events where tickets sell out quickly – publicising the ticket launch
date well in advance drums up interest.

Uniqueness
If you offer something that people can’t get anywhere else, and it’s relevant to them,

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you stand a good chance of getting their attention and increasing engagement with
your social content.

Amplification
Find influencers who have their own engaged audience (don’t just think ‘people with

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millions of followers’, the followers need to actually listen to what they’re saying). Come
up with a value proposition for them that encourages them to listen to what you’re
posting and then share your content.

Test, measure and learn

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How do you know what content works in social media?

Even without web analytics or social media analytics, you can very quickly look at
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engagement metrics for individual posts e.g. likes on Facebook, RT on Twitter.

However, to know how content contributes to your digital KPIs and ROI, then you need
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to ensure you’re measuring a much wider set of metrics. A few tips:

• Add campaign tracking to all posted links (using a consistent tracking taxonomy)
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• Use social reports in web analytics to monitor social sessions and conversions
• Use referral reports to compare social domains to other domains for referral traffic
• Use landing page reports and then apply social segments to gauge social impact
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for key content pages

You should also use social network specific analytics to explore the impact of your
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content. For example, on Twitter you can compare month-on-month for total
engagement and drill down into tweets with the most impressions and engagement.

Make sure you define the KPIs you will measure success against and then ensure
reports are set-up to provide the data for analysis. Don’t go into the analytics tools with
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no idea what you want to measure – you’ll waste a lot of time!

Useful tools

It helps to use a toolkit to coordinate and automate social content marketing. That
doesn’t mean remove the human element and personalisation, it simply means use
tools to help you get your messages out there efficiently, for example queuing Tweets
to be sent at times that are most likely to get engagement from your followers.

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There are lots of free and paid tools out there. Below is a small list of ones I find really
useful:

Hootsuite/Tweetdeck
Social media aggregation platforms to help you coordinate your streams, schedule
updates to multiple platforms and monitor keywords/hashtags to see what content
other people are posting/responding to.

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Buffer
A great queuing system that helps you plan bulk updates and set a publishing
schedule for each social network, as well as providing URL shortening and tracking
(though you can of course use your own).

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Followerwonk/Audiense/Buzzsumo
For identifying key influencers based on topic, location etc., really useful for connecting
with people who can amplify your content.

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Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing (also known as influence marketing) is a form of social media
marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people
and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence
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in their field. Influencers are someone (or something) with the power to affect the
buying habits or quantifiable actions of others by uploading some form of original often
sponsored content to social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or
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other online channels. Influencer marketing is when a brand enrolls influencers who
have an established credibility and audience on social media platforms to discuss or
mention the brand in a social media post. Influencer content may be framed as
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testimonial advertising.

Influencer marketing is a way to leverage the status of an individual within your

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organization to boost the profile and standing of the company as a whole. Many
influencers also use their status and reach to launch their own companies or consulting
businesses.
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Many of the world’s leading influencers’ names are synonymous with those of their
organizations. WordStream’s own founder and Chief Technology Officer, Larry Kim, is
considered an influencer in the paid search, content marketing, and social media
spaces. Larry frequently speaks at conferences around the world, and his extensive
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knowledge and thought leadership in search has elevated not only his own profile, but
that of WordStream as a company.

Most discussions of social influence focus on social persuasion and compliance. In

the context of influencer marketing, influence is less about arguing for a point of view
or product than about loose interactions between parties in a community (often with
the aim of encouraging purchasing or behavior). Although influence is often equated
with advocacy, it may also be negative. The two-step flow of communication model
was introduced in The People’s Choice and developed in Personal Influence.

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Influencer marketing is also important through social comparison theory. As

psychologist Chae reports, influencers serve as a comparison tool. Consumers may
compare influencer lifestyles with their imperfections. Meanwhile, followers may view
influencers as people with perfect lifestyles, interests, and dressing style. As such, the
promoted products may serve as a shortcut towards a complete lifestyle. Chae’s study
finds women with low self-esteem compare themselves to the influencers. As such,
they elevate the status of influencers above themselves. When using an influencer, a
brand may use consumer insecurities to its benefits. For this reason, influencer

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marketing may lead to faulty advertising.

Identifying influencers

Market-research techniques can be used to identify influencers, using predefined

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criteria to determine the extent and type of influence. Activists get involved with
organizations such as their communities, political movements, and charities.
Connected influencers have large social networks. Authoritative influencers are
trusted by others. Active minds have a diverse range of interests. Trendsetters are the
early adopters (or leavers) of markets. According to Malcolm Gladwell, “The success

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of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with
a particular and rare set of social gifts”. He has identified three types of influencers
who are responsible for the “generation, communication and adoption” of messages:
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• Connectors network with a variety of people, have a wide reach, and are essential
to word-of-mouth communication.
• Mavens use information, share it with others, and are insightful about trends.
• Salesmen are “charismatic persuaders”. Their influence is the tendency of others
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to imitate their behavior.

Fake influencers
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Fake influencers have been around for as long as their genuine counterparts, and all
criteria used to determine the veracity of an influencer account can be fabricated.
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Third-party sites and apps sell services to individual accounts which include falsely
increasing followers, likes, and comments. Instagram has failed to shut down all such
websites. One marketing agency tested whether fake accounts could be profitable.
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The company created two fictitious accounts, built their online presence through paid
followers and engagement (likes and comments), and applied for work in marketing
campaigns on popular influencer-marketing platforms. They published their results, an
explanation of how the false accounts were created, and which brands had sponsored
them.
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An analysis of over 7,000 influencers in the UK indicated that about half of their
followers have up to 20,000 “low-quality” followers themselves, consisting of internet
bots and other suspicious accounts. Over four in 10 engagements with this group of
influencers are considered “non-authentic”. A study of UK influencers which looked at
almost 700,000 posts from the first half of 2018 found that 12 percent of UK influencers
had bought fake followers. Twenty-four percent of influencers were found to have
abnormal growth patterns in another study, indicating that they had manipulated their
likes or followers.

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Virtual influencers

Virtual influencers are also sometimes considered fake. However, virtual-influencer

profiles do not correspond to real individuals and are not automated bots which
generate fake likes, comments, or followers. They are virtual characters, intentionally
designed by 3D artists to look like real people in real situations. Although most of the
characters can be easily identified as computer graphics, some are very realistic and
can fool users. The characters are usually identified as models, singers, or other

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celebrities. Their creators write their biographies, conduct interviews on their behalf,
and act like the characters themselves. Lil Miquela was a realistic virtual influencer
which prompted curiosity and speculation until it was learned that she was created by
advertisers.

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Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market

one of its products or services. Some influencer marketing collaborations are less
tangible than that brands simply work with influencers to improve brand recognition.

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An early example of influencer marketing involved YouTube celebrity PewDiePie. He
teamed up with the makers of a horror film set in the French catacombs under Paris,
creating a series of videos in which he underwent challenges in the catacombs. It was
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pitch-perfect content for PewDiePie’s 27 million subscribers and received nearly
double the views as the movie’s trailer. Everybody won.
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That’s a simple example. It’s easy to imagine a celebrity teaming with a company to
pitch a product even if the pitch is a series of 10-minute videos instead of a 30-second
television ad.
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But people wouldn’t be talking about influencer marketing you wouldn’t be at a website
called the Influencer Marketing Hub reading about it, either if it didn’t have a much
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broader set of applications. And the key is in that word, influencer.

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