Influencer Marketing; yay or nay
Influencers like us all are but humans
“The law of diminishing returns states that as investment in a particular area increases, the rate of profit from that investment, after a certain point, cannot continue to increase if other variables remain at a constant. As investment continues past that point, the return diminishes progressively.”
Influencer marketing has been the buzzword in the marketing field for a while now. Every regurgitated article showing you “10 most effective marketing strategies” or “Top 10 marketing strategies to boost business growth” calls for the use of influencer marketing and advises that you employ the services of influencers to better “convince the audience” and help “build trust with potential users”.
That's why everyone these days is looking for legit or crook ways to grow their social media following to sizable numbers and be able to claim the “influencer” title. Now that begs the question, is influencer marketing for my project? Or better still at what stage do I use influencer marketing? Especially for crypto projects who have been my focus for the better part of half a decade.
Behind the eyes of the public, influencer marketing is a game of false appearances, fake numbers and individuals with not-enough-convincing-power to influence others' decisions. It's pretty ironic cos it's an industry that rose to prominence on the coattails of being able to convince others, but only a few actually have convincing power.
I have in my years in the space kept a pretty extensive database of influencers across multiple platforms; crypto twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch yada yada and had to work with quite a number of them. One thing I learnt the hard way and with quite a chunk of misappropriated funds is that we overestimate the power of influencers.
The Elon Musk and Twitter bot saga brought up worms on not just Twitter but all the major social media platforms imo. The large chunk of follower numbers aren’t humans but bots meant to make the platform stats look good to inflate valuations and the likes. Influencers and the platforms benefit from this and it's a merry-go-round of foolery.
Not to sound like an agent of doom however, on the flip side when done right it truly can be game changing. I believe that everyone must at some point practise influencer marketing even if not in the most outlandish ways. It could be as simple as having a friend with more reach talk about you or convincing a big-name to use your product and give a review about it.
For crypto projects as with any field networking truly is very important and many bootstrapped projects lean into established networks by the founders for the first bit of promotion before the funds come in and paid promo can begin.
In my honest opinion and after having spent thousands of dollars on influencers my personal bias is that they should be sparsely used. The best time to use influencers are early on when there is hardly any name and the project cannot be recognised or stand out. That is when influencer marketing works best tbh cos it helps create that first set of users, that first group of community members and that first set of believers in your product.
That is where I have found Influencer marketing to be most efficient, but when marketing funds get repeatedly funneled into the use of influencers it invariably hits a point where returns begin to diminish and they no longer hold any sway or bring any conversion.