Influencer Marketing: The Beginning and Its Development

Outsourcing influencer marketing is discovered to be one of the most cost-effective ways to achieve brand awareness, increase sales and profits, keep your customer loyalty, and attract new customers. Many international e-commerce people could testify how this marketing strategy helped their brand reach, not just the public, but especially the target audience.

If you’re one of the few marketers who aren’t yet familiar with influencer marketing, it’s about time to learn it. Apply it to your business immediately and bring your brand on top!

Outsourcing influencer marketing is a marketing strategy where you’ll find outsourcing partners that were proven to be experts in social media and influencer marketing. They should have a knack for choosing the perfect and suitable influencers for your brands. Through outsourcing, the burdensome of looking for influencers will take away from you. Meanwhile, influencers are individuals who became popular in social media because of the content they share, their personalities, and qualities that many people are impressed with. Influencers are active in their social media accounts, famous in their niches, and followed by thousands or millions of people who believe in them.

According to many e-commerce people and surveys, influencers are proven to be more effective in convincing people to buy the products they endorse than traditional celebrity endorsers. Aside from not hitting your target audience, traditional celebrity endorsers are costly and complicated. Now, with the advancement of social media marketing, influencers will promote your brands to their supporters through their posts, mentioning, and by using or wearing the products. And because influencers already built a good reputation, credibility, and trust among their followers, it’s easy to convince them to buy your products.

Outsourcing influencer marketing promises a great and certain future to help your brand achieve its success. We should be grateful that this kind of marketing strategy emerged and developed. How did influencer marketing start and evolve? Do you want to know who was the first influencer?

It was only in the past decades when the word “influencer” entered the modern dictionary. And in 2019, it was officially added to the English dictionary. However, influencer marketing has already existed since the 1930s. And before this period, it is said that the Queen and the Pope were used to promoting medicine so those people who didn’t believe in the medicine would believe.

Below are some of the marketing strategies that companies used to apply in their brand promotion that can be considered as the beginning of influencer marketing:

• In 1890, a pancake mix named “Aunt Jemima” was popular and marketable. The person behind Aunt Jemima was Nancy Green, the first African-American. She was able to convince the public to buy the readymade pancake.
• In 1905, American silent film actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle promoted a Turkish brand cigarette called Murad.
• In the 1930s, companies realized the effectiveness of celebrities promoting products to the public. With the help of Santa Claus’ image, Coca-Cola’s advertisement in 1931 became successful. It was like the public did not love the product first, but the person promoting the product.
• During the 1950s, the Marlboro Man was born. He represented the macho image and successfully convinced men that smoking would make them masculine and attractive. The Marlboro Man was one of the biggest influencers of that time until 1999. The brand of cigarette became well-known, and the sales increased tremendously.

From there, many “influencers” were born and helped brands reach the public. The success of influencer marketing continues to surge, especially when social media has started to become appealing.