Trust in Influencer Marketing: How it Works

First, let’s answer the question: Why do brands use influencers? It’s simple: it is beneficial for a brand, influencer and its audience.

If a brand chooses an influencer, then an influencer and its audience really matter. In other words, it is not so important whether a brand pays for cooperation or not. The very fact of handling an advertising proposal is already essential for an influencer because it emphasizes their status as an important public person. If a brand notices an influencer and suggests a business proposal, then an influencer does everything right and builds communication with the audience correctly.

Collaboration with influencers is an opportunity for a brand to reach a new audience with a “hot message.” The review or recommendation from the influencer will be more positively perceived by the audience compared to traditional advertising.

For the audience, the brand’s promotion transmitted through an influencer is an opportunity to be the first to get a product or service and become a trendsetter along with a famous person.

But is it always possible to answer “yes” to the question, “Is influencer marketing effective?” It is if an influencer remains themself, and a brand, for its part, does not try to influence the blogger’s product, reviews and comments. So, the maximum effectiveness of influencing marketing is possible if all parties remain as sincere as possible and do not try to sell what it does not need to the audience. This is one of the key advantages of influence marketing: an influencer knows the interests of their audience and shares trusted opinions with potential brand customers.

Here comes the main point. Influencer marketing brand awareness helps any brand strengthen its market position and increase audience recognition. However, the recognizability and authenticity of the influencer themself are no less important for the audience than a review of a brand. This is the magic of relationships in the triangle of influencer brand audience. The audience’s trust is ensured by two factors: the authenticity of an influencer and the quality of the product brought to the audience.

In this case, we are talking about trusting the audience as one of the key components to determine the effectiveness of a future advertising campaign. Trust is a qualitative indicator, unlike quantitative indicators such as video views, likes or dislikes, shares, comments and the audience’s involvement in communication with a blogger. It is measured by an advertising campaign’s results.

A feature of an influencer’s credibility and trust in the brand that the influencer advertises is that this is not a constant characteristic. For example, credibility may decrease due to increased advertising posts and the loss of some of the influencer’s authenticity. In this case, a transformation of an influencer into a celebrity with an increase in audience coverage may occur, but a decrease in involvement and trust may result.

Answering the question of what influencers can do for your brand will be like this: they can share the trust of their audience with a brand. However, to choose the right influencer suitable for a particular brand with a high audience trust, you need to know the history of previous blogger advertising campaigns. Hypetrain analysts who have experience in assessing the qualitative and quantitative indicators of influencers and compiling ready-made media plans for effective advertising campaigns will help you determine the level of confidence of the influencer audience with a particular brand.