The ascendancy of influencer marketing as a bona fide marketing channel for companies serious about promoting their goods and services has been comet-like. In 2017 the influencer market was worth $2bn, but today is tracking to reach $15bn by 2022. You can see the appeal as it’s never been easier to measure detailed influencer campaign ROI, and the concept of using an influencer to speak to a pre-engaged audience about your product in a trustworthy, authentic voice holds real currency – especially in the context of the last 18 months. 

Nor has there ever been a better time to get started with influencer marketing. With various companies and platforms now providing the ability to autonomously discover, track, and manage these campaigns from a central software dashboard, the hassle of running these campaigns manually is a thing of the past. If this sounds similar to how performance marketing works, you’d be right. But, in practice, how similar are influencer and performance marketing, and are the two formats diverging or converging as the former comes of age? Let’s take a look… 

What are influencer and performance channels?

We’re going to start with the basics, kicking-off with a look at performance marketing. This umbrella term covers a huge number of traditional digital marketing formats, including search, native, affiliate, and sponsored ads. Many of these programmatic ad types have been around for a significant period of time, but still offer the marketer the ability to control and track their campaigns with the help of automation. Payment is according to a pre-agreed metric, so the format suits any marketing budget, is scalable and cost effective.

Influencer marketing is both relatively new and all about brands collaborating with influencers on social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Today, these platforms reach an active global population of 4.2bn. Influencers are highly trusted and fantastic for boosting brand awareness while also driving purchase decisions through placements and endorsements via their SOM accounts. 

So, what do performance and influencer marketing have in common?

It has become popular to suggest that influencer and performance marketing are converging because you can now use automation and tracking to help control, analyse and pay for an influencer campaign in the way you would a traditional performance marketing campaign. 

This is certainly true, and since 2017 the influencer format has come a long way. Historically, a marketer would typically pay an influencer a large, lump sum for a campaign and subsequently track performance through the acquisition of likes and comments etc. All pretty antiquated. But these days detailed ROI metrics (including partnership attribution and revenue) are now available for influencer campaigns, making the comparison with performance marketing easy in this instance.

…And where do the two diverge?

Despite a bit of overlap in terms of control, tracking and automation a few fundamental differences prevent influencer marketing and performance marketing need to be recognised. The most significant is the fact that traditional performance ads are on the wane in terms of trust and popularity. Having been subjected to years of poor creative as marketers favour data and tracking over the production of engaging content the public has become ad-blind. 

Conversely, influencer marketing has been proven to generate 11 times the ROI of traditional advertising. That is because influencers inhabit a special place for those that follow them. They offer a personal, trustworthy, interactive relationship that is often developed over many years. This longevity is highly valued, and according to Wolfgang Digital's 2019 KPI report, mature advertising programmes generate 28% of a company’s total revenue compared to 18% achieved by paid search. The fact that an influencer’s audience has actively optioned to engage with their content (sponsored and all) in the form of a ‘follow’ shows how valuable influencer campaigns can be. 

Elsewhere, influencer relationships are more content focused than you find with performance marketing, and the value of the content created here is also key as it contributes to the influencer attracting followers. Other benefits influencer marketing holds over performance marketing include the ability to harvest brand awareness data and – as touched on earlier – the presence of a pre-engaged audience in the form of the influencer’s followers, who are keen to interact with the influencer’s output and recommendations. Finally, influencer marketing is useful where the long-term strategy is to develop brand market share, rather than simply direct performance goals.

The conclusion is that while influencer and performance marketing operate administratively along similar lines, the nature of influencer content creates a significantly deeper, more meaningful relationship with the consumer. This fundamentally separates it from traditional performance marketing, and the growing mistrust people feel around these formats. 

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