Social Media Influencers vs celebrity Endorsement: Who Wins?

  Understanding the difference between celebrity endorsement and influencer marketing is very important when developing a PR or social media campaign. You may tend to think that the two are the same since they are all supposed to trigger people’s intent to buy a product but that’s not it, the two are very different options for marketers. Understanding the difference is pretty simple, think of the famous people as celebrities and the others who command a huge social media following as influencers.  Celebrities use their fame to get people thrilled about a brand while social media influencers   create  buzz around a product on social media by using the product or just displaying it casually in their content. Most marketers have over the years used celebrity endorsement to generate public interest in a product or service but as the marketing environment is changing, staying true to one marketing strategy is getting hard.  Here are reasons why most marketers are abandoning traditional celebrity endorsement for influencers

Audience Relationships

Most celebrities do not have much of a relationship with their fans as influencers do.  You may find influencers say vloggers initiating conversations, replying to comments and answering questions from their followers on social media. Because of this kind of back-and-forth exchanges they build a credible relationship with their followers and they understand their needs and preferences. Getting feedback is also easy. 

Expertise

 A famous actor or singer doesn’t have to be an expert in dental health  to endorse a certain brand of toothpaste but top-notch influencers usually have expertise in the product they mention and they have spent a lot of energy convincing their followers of their specialization. For a startup focusing on a particular niche it would be advisable to work with an influencer in the niche. Followers see influencers  as  reliable sources of information since they perceive them as containing  a purported expert level of knowledge

Content creation

If you ask a celebrity to endorse your brand, they will entirely depend on the message you give them but influencers are generally specialists in content creation and they will come up with their own content.  You only need to give them guidelines and give them a creative leeway, This means that they may even use creative content delivery strategies that  you may not have thought of.

 Cost

A one off celebrity endorsement may be almost equal to the yearly marketing budget of a startup. But still big companies throw huge amounts of money at celebrities hoping that some of their fame will rub off on them but sometimes it back fires and the money just goes to waste. Also for small startups, the price tag of getting a celebrity to endorse your brand may be too high. Another issue with celebrity endorsement is that the message comes across as forced and unauthentic and the audience is sure that they got paid to endorse the product.

The bottom line here is; celebrity endorsement and influencer marketing should be treated differently since they entail different advantages and disadvantages and each produce different results. Since the advent of social media, many people are spending quite a lot of their time on social media and as marketer it is important to be where your prospective buyers are. This is why influencer marketing has emerged as a viable way of building a brands reputation today.