Why influencers are becoming the most powerful media

While brands possessed power in the past, consumers are now the ones that rule. Marketers must find a way to obey and meet their needs more accurately. The accessibility of information has remodeled the buying process, from its traditional form to a multidimensional consumer journey with a great number of touchpoints. Many companies have noticed a tremendous gap between them and their customers. They fail at conveying their business message, often due to irrelevant advertising and brand communication. From a business perspective, the evolving marketplace offers great potential for growth and success, but marketers often struggle to adapt to the fast pace of changes in time.

It seems that the distance between businesses and their customers is growing and advertising may struggle to convey the value brands offer. What triggers people to buy is emotion. The high volume of information, as well as advertisement messages, impact the perception of consumers, decreasing the trust in brands. Companies are seen as faceless profit-generating enterprises, aggressively pushing their products towards the public.

The customers, though, require a different approach based on emotional connection. Marketers must understand that the value should be shown, rather than spoken about. To achieve success, businesses must put people in the center of their marketing strategy and find a way to personalize experiences. How can this be achieved? Avoid intrusive advertising, make people speak about you and add a human touch to your brand. This way, people will start to trust you.

Media mix evolution

In recent years, media consumption habits among generations has changed. There is a significant shift from traditional to digital media. Not only do people not trust traditional advertising anymore, but they also do not spend their time watching TV, reading print releases, or listen to the radio. Instead, they devote great parts of their daily lives to social media platforms. The traditional media mix closed-system of transmitting information cannot keep up with the rapid changes in consumers' interests and narrowed attention span. This might be the reason why traditional media fall behind digital media, with the majority of people preferring to spend their time online.

Then, what would be the point of advertising your brand on traditional media if nobody will be there to pay attention? Advertising through these channels might not be entirely doomed to failure, but it is doubtlessly less relevant and worthy, compared to years ago. But what does that mean for a brand? A new advertising approach is needed, that is synced with and adapted to the audience. Meaning, a brand should know and understand its customers - what their interests and preferences are, what they spend their time on, and what type of content appeals to them. To find the best advertising approach, a marketer should look at the channels their audience spends the most time on. The medium's audience should completely match the brand's audience. Otherwise, you risk a wastage of resources.

Considering the shift from traditional to digital media, advertisers may want to place their main focus on online platforms. There are more than 2.7 billion social media users in the world, and this number grows continuously each year. So why are brands still allocating so much of their budgets to channels where less attention is being paid?

The challenge with social media ads

There are plenty of ways to advertise online, and each of them has various advantages. Precise targeting, in-depth analytics, and high consumption of the media can promise an advertiser great ROI from the campaign. Online marketing might seem a more profitable advertising method in terms of media consumption habits, but it also has its tricky challenges. Marketers often fail to keep up with the changing digital landscape and find it hard to overcome common obstacles.

• No trust in ads: Not only do consumers not like ads, but also they do not trust them.
• Ad blockers: In 2020, $35 billion of digital ad spend will be lost due to growing use of ad blocking technology
• Rising cost and limited exposure: Social media algorithms are reducing the reach of the post, unless a brand promotes it.
• Fierce competition: Digital landscape grows continuously, together with the amount of data competing for users'attention.

Today, in the over-crowded digital space, brands are struggling to catch their audience's attention and engage meaningfully with them. The best way to overcome all digital marketing challenges is to implement a strategy, which successfully bypasses them all together. Only interpersonal relationships can benefit from a lack of trust in media advertising, as it seems that people are trusting similar or connected peers the most. Word-of-mouth has always had an important influence on purchasing decisions. Brands today can create buzz around their products easier than ever due to social media and the ease of information exchange. Anyway, social media has never been about brands. People use these channels to form a community based on shared interests and interact with peers who they consider similar.