How safe is Influencer Marketing for Brands?

As a result of the peak use of social media in 2015, brands have shifted their marketing activities to digital channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Youtube. The escape from traditional channels began much earlier, but the emergence of influencers and understanding of their potential by brands were a little bit late. Looking at the economic size of the Influencer marketing sector, there has been a huge increase every year worldwide since 2016.

As with any fledgling sector, the growth rate and economic size of the Influencer marketing sector are increasing so rapidly, brands and other participants who want to use this potential to the fullest are unfortunately ignoring the legal and security issues of the business. Brands that are so focused on potential are extremely far away from seeing threats, and it is also a fact that this leads to some bad results. The first of these is the collaboration between brands and fake influencers who do not have real influencer characteristics. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal (2018), Instagram accounts with 50,000-100,000 followers, which are rated as mid-level influencers, usually consist of 20% fake followers. This is a big mistake for brands that prefer influencer marketing depending on the number of followers.

According to CBS (2019), such fake situations in the Influencer marketing sector caused brands to waste $ 1.3 billion in 2019. In a market of $8 billion, $ 1.3 billion makes 16%, which shows the importance of the situation. It would be a very naive discourse to say that forgery and fraud only hurt economically. The loss of time and energy it causes for marketing departments is also huge. According to the results of a survey conducted by Invesp among its marketing employees and marketing managers, 50% of marketers say that spotting fake followers is the biggest challenge in influencer marketing. Again, in the same survey, 63% of marketers and brands said that they had previously had an influencer scam. Looking at all this data, influencer marketing seems to be a mousetrap for brands, but when the sector settles its dynamics and begins to standardize, such problems will be less encountered.

At this point, the reason for ILONSI’s launch and what problems it creates solutions to can be better understood. As a marketplace, ILONSI is committed to bringing brands together with the right influencers in an effortless way with spending very small budgets. A variety of data is collected, such as the engagement rate and comment/like ratio of influencers who registered to ILONSI. Thanks to these parameters, brands can more accurately select influencers with which they can collaborate. In the same way, the workload on brands eases by moving them from an active position to a more passive position, because all brands have to do is create an ad and then choose one of the influencers that they filter according to their wishes. In the event of any dispute between the brand and influencers, ILONSI keeps payments in itself until the collaboration is completed, thus forming a control and claim back mechanism. As a result, you can make your collaborations safely.