How to Measure the Impact of Influencer Marketing for Your Small Business

Method A qualitative research including three interviews of influencer in the fashion and beauty industry, two interviews of brand within the fashion and beauty industry and seven interviews of followers following the influencers previously mentioned. The study used three perspectives, as all the parts are linked together and in order to have more reliable findings 

thanks to the triangulation of data. Findings: Brands, thanks to social networks and influencers, have a real power of influence on young generations of consumers. Consumers identify and create links with influencers, which drives them to follow influencers recommendations. This relationship impacts young consumers on different level. Indeed, 

followers tend to purchase what the persons they idealize use or wear, being the influencers in this case. Thus, even if partnerships are a strategy used a lot by brands, it is not the only one. Today, brands are aware of the behavior of consumers, and they know that their sales will improve if an influencer post any type of content with their products and especially if they 

are not paid to do it In fact followers 

have more trust toward what is said by an influencer when there is no paid collaboration involved. That’s why on top of partnership, where the influencer perceives a remuneration, brands also send them gifted products in the hope that the influencer will use them We are today, and for several years now, in the era of digitalization. The world is in motion, in 

constant evolution. Digitalization is present everywhere, in most of the industries and in our daily lives. Through phones, computers, software, social media and household appliances for example, our generation, also called generation Z and defined as a “group of people who were born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s” (Merriam-webster.com, 2019), is very 

connected and the next generation, generation Alpha defined as being “composed of individuals who were born at the crossover of Generation Z and the new age” (Tootell, Freeman and Freeman, 2014, p.83) will be even more connected. Indeed, young people, children, teenagers and young adults issued from this generation have been immersed in this 

digital era since they were born and use

it daily. In fact, the generation Z was born within the beginning of the internet and the generation Alpha, which started in 2010, saw the launch of iPad and Instagram. Both generations witnessed an era of rapid advanced technologies (Arora and Jha, 2020). As Jha (2020) says, the generation Alpha “had already influenced the trend of marketing, technology, 

and priorities of their millennial parent”, and companies had understood this and had integrated it into their strategies to be even more competitive. This is the reason why, in marketing, in recent years, a popular strategy for companies is influencer marketing. It 

marketing (De Jans, Van de Sompel, De Veirman and Hudders, 2020). A lot of research has been done to determine exactly what influencer marketing is, why companies are using it more and more and what it brings them (Backaler and Shankman, 2018; Coll, 2019; Genú, 2019; Levin, 2019). Influencer marketing is described as a new effective and cost-efficient marketing tool as it is not perceived by customers as advertising (Ye, Hudders, De Jans and 

thanks to social networks and influencers

to reach a larger audience, to increase sales but also to gain visibility. 1.1 Background Marketing is about people finding ways to deliver exceptional value by fulfilling the needs and wants of other people (Ferrell, 2021). For this purpose, different types of strategy have emerged over the years such as Digital Marketing, Green Marketing or Guerilla Marketing 

(Wind and Mahajan, 2001). Digital marketing can be defined as implementation of digital technologies, which are used to create channels to reach potential recipients, in order to achieve the enterprise’s goals, through more effective fulfillment of the consumer needs (Sawicki, 2016). One of the channels created is influencer marketing. According to the 

Association of National Advertisers (2022) influencer marketing focuses on leveraging individuals who have influence over potential buyers and orienting marketing activities around these individuals to drive a brand message to the larger market. Given their potential to reach large audiences, influencers incite companies to include them as a relatively new marketing 

Conclusion

De Veirman, 2021). It is today a key component of the firm's digital marketing strategies (Abidin, 2015) used to promote brands and reach very engaged audiences. This strategy could be compared as an evolved word-of-mouth marketing as it works thanks to experience sharing, user-generated content and spreading via blogs and social media (Ye et al., 2021). This user-generated content gains importance in the digital world because it offers genuine 

and honest insight into the value of a product or service, and people are more likely to trust and follow these recommendations compared to brandgenerated communications (Djafarova and Rushworth, 2017). The main influencer marketing’s tools are social media in general (Instagram, facebook, Twitter and youtube) and social media influencers. Social media influencers are users of social media who are being followed by a significant number of other 

users (De Veirman, Cauberghe and Hudders, 2017; Harrigan, Daly, Coussement, Lee, Soutar and Evers, 2021). As they share a part of their lives with relevant content, they provide the impression that the followers know them. Users develop admiration, para-social interaction; which refers to the relations people have with media figures (Horton and Wohl, 1956); perceived similarity, sense of belonging, intimacy and psychological closeness which play an