Is Influencer Marketing still relevant today?

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, every business is soul searching and wondering how to move forward with their marketing communications. Some common themes have emerged as to how businesses are trying to further humanize their brand, generate empathy from the public, and simply “do the right thing.”

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In parallel, many businesses have pulled the plug, at least temporarily, on advertising programs, many of which include influencer marketing. Is this the right approach, though? Is there a hidden value of influencer marketing that most businesses have yet to grasp? In this podcast, we will learn how brands need to become re-educated on how they define digital influence and influencer marketing, why a long-term approach based on brand affinity – not mere influence – will yield better results, and why the trends that favor influencer marketing’s continued growth do not change because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

About Matthew's guest:

Neal Schaffer is a leading authority on helping businesses through their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and development and execution of social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives. President of the digital marketing agency PDCA Social, Neal also teaches digital media to executives at Rutgers University, the Irish Management Institute (Ireland), and the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). Fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, Neal is a popular keynote speaker and has been invited to speak about digital media on four continents in more than a dozen countries. He is also the author of 4 books on social media, including Maximize Your Social (Wiley) and the recently published The Age of Influence (HarperCollins Leadership), the definitive data-driven playbook for influencer marketing that marketers have been waiting for. Check out his Maximize Your Social Influence podcast for weekly inspiration

WVU Marketing Communications Today is hosted by Matthew Cummings from West Virginia University which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.