Imagine two YouTubers, and both of them have about a million followers on their channel. They both also get millions of views on almost all their videos. But one of them is a digital creator while the other is an influencer. What is the difference between these two? Well, one could have a substantially greater impact on your business marketing than the other.
Very few people understand the difference between these two categories of people: digital creators and influencers. Most people presume that both these terms refer to anyone who has a solid fan base on YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram that makes them millions of dollars. This is not necessarily true in all cases.
This post reveals everything you need to know about digital content creators and social media influencers.
What is an Influencer?
As previously mentioned, most people think that anyone on social media with millions of followers is, by default, an influencer. But that’s not true. Influencers are different from digital creators.
Generally speaking, influencers can influence or impact their followers’ perceptions and behavior towards other things or brands.
An example of an influencer would be a beauty guru who poses in a photo or video with a new lipstick sponsored for her.
Another example could be a fitness freak who fearlessly promotes his new gym gear.
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Influencers have one job to do: influence others through their words and actions. Their work is to convince people to follow a brand, get engaged with it, purchase a product or service, or take other action desired from them by a business. Influencers can influence others because of their fame, or in some cases, notoriety.
Unlike digital creators, they have the power to affect the buying decisions of people due to their knowledge, authority, position, or relationship with their audience. When a person has a large following in a specific niche and is actively engaged with the followers, they can easily adapt to the role of an influencer.
What is a Digital Creator?
A digital creator produces content posted on digital properties like Youtube or Instagram. Digital creators consider this to be their job: creating content. Their work is to write or record the content, not influence others. Do you see the difference?
Digital creators make a career out of creating content. They are responsible for making contributions to the information pool of any digital media. Their targeted audience is usually specific end users or people in particular contexts.
Although digital creators can also influence people, that is not their primary intent. That’s the same as influencers creating fresh content of their own at times, but that’s not their primary focus. It is actually easier to become an influencer than it is to be a professional digital creator. For example, a stay-at-home mom could become a fashion vlogger and later use her YouTube or Instagram followership to promote her custom clothing business. She would play the role of an influencer, in this case, having the power to persuade her followers to buy her products. But for her to become a digital creator, she would need years of experience in the clothing line to tell real stories about her favorite fashion brands.
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How do Influencers and Digital Creators Impact Your Business?
The point of learning about influencers and digital creators, and identifying the differences between them, is to realize how you can work with both of them to benefit your business.
Which one of them can help you grow your sales?
Working with a digital creator will produce very different marketing results than working with an influencer. Influencers will dominate what their followers wear and other products they buy. Digital creators, on the other hand, will produce content that will get people engaged. Their content can include how-to guides, tips, tutorials, product reviews, and testimonials.
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You might think that digital creators have a smaller following. But they actually have more. They can sometimes be just as effective as influencers. Many businesses and marketers work with digital creators to sponsor and monetize their videos. They also use digital creators to move prospects along with their marketing funnels.
Why is it Better to Work With Digital Creators for Marketing?
Most marketers would instantly like to work with influencers than with digital creators if given a choice. Instead, they would produce customized content presented by influencers to their target audiences instead of hiring a digital creator to create new content for them.
But the problem with this strategy is that the millennials are increasingly becoming wary of influencers and their authentic characters. According to a study, 52% of millennials do not trust and have faith in influencers. A perception that is getting more and more popular is that some influencers do what they do only for the money they get from it. This means they just promote products to be paid for their efforts and do not really use the products personally the way they show in their pictures and videos. When their followers know that they are not really using the products they endorse, their influence levels drop, as their posts become nothing more than advertisements in the eyes of the audience.
There are legal issues involved in using influencers as well. Only about 11% of influencers fully comply with the FTC advertising guidelines. This makes the lines between influencer content and advertised content even more blurry.
This does not mean that influencer marketing is dead, though. Research shows that the influencer marketing sector will grow to approximately $9.7 billion by 2023. Not only that, more than 500 new marketing platforms focused on influencer marketing are planned to be established by 2025.
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These stats prove that influencer marketing is an immensely popular and effective means of marketing. But observing the effectiveness of using digital creators for marketing and seeing what they can do for your business, influencers have moved to the position of the second choice for most well-established and growing brands. Brands cannot solely rely on influencers to attract crowds and build large audiences. If you want to get explosive results, you actually need to use both of them.
Digital creators get you faster results because they produce their own content. The audience sees that content as more personalized and can thus relate to it more closely. Video creators, for instance, shoot, edit and customize their videos. The viewers can see through the effort they put in and the authenticity of the content. Video makers often record their own ad segments. They do not take ready-made ads created by brands, edit them a bit, and upload them on their channel to promote the brand. They are masters at making their own versions of ads. That’s why they are better at promoting themselves as well.
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As a result, they can get deeper engagement from their followers. When you work with them to market your business, you have a higher chance of getting quality leads or grabbing the attention of potential customers. If you work with a digital creator to produce content and then monetize that content on giant platforms like Google or Facebook, you benefit the content creator and your business. You can reach enormous audiences from specific niches in this manner, who are likely to take the desired action towards buying your product.
The Bottom Line
As the bottom line, we would say that both influencers and digital creators can benefit your business. But the best way to go about it is to either use a combination of both or use a mix of digital creators and paid advertising to get the maximum reach.
Another factor that also impacts the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is the quality of your website or landing page. Let’s say you run a fantastic campaign. Many people view your content or ad and click on the call-to-action button to end up on your website. It is your job to convince them through your page copy to move them further down your sales funnel. For this, you do not just need an outstanding piece of content written on that page, but also an easy-to-navigate, responsive and appealing page design.
If you want to build an attractive website to showcase your business and to drive traffic from your marketing campaigns to it, sign up for your free account on Strikingly today. Using our website-building tools, you can get your site ready, published, and fully functioning in only a couple of hours.
We take care of the technical details and coding at the backend while providing a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface in your site editor. Our tools make it easy for you to add content to your web pages and customize it to suit your specific marketing goals.
