Swiss Influencer Marketing Report 2020

Influencer marketing is an ever-growing topic in today’s marketing strategies. We consider influencers as individuals with a high follower count and social media activity, who share content including product placements and advertising for commercial purposes on their social media channels. This three-sided study covers the triangle of marketing managers (N = 218), influencers (N = 124), and consumers of the millennial segment (N = 1007, representative Swiss sample of 13-30 year-olds) in order to determine the dissemination, relevance, and perception of influencer marketing in Switzerland. Our results reveal the high potential of influencer marketing and the impact of influencers on their followers. We find that 60% of Swiss Millennials follow influencers on social media and 53% of these active followers have already acquired a product or service inspired by an influencer. Those marketing managers who already use influencer marketing (nearly one third) agree with these promising results: The majority of them evaluates the return on in investment of their influencer campaigns as more efficient than alternative advertising formats. However, our results also reveal some potential for improvement, as there exist important misunderstandings between marketing managers and millennials with respect to the influencer topic. This concerns particularly diverging opinions regarding the most popular (Swiss) influencers, the most important influencer platforms, as well as which content topics (e.g., beauty, sports…) of influencers they consider most interesting. Further insights of the study address the influencer profession itself – such as influencers’ relationship building with followers and preferred contractual conditions in cooperations with firms. All in all, this study gives a broad overview over the influencer topic and provides insights of how firms should implement influencer marketing in their organization in order to grasp its full potential as a powerful marketing tool.