To define Influencer:
According to Google Dictionary, an Influencer is a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media. To be specific, influencer posts sponsorship content on their social media page to help the brand or organization to increase their brand awareness.
Cristiano Ronaldo:
The Portuguese soccer superstar has more than 176 million followers on Instagram and over 120 million followers on his Facebook Community. As a very active social media user, the Portuguese superstar promotes a lot of contents on his social media pages: his perfume collection, clothing selection, sponsorship with Nike, his own Pestana CR7 Hotel, Clear Hair Shampoo, Insparya Hair transplantation clinic…
Being the single individual with the most followers on Instagram, his movements on social media is influencing a lot of people, especially millennials. For example, a lot of kids wear his Nike Mercurial soccers shoes when playing soccer. Me myself, stayed in his Pestana Hotel in Lisbon when traveling in Portugal last year.
My opinion on the role of influencers in marketing:
From a marketer’s standpoint, influencers play a really important role in terms of marketing. Sometimes, they can decide the future of a brand. Puma was having a really bad downtrend before 2015, they decided to make a change and started to let celebrities (Rihanna, Selena Gomez, Young Thug…) wearing and promoting their product. Their stock price has gone up 4 times from 15 EUR to 60 EUR from mid-2015. People like to follow the lifestyle of celebrities or public figures, they like to use what they use, wear what they wear and have what they have. Influencers are public figures on social media who direct majority of people’s preferences and lifestyle. As a marketer, using influencers to promote products is a great idea despite the high sponsorship fee associated with it.
Jamespersonalblog 