Instagram Influencer Marketing a Nine-Figure Market

Engaging in influencer marketing by Instagram? You're in good company; over a billion dollars' worth of good company, in fact. That's the word from MediaKix, which recently showed off not only what the current state of influencer marketing on Instagram looked like, but also offered excellent news for anyone who has an Instagram following sufficient to offer to marketers: that number is only likely to go up, and in a big way, in the short term.

The growth on Instagram in general is part of the picture prompting major growth in Instagram marketing; just in the last six months, reports note, it's added better than 100 million total users, and given that the site has over 600 million global users, it clearly has a major case for its own status as a marketing tool. Better yet, over 400 million of those users check the site daily, making it clear that user engagement on the site is enormous and probably worth marketing to.

When a site can increase its numbers six-fold in a little under four years—it went from 100 million users to 600 million in the space between February 2013 and December 2016—it's clear there's a lot going on, and plenty of influence being created. Further, many don't expect the site to lose a lot of ground, either; by 2020, what was a billion-dollar market is expected to reach between $5 and $10 billion.

Naturally, there are doubts here; there's not much in the way of transparency on Instagram' s user base, and, because that has been a problem for influencer marketing in general for quite some time now, there isn't much in the way of metrics to do a lot of useful analysis with.

When you're talking about a market that may increase five to 10-fold in the space of about three years, you're dealing with a market that's massive by any measure and is probably making for fertile ground for influencer marketing. Naturally, the usual suspects are cited for reasons why this is on a growth tear—the losses felt in standard television and print media, the rise of social in general—but with these points come important caveats. We've seen already how there are still plenty of users out there who trust advertising, even television advertising, and we can't be in such a rush to jump on the influencer bandwagon that we forget there are plenty of other media types that still have markets.

Influencer marketing, as part of a balanced marketing program, can offer excellent new returns on investment and tap a particular market segment of those who go looking for advertisers. This segment is often difficult to reach by any other means, so pursuing it is clearly worthwhile, as the recent MediaKix numbers show.