Where should your influencer marketing strategy land?

Abstract: Influencer marketing is growing. With a decline in traditional media, companies are exploring alternative options. With the ever changing landscape of social media, new strategic challenges constantly arises. With influencer marketing, companies can endorse their product through the influencers' social media crowd. However, the integration of social media ads and editorial content has brought unclarity of how consumers' perceive posts on social media sites like Instagram. Additionally, as influencer marketing is about getting consumers interested in knowing more about the product, their ultimate goal is to convert them to paying customers. As the landing page is the first contact with a company and closely connected to conversion, it's vital that consumers are transported to a favorable one. However, research points out that companies are neglecting the effort they put in the landing page. Accordingly, the thesis aims to explain effects of different landing pages and different influencer Instagram post types. This, in order to point out the importance of having a landing page strategy. Further, the relationship between the two was explored in order to understand how post type affected preferred choice of landing page. A quantitative experiment was conducted with 395 respondents answering an online survey. The results gave insights that the start page, connected to a better customer experience, is generating greater brand effectiveness. Furthermore, the study shows that an explicit stated non-sponsored post generates effects like greater intention to engage in eWOM. However, the results also indicated that since both sponsored and non-sponsored posts are perceived as advertising, positive effects from influencer marketing disappeared. Finally, the thesis enlightens that a start page fits better with an explicit non-sponsored posts, while both landing page strategies arguably could be working for the sponsored and non-sponsored posts.