Influence Marketing or Public Relations: Reinventing Hot Water or Changing Paradigms?

If we look at Wikipedia’s definition, influence marketing is defined as a form of marketing in which the focus is on influential people rather than final targets. What difference then with public relations?

Public relations are based among others, on a major idea: the mobilization and commitment of a trusted third party to change perceived images, opinions and ultimately behavior.

Public relations strategies (when they have not been confined to a mere media relations role) have always operated from a marketing and/or communication strategy deployed to a network of leaders and relay of opinions.

Among them, there is obviously the media that enjoy both an audience and an authority. But not only, since it has always counted all those who, in one way or another, could have a positive influence (in the sense of the issuer) on opinion. PR Agencies in Toronto offer public relation and communication services.

Influence marketing has enjoyed strong popularity since the appearance of the first blogs to the massive development of social networks. Why such a success? It is due in large part to what has been called Peer to Peer (Peer to Peer) who has devoted the credit that could be given to the word of a person “like me” as opposed to that which one could concede to a medium judged more or less subordinated to a power, whatever it is.

But it is also due to an evolution of the strategies which, more than before, mix more the techniques and put in the attic the old oppositions between the advertising (which leads to buy space to be visible in the media) and the relations public (which leads to convince the relays of influence that it is interesting for them to share a vision, in the interest of their audience).

The digital has shattered this rearguard structuring to hatch a much more relevant bottom-up approach based on content rather than techniques. We are now talking about ” owned, paid and earned” to structure the communication approaches between the proprietary content (the owned on its own digital ecosystem), the paid (what to pay in one form or another) and the earned (which is obtained without any other consideration than the content itself and shared on the internet … or elsewhere).

It is also from here that influencer marketing is successful because from branded content (content and content marketing), it includes in the same way the paid and the earned from influencers that according to their audience and their authority, but also their level of editorial contribution, it will be necessary to convince and/or remunerate.

Nothing changes, everything changes.

Influence marketing in a certain way reinvents warm water. Public relations marketing have always sought to convince trusted third parties and have always used publicity or paid partnerships. From another point of view, influence marketing renews approaches by blowing up unnecessary silos between trades. And in this sense, it allows strategies both deeper in their design and finer in their mode of operation. A new paradigm.