Influencers have become an essential ingredient of today’s marketing pies — but consumers, brands and even influencers would admit that trust and credibility problems have left the industry tasting a little bitter.

Not all brands feel entirely confident putting their trust in influencer marketing. It can feel risky relaxing control of a brand identity and putting it into someone else’s hands, particularly when it’s hard to know how to measure the return on investment and to be certain the right people were reached. What if the influencer bought their followers? What if the engagement levels were courtesy of a big click-farm made up of bots?

According to research by Carmichael Lynch Relate an estimated $2 billion was spent on influencer marketing last year, but almost one-quarter of those dollars were wasted on inauthentic content that consumers do not trust. Influencers aren’t feeling so great about the situation either — the same survey found that 23% do not feel they can be authentic when they produce brand-sponsored content and even more so — 70% — feel stifled by brands limiting their creative freedom.

You could say we’re all just stuck in an awkward triangle of brands wearily sponsoring influencers, who are wearily creating content for consumers, who are growing weary of the whole thing.

In the midst of this the trend of micro-influencer marketing (accounts with 30,000 followers or less), has risen in popularity, gaining 60% higher engagement, 22.2% more weekly conversations than the average and 6.7 times more cost-efficient per engagement. Micro-Influencers are perceived as more trusted sources of info for their followers because they are often within a niche and are therefore more likely to reach and resonate with their targeted audience. However, this still doesn’t solve the problem of measurable engagement. How can brands tell whether they are getting a return and not just burning money? ROI is understandably still a big challenge for influencer marketing, but changing the perspective can help to see its value more clearly. Rather than positioning influencer marketing as a hard sell and expecting conversion — which consumers can smell from a mile away — treat it as a means of driving awareness and consideration. Better yet, stop thinking of influencer marketing as a sell at all. The further away from selling influencer marketing gets, and the closer it moves towards fuelling the honest opinions of the real people who share them, the more effective the model will become.

This is the inevitable next shift for the influencer marketing industry and it’s a change we at WOM are working hard to bring. WOM stands for word-of-mouth, peer to peer recommendations. Largely remaining unrewarded and untracked until now, peer to peer recommendations account for 2.1 billion, daily. These recommendations pack a lot of power precisely because they are honest and were not paid for upfront. Their creators were influencers among their peers and networks and what they lacked in reach (which is by no means the only way to measure influencer marketing) they made up for in trust. They create word-of-mouth content, which is the core asset in the blockchain-enabled WOM Protocol. This content fuels the supply side of the decentralized WOM marketplace.

Brands need a way to incentivize these kind of genuine recommendations without compromising their honesty or stifling their creativity. The creators need a way to be fairly rewarded for their part to play in driving awareness and consideration for brands. Even the platforms, which cannot survive without monetizing, need a model that doesn’t play brands and advertisers off against consumers, but rather enables all parties to be part of a fairer, more transparent and mutually beneficial system. No one could’ve predicted that in 2018 the biggest threats to brands would be kids with iPhones. With their abilities of smearing campaigns on social media, creating more effective content and taking back control of their data. So how do you approach influencer marketing in a world of distrust, anger and scepticism?

From both a brand and consumer perspective the answer is a tangible fair system that clearly states and measures the value of content. What better way to do this than on the blockchain? A decentralized, self-sovereign marketing ecosystem that finally puts everyone on an even playing field and actually incentivizes consumers to create good content. People need to be given a voice which rewards their honest content. Influencers need to be given the creative freedom to choose the products they want to recommend. No one wants to end up in a situation where creators are sponsored into producing inauthentic content that feels a little too far from reality and a little too close to the Truman Show.

Find out how the WOM Token is transforming influencer marketing