Effectiveness of Influencer Marketing vs Social Media Sponsored Advertising.

ABSTRACT This study aims to assess the efficacy of social media advertising and influencer marketing, using sales, page engagement, brand perceptions and buying intentions as the dependent variables. To achieve the objectives of this study, the researchers ran six advertisements and opted to make use of the same adverts for both the influencer marketing and social media advertising campaigns. The findings of this study indicate that sponsored advertisements are more effective in generating post engagements than influencer marketing posts. Moreover, the study shows that social media users tend to save sponsored advertisements more than they save advertisements by influencers.