The increasing number of social media influencers is leading to the emergence of influencers entrepreneurs. Representing different industries, entrepreneurs use social media to boost their business and online presence. Startup founders small business owners use social media to raise brand awareness, grow their customer base, add market value to their brands and personal brands, as well.

Instead of using celebrities, or niche related influencers, young entrepreneurs choose to promote their products via their own social media accounts. They act like influencers in the business world. These influencers do not need to create content as usual influencers. Contents they share are generally about business news, updates of their works, entrepreneurs the future of hot topics of business and many more. These people often participate in main events, take the stage in major forums, sometimes, promote and support the other industry brands. You can come across with success and fail stories of the intrepreneur influencers on their profiles, their public speeches. 

Let’s look at a few of influencer entrepreneurs that are well-known for their promoting their business.

Neil Patel

Global marketing expert and entrepreneur Neil Patel. He is the founder of marketing platforms Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, Hello Bar, Neil Patel Digital which serve as fast decision making, project management, website analytics, SEO, and social media tools for businesses. He also ranked as a top entrepreneur by the Wall Street Journal, Top 10 Marketer by Forbes, Top 100 Entrepreneur under 35 by Obama, and New York bestselling author. Neil uses his social media accounts to share his experience and knowledge about the essentials of digital marketing and to boost his businesses, as well. 

Saygin Yalchin

German entrepreneur of Turkish descent Saygin Yalchin is the founder of SellAnyCar.com. He is referred to as the online business guru of the Middle East region. His YouTube channel and Instagram account is the balance of entrepreneur and real social media influencer. Saygin uses social media in a smart way which he shares his daily life, entertainments, travels while not avoiding his work life, events he attends, charity works, etc. In one of his interviews, Saygin mentioned that people do not follow brands, they follow people that lead those brands. To him, people shape the face of companies. Business people have to focus on influencer marketing rather than traditional PR campaigns. Social platforms like Instagram is applicable for fast-growing and YouTube is better for real audience and more engagement.

Mari Smith

Also known as “Queen of Facebook” is Forbes #4 Social Media Influencer, deliver social media and thought-leadership consulting, training on using Facebook as a marketing technique.  She usually makes video tutorials about Facebook updates, optimizing Facebook for small business and Messenger for Business. Mari involved with Facebook from its beta test times. She recommends small business organic traction before paid ads, prioritizing audience engagement.  

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook’s founder and CEO often Mark Zuckerberg is always on stages about informing the latest updates of Facebook, changing algorithms. What makes him cool on social media is that he also points out the moral benefits of Facebook, its role in society. Apart from sharing news about Facebook, Zuckerberg often attends different events about his path to success and gives advises to young entrepreneurs.

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella has been working for Microsoft for more than twenty years in different positions. He was the first person who saw the acquisition of Nokia, LinkedIn, Web site. His LinkedIn profile allows us to call him the human face of Microsoft on social media. Together with Microsoft news, he discusses different topics including the new application areas of technologies, the impact of Microsoft partnerships such as their recent with a strategic alliance with KPMG on cloud technology, AI, SAP on cloud technology, Humana. Also, Satya pays special attention to empowering women entrepreneurs and creative innovators in parts of the world.

Impact on brands

Influencer marketing starts with brand storytelling. It is important to set values that your brand lays, its goals, and convey them to the relevant audience. Either by business influencers or directly by their founder’s brands need to be spoken online and offline.

Influencer entrepreneurs are the best fit for the B2B environment. Feedback of impressive people in the corporate world means larger-scale sales in comparison to the B2C. A clever way of promoting your brand in influencer marketing is by using your customers as an influencer. Leveraging your existing customers can generate more conversion and sales. A different range of customers also opens doors to a variety of markets.

Born between 1995 and 2010, Generation Z is changing the habits of social media usage. Born up to the digital era, Gen Z also called Digital Natives, Net Gen, GenWii, Tech Gen. Tech generation gets information mainly from social platforms, makes friends without seeing each other in real life, open to sharing their life on social media spend most of their time online. They are characterized by their unique style. Their purchasing decision heavily depends on celebrities or social media influencers which make brands shift their marketing strategies. They do not prefer traditional educational systems, instead, they choose to invest in their skills, take relevant courses. According to IBM statistics, 26% of Gen Z work online, while 16% work for themselves. Making money online is more attractive than nine-to-five jobs. 

Although statistics show Gen Z spends most of their time online, they do not only surf on social networks but make a difference where they go. Instead of blending in society, Gen Z is enthusiastic about standing up for their beliefs. This generation is political activists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and peacemakers. Despite their age, they take big steps to fight for human rights, equality, avoid plastics, are in support of the environment, are earth savers. These kids do not clearly identify their categories instead enjoy the diversities of their world.

Want to know an inspirational Gen Z?

Azerbaijani student Reyhan Jamalova invented the “rain energy” which designed to harvest rainwater as a source of energy in her 15. Forbes 30 under 30 was the youngest attendee at the 8th Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2017 and got an estimable mention in Ivanka Trump’s speech. 

You probably heard about 16 years old Swedish Greta Thunberg. Environmental activist skipped school for her unbroken beliefs. Starting in 2018, she demanded the Swedish government to decrease emissions by 15%. Thunberg was awarded as Time’s Person of the Year 2019.

Former Disney princess Zendeya continues her stage carrier as a singer, dancer, and actress. She also made clothing collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger, is a global ambassador for Lancome. The popularity of the rising star is not only for her talents but also for her activism in different social issues such as gender equality, body positivity, or bullying.

Gen Z reshapes Influencer Marketing

The consumption power of this group changes brands’ marketing and communication channels. They require brands to be creative, credible and authentic. It is difficult to influence Gen Z with chic promotions. As their older generation, Gen Z is also less likely to be influenced by traditional advertising, what they do in turn, they get information by the people they trust. What works for this group is a blend of traditional and modern marketing technics. 

Brands need to set a sophisticated approach. Focus on leveraging influencers for delivering messages instead of selling products. Brand story-telling is via different channels creates more authentic and engaging backlinks rather than stating fancy missions on your website. Cooler way of self-promotion is endorsing Gen Z influencers over your brand story-telling. Tech natives use Instagram for brand discovery, search for product features on YouTube.

Value creation is among the core issues Gen Z pays attention to. With 2.6 million followers on Instagram and  6.9 million YouTube subscribers, Orkun Ishitmak is one of the biggest influencers in Turkey. He creates a different range of creative content such as travel vlogs, testing, reaction, informative videos on his social media accounts. Plus to his successful influencer background, every New Year year Orkun organizes charity projects where he buys gifts to homeless and needy people. It is not surprising that global and local brands keen on collaborating with him for their commerce and charity works.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Orkun Işıtmak (@orkunisitmak) on Dec 19, 2019 at 6:50am PST

Partnering with real people creates credible feedback for this group. This is why nano and micro-influencers are an alternative way of marketing. They are the best medium for raising awareness of small brands or campaigns. Micro and nano influencers generate greater engagements thus have a high ROI. Long-term partnerships also create authentic and high-selling projects, making Gen Z loyal to brands. When working with Gen Z influencers allow them to create User Generated Content, to present their style, freedom.

It is better to collaborate with influencers for online and offline partnerships. Creativity is one of the key ways of reaching out to this group. Go beyond social media platforms. Take Levi’s and Google’s partnership. Brands together launched new lines of “smart denim jackets” which warns wearers if they forget to take their mobile phones. 

Although Gen Z has unlike social media habits the rest of the population, however, have different preferences about social media platforms, different interests, say, platforms like TikTok, Twitch, Live.ly are mainly popular among teens, while the older Gen Z favors Instagram and Twitter. 

Whether brands have successful Gen Z experience or not, It is important to keep track of the latest trends, improve the quality of their products and promotions, as well. 

Chinese influencer market has different varieties form Western markets such as low CPC, more engaged audience, word of mouth marketing, and of course very distinct social media ecosystem. We already mentioned Chinese KOL Beck Li’s Mini Cooper fortune where she made 100 Mini Copper sold out in just four minutes through her social media account. This is enough to show how powerful are the influencers in the Chinese market. It is not surprising that western luxury brands are fancy for collaborating with KOLs. The Chinese influencer market is more than a place to raise awareness of your brand but a strategy to launch new products. 

What makes the Chinese market realistically powerful?

Trust building: If you ask big KOLs probably all of them will mention that trust is the biggest reason behind their success. According to the research, 49% of customer choice depends on KOLs’ opinion. 

Dedicated audience: The distinct feature is that Chinese followers are real and their choice heavily depends on influencers. 

Long-term partnerships: Whether it’s a collection or just a partnership long-term relations with influencers create more authentic content, more selling projects and accepted as more trustier by their audience. 

Customized products: It’s easy to find the usual product in the stores, the aim is to add influencer’s value, their uniqueness. 

Considering the feedbacks of the target audience: Influencers ask followers’ opinions during the production and designing process. 

Social media ecosystem: Chinese social media platforms are created to push e-commerce, thus, it has online shops where influencers and brands store their products upon the posts. The most popular ones, WeChat and Weibo are the platforms that made sold-out sales within few minutes. 

Let’s see a few examples of the selling power of Chinese KOLs.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by @mrbagss on Oct 24, 2019 at 2:50am PDT

Mr. Bags

Tao Liang is known for his passion for capsule luxury bags. He made collections with different Western brands such as Givenchy, Montblanc, Longchamp. He sold 3.24 million RNM Tod’s handbags within six minutes. 

Yang Mi

Actress, high-fashion influencer Yang Mi collaborated with Michael Kors for Valentine’s Day. A limited-edition Whitney Shoulder Bags designed with heart and star studs. Red and black colored bags aimed to depict a confident, charming woman.

M.A.C. Cosmetics

Can you expect a makeup line to be inspired by anime characters? M.A.C cosmetics together with Tencent mobile game “Honor of Kings” launched lipstick collection. Limited-edition lipsticks came in five shades associating five of “Honor of Kings” heroines. To raise awareness, five reality show stars attended in the campaign posts. The campaign was sold out in 24 hours of its launch. 

The value of the influencer marketing industry in China is predicted to be 20 billion in 2020. Although China has bright influencers it is still fuzzy for western brands to enter in. In light of this, we’ve listed a few tips for running successful campaigns in this multi-billion market:

Use relevant influencers 

It’s better to invite micro-influencers to your small scale campaigns for raising awareness. Instead, collaborate with macro or celebrity influencers for Influencer X campaigns. Especially, luxury brands are a perfect match for this kind of collaboration. 

Relevant content for each platform

Chinese platforms are divided into three groups; blogging, short videos, and live-streaming. Suggesting YouTube or Instagram style formats doesn’t apply to China’s social media platforms. Brands should understand the different characteristics of platforms. For example, Weibo and Wechat are mainly blog sharing platforms and allows user-generated-content. Short video platforms like Xiaohongshu are effective channels for raising awareness. Live-streaming is the best way for detailed information about Influencer-X-Brand collaboration.  

Allow User-Generated Content

User-generated-content campaigns boost the exposure and increase the virality of content. Besides, UGC requires minimal effort and is visually-oriented, encouraging customers share their experience via an image with a short text. 

Here we have a creative approach by one of the luxury US shoe brands. Stuart Weitzman invited fashion influencer Zola Zhang to design outfits of the models for their show. In the end, Zola shared the detailed behind-the-scenes of the designing which created high engagements.

Focus on Millennials and Gen Z

Purchasing habits of Z-lennials are different in the West and East. Unlike Western Z-lennials who surf on different social platforms, shopping websites, the Chinese prefer to buy massively from Taobao. Micro-influencers have a more in-touch connection with their followers and more authentic content. Their growing capacity promises successful long-term partnerships for newcomer brands. 

Last but not least tip is budgeting

There’s one influential factor to start a campaign in the Chinese influencer market is budgeting. Without enough budget allocation, brands that intend entering China every campaign is “predestined” to fail. 

Brands falsely tent to believe that the costs in the Chinese market will be comparatively low and rewards will be high. This is commonly made mistake by businesses as they apply western KPIs and standards to the China market. But, China market is more competitive and expensive than that of the West. The obvious solution here is to increase the marketing spendings in order to get the expected results and grab the market share. As the above-shown report by Newrank, describes the rough amount spent on KOL campaigns during the first quarter of 2018 and 2019. 

While far from being a definitive guide to elaborating the power of Chinese key opinion leaders, brands can think around it and set more realistic expectations for Chinese influencer marketing campaigns.

Influencer marketing is a hot topic in digital marketing. Consumer-driven nature shapes strong relations with a target audience. It is not surprising that companies shift their marketing strategies to more connected and authentic influencer marketing. Predictably, the estimated spending on influencer marketing for 2020 is 10 billion dollars. 

 Plus to its benefits, influencer marketing has risks as well such as: 

• Picking influencers with an unsuited audience,
• Miss-management of relations with influencers. 

While influencer marketing is expanding to different industries important question is whether to develop an in-house team or work with an agency? 

Brands either assign a team of influencer marketers or they co-operate with specialized agencies. The matter is you know your customer better and the agency knows the market better. A lot of brands don’t have an assigned influencer team. If you have relative experience and dedicated team you can definitely leverage an internal team. Let’s have a quick look at insights into an in-house team and influencer marketing agency before deciding.

In-house

No matter you work with an agency or platform your internal team will engage in influencer marketing, review contents, check proposals and report. In-house programs allow you to directly connect to influencers and evaluate their approach. 

Pros 

Transparency with influencers. Control over the project, brands follow the process from milestones to the end. 

It’s more affordable as you don’t outsource a team of experts for a small budget project but use your professionals to find the best matching influencers. 

Solely working will bring practice and strategic management to influencer marketing. A huge number of projects will make you list the best influencers for you. 

The in-house team creates direct relations with influencers, allowing long-term relations with them such as brand advocacy. Long-term collaboration is also more authentic and influential and it’s accepted more organic by your target audience. 

It has long-term monetary and non-monetary benefits. Investing your employees and resources will improve your intangible assets and save your money for the long-run.  

Cons

It takes a long time to be prominent in influencer marketing. You may have unsuccessful partnerships or pick irrelevant influencers. Even if you choose the right influencers you may omit basic factors such as not creating hashtags, focusing on the influencers audience instead of quality content. 

Working only with in-house team may limit your access to new influencers, new channels as agencies are totally engaged with influencers.

Having a digital marketing expert is not enough for running an influencer program. If you plan for continuously running influencer marketing campaigns you need to hire a team of influencer marketers or train your employees which are additional costs. Your marketing team needs to follow trends, fully engage in the influencer market, rival brands’ campaigns and many more. And you as a company need to keep track of the team’s performance. 

Another thread here is entering the global market alone. Because brands aren’t familiar with foreign influencers, the local audience they need influencer strategies or campaign managers. 

Agency

An influencer marketing agency is a specialized agency that has tools, expertise in building, and managing influencer programs. Influencer marketing agencies or platforms are needed to reach the full potential of a campaign. 

Pros

They speed up the process of finding the most convenient influencers as they have a set of data of influencers in specific industries. Therefore, agencies ease the process of searching, reaching out to influencers, and creating organic content. 

Let’s say you are a new brand and you want a very famous celebrity to promote your product. Obviously, the celebrity manager will call for a recommended third party before coming to an agreement. 

Agency reputation plays an important role in the influencers’ decision. Plus, specialized agencies provide necessary metrics and give project reports. 

Their expertise allows to scale up your project through the right strategy on the right platform. 

The coin has two sides. Besides their benefits and expertise, agencies have lagging sides.

Cons

For a limited budget, agencies are additional costs. 

Lack of transparency. Not having a direct relationship with influencers may prolong the duration of projects 

Before reaching out to influencers you need to find the right agency, make them know your brand, what you expect from the project, which takes additional time. 

Considering all factors in mind you can make a decision whether agency or in-house. But, these two are not the only options available. There is one prominent option that you shouldn’t ignore – it’s influencer marketing platforms, like Keepface. It’s an all-in-one automated tool where your team can easily plan influencer campaigns, find relevant influencers through a huge database via smart filters, and most importantly have full transparency throughout the whole campaigns and get the full report of accomplished projects. It’s more like a free self-service influencer marketing that is also budget-friendly. 

Conclusion

To sum up, if you are new to influencer marketing or you may need influencer marketing specialists at first. For one-off projects, agencies will support you from the time and cost-saving side. If you plan for ongoing projects with influencers, it’s worth investing your internal workforce, training employees, or hiring experienced ones.

Instagram’s aim used to be sharing happy moments of life with friends, family when it was first launched in 2010. Now it is completely different than the beginning. Celebrities, brands, social media influencers changed its nature to a business profile. However, wealthy people use Instagram to give insight into their dynamic and admiring lifestyles. Some use Instagram like any of us while others show off every piece they buy, every place they go. Just as these richest kids of Instagram, they take it one step further by sharing every new purchase, lavish parties even private jets in the coolest way possible with billions of followers.

Here we list some of the top 10 richest kids of Instagram:

 1. @prince.pd

German real estate entrepreneur’s Instagram may lack in followers numbers but not in his wealth. His Instagram is full of expensive cars, skyscraper photography, drink bottles, private jets, exotic travels. 

2. @dradinova

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Daria Radionova (@dradionova) on Jun 25, 2019 at 10:19am PDT

Although, there is no public information about Daria’s business background. But this rich kid of Instagram is famous for wrapping her expensive cars into crystals. She previously designed her Mercedes car with crystal which then sold for a dog shelter in London. Later, Daria covered her Lamborgini Huracan with 1,3 million crystals. Her recent work was Lamborghini Aventador. Daria’s Instagram account is flooding with photos of her crystal cars, luxury bags, designer shoes, watches, fragrances, jewelry. The Instagram model only wears from Fendy, Gucci, McQueen, Balenciaga. Crystal beauty is also a fundraiser for children that fight against serious illnesses.

3. @markvandelli

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Mark Francis Vandelli (@markvandelli) on Aug 20, 2019 at 10:46am PDT

Son of  Russian socialite and Italian industrialist, Mark Vandelli is a former editor for Insider magazine, a businessman, model, and interior designer. At 21, he was picked up as of the best-dressed men in Britain. Recently, he works as a jewelry designer for Channel, Tom Ford Christie’s. With high-classed costumes, well-defined angle poses, noble interior places Mark’s Instagram is a pure example of elegance.

4. @dorothywang

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Dorothy ✨✨ (@dorothywang) on Nov 16, 2019 at 12:26pm PST

Self-described as funemployed, fabulexe Dorothy Wang is an American actress and TV personality, daughter of a Chinese billionaire. She gained Instagram fame after posting with #richkidsinstagram hashtag. 10 million wealth owner designed her necklace line with her famous hashtags. Dorothy shares her adventures lifestyle, lavish parties, fancy costumes.  “I can share a different side of richest kids of Instagram”, said Dorothy.

5. @letthelordbewithyou

20 million wealth owner with doing not so much. He gained popularity and giant wealth after the show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. In 2018, he launched his clothing line Talentless. Despite sharing his own brand, he features his tasty lifestyle, Ferrari car, Richard Mille watch, he partners with brands as an Instagram influencer.

6. @emirbahadir

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by EMIR (@emirbahadir) on Nov 23, 2019 at 7:50pm PST

Emir the next richest kids of Instagram on our list. He is from the real estate empire family in Turkey. Instead of following his family business he launched his own lifestyle and entertaining brand called Bahadiring. Instead of being respected for his family he prefers to be valued because of himself, mentioned Emir in one of his interviews. The young entrepreneur is keen on to help and inspire young entrepreneurs, make them believe they can do it if they believe in themselves. He doesn’t hesitate to share his pictures at business events, on high-end wears, fabulous parties, glorious travels and of course in private jets on Instagram. Traveling is in his DNA. For Emir, Instagram’s purpose is to show life from the entertaining and fun side. 

7. @evanluthra

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Dr. Evan Luthra (@evanluthra) on Aug 2, 2019 at 12:38am PDT

Evan is an Indian millionaire tech entrepreneur, one of the “Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30”. He started his first app at the age of 12. Angel investor’s company EL Group International is a technology provider for Fortune 500 companies. Currently, he shifts to the crypto business. Evan is also a spokesperson for TEDx, United Nations, Washington University, and Dehli University. You can see his passion for his work on his Instagram account. The impressive young man also finds time for fancy parties and yacht voyages as well. 

8. @kanelk_k

Thanks to his billionaire family, he made his business at 18. Kane Lim studied fashion at the University of California. He said: “I went to the designer shoe and said I will take each pair one color”. A luxury collector displays every piece of bags, shoes, and jewelry from his wardrobe. Fashionista’s favorite brands are Cartier, Channel, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, and Christian Louboutin.

9. @faz3

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Fazza (@faz3) on Oct 30, 2019 at 6:31am PDT

Active social media user, Crown Prince of Dubai, 400 million dollar wealth owner Sheik Hamdan is Chairman of the Dubai Execute Council, Dubai Sports Council, and Dubai Autism Center, and one of the rishest kids of Instagram. The so-called “Sheik of Instagram” uses his account to share his wonderful lifestyle with 8.8 million followers. Apart from sharing his family, he posts about his charity works, Dubai sky, his passion for sporting, travel, photography, and animals. Besides his family members, Fazza follows different accounts such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, sports personalities Cristiano Ronaldo, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and few photography pages. 

10. @chrystan_x

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by ♕ Chryseis Tan ♕ 陈雪铃 (@chrystan_x) on Sep 5, 2019 at 5:32am PDT

Daughter of Malaysian tycoon, CEO of Berjaya Corporation, successful investor Chryseis Tan uses social media to increase awareness about her business instead of showing off her wealth or work. In the beginning, she used Instagram for sharing her travel pictures. As it seems from her sophisticated outfits, the business lady is interested in beauty and fashion and keen on investing in these ventures.