In recent years many bloggers have left their 9 to 5 job to make a career out of blogging full time.  Whether they are blogging about fashion, beauty, lifestyle or food they have large readership numbers along with lots of followers on their various social media accounts.

Marketing Spend

Brands have been paying attention and are now leveraging off the popularity of bloggers, as people now spend more and more time online.Whether it is advertising, sponsorship or paid content marketing, brands are spending more of their marketing dollars in this space.

Influential People

The rise of bloggers as influential people is obvious, Lucy Feagins creator of The Design Files is case in point.  The Design Files is regularly ranked as one of the top 5 design blogs in the world with over 1,000,000 monthly page impressions. Brands and products featured on her blog often see a large increase in demand due to this exposure – this has in turn become known as The Design Files Effect (TDFE).  Big name brands such as Dulux, BMW and Bank of Melbourne have all been major sponsors of various Design Files events over the last few years, so they are clearly seeing the benefit of this exposure.

Collaborations

As well as sponsorship and paid advertising, brands are now taking this a step further.  Last year Foxtel created a new show featuring some of Australia’s top fashion bloggers, which followed their journey as bloggers and the different products and brands they collaborate with.  These bloggers have since gone on to create marketing campaigns and become brand ambassadors for major brands such as Schwarzkopf, Holden, OGX, Tony Bianco and David Jones.

This is a trend that is only going to increase given the way in which media consumption is shifting further and further into the digital space.  The value of blogger sponsorship, advertising and paid content marketing is certainly something that should be evaluated when reviewing your digital strategy.