Virtual Influencer Marketing

Here I want to talk about the effect of virtual influencers, which will shape the social media of the future. And I would like to start with a question.

Will virtual influencers become more realistic, or will real influencers become virtual?

We are becoming more digital every day, often without noticing it. We used to take inspiration from influencers for our real-life characters and lives; now we have begun to take more inspiration for our own digital presences and how they look.

Trends are always shaped and defined by the changing behaviours, searches and habits between brands and consumers. That is why the influencers and platforms in between always take their share of the change.

A godsend for brands

From a company's point of view, virtual influencers are becoming the most useful influencer marketing model and a real godsend for their brands. One of the most important reasons is that a human being, however famous, is still human, and the chance of a slip is always there.

Celebrities' or real influencers' personal crises that cause a sensation, and the risk of their names being tarnished by bad news, are among the things brands most need to avoid. A very simple example: after Ronaldinho was filmed drinking Pepsi at a press conference, a £500,000 Coca-Cola deal was cancelled.

Imagine positioning your brand with an influencer who cannot make mistakes and whose contract you hold for life. Add to that the fact that your influencer marketing budget would be optimised to a great extent.

Create your own influencer

This is a sentence I keep telling entrepreneurs: create your own influencer. Manage your own brand face, run sustainable influencer marketing and build a sphere of influence specific to your sector and area of interest, even if it is a micro one.

The metaverse and the future

As the concept of the metaverse finds more room in our lives, and as the technologies and platforms integrated with it enter our lives more, we will begin to perceive the virtual more naturally. Perhaps we will find ourselves following a real influencer's metaverse character, their “meta human” version, on social media.

Thinking about it now, you may question whether this could ever be real. But a few years from now, buying, as an NFT, the bag a virtual influencer you follow on Instagram shared, from the store they tagged through their virtual character, and then sharing it with your own character, is not far off at all.

We are already in the metaverse. The only difference is that, for now, we think of ourselves as real and realistic.