With the world digitizing so fast, there is also a revolution in sales and marketing strategies, "Digital Influencers" are the new Sales Team. In an interview with “Brian Freeman," the CEO and founder of Heartbeat, I came to understand how the digital influencers are becoming the new sales team. While there are some who think the expression “influencer” is an expired term, the role of influence on B2B buying decisions is irrefutable.

To learn more about how influencer marketing and influencer sales strategies have transformed the digital marketing, Brian’s idea of utilizing digital influencers to get more audience engagement and increased sales is the crucial concept. Before Bumble, Brian started "Wildfire" in 2013, which was the first-ever female-focused dating app. He allowed the influencers to post about his brand on their IG accounts, which resulted in a spike of traffic towards the app! Before getting into influencer-marketing and consumer-brand relationships, Brian categorized influencers into Nano-influencers( having an audience that is mostly organic), Micro-influencers(with 5K to 100K followers) and Macro-influencers( celebrities e.tc) based upon their role on Instagram and the volume of their followers.

In 2014, Facebook ad campaigns were very restricted as they didn’t want to make it a messy ad place. Brain took another way of getting traffic by letting people post on their Instagram about the specific brand. He shared his strategy of “ Marketplace model," which surpassed google ads strategy.