INFLUENCER MARKETING AS A WAY OF PROMOTING A BRAND VIA SOCIAL NETWORKS

Sa？etak The contemporary market environment gives rise to a new generation of consumers to which the organisations, through their communication activities, must serve. One of the new possibilities with a high potential in the contemporary marketing communication domain, entails the use of “influencers”, i.e. influential individuals, on social networks. Influencer marketing is being welcomed as a modern concept which represents the more and more significant way of promoting brands on social networks, and which emerged as a result of the development of the innovative digital marketing strategies. By applying the two-phase communication to the specific focus group, a special relationship between brands, influencers, and the end users is being created, which, after all, secures better positioning of the brand, as well as the growth of sales. The paper probes into differences and similarities between the online and offline marketing, and elaborates on the research conducted on a sample comprised of business subject representatives and social networks users from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, by analysing the peculiarities of influence marketing and contrasting the acquired results with the outcomes of the previously conducted global-scale studies