MARKETING
As online platforms become cluttered with ads, marketers are challenged to find new ways to connect with their customers. One rising trend they should pay attention to is “influencer marketing,” or using the power of popular people to reach your target market, according to this opinion piece by Aprajita Jain, a brand marketing evangelist at Google.
You are in your mid-30s, single, sipping a coffee at your favorite coffee shop. Suddenly a stranger approaches your table and asks if he can sit with you. Instinctively drawing your purse a little closer, you make an excuse and leave. A month later your best friend tells you about someone she wants you to meet and gives you a very unbiased opinion on his virtues and vices. Knowing your friend has the best of intentions, you agree to meeting this person. As you walk into the restaurant you see the coffee shop guy sitting at a table waiting for you! This time your guard is down because you have the endorsement of someone you deeply trust. Brands are learning from this real-life psychological hack. Instead of getting in your face with their own message about their greatness they are letting ‘influencers’ — people you trust — tell you why you should pay attention to their products and services through a voice that sounds far more authentic. The influencer is that mutual friend between a brand and their consumers. Influencers are well-connected. They are authoritative. They have active minds and they are trendsetters. Why are influencers so much more effective for marketing than self-promotion by a company? Let’s examine the trifecta of good influencer marketing: Attention equals currency. Influencer marketing allows targeted exposure to the right kind of consumer, one who is already interested in a category that you operate in and will likely pay attention. In a world where TV ads have become background noise and consumers are becoming immune to traditional digital advertising, being on-target is crucial. Just take a look at the rampant rise of ad blockers — last year alone, usage surged by 30% globally (PageFair 2017 Adblock Report). Only 6% of display ads are ever clicked on. Further proliferation of mobile phones, video content and social media, are turning influencers into constant companions of your audience. To get their attention, brands have to work with the people they listen to. Creativity and organic content has become the expectation. Remember Jared Fogle, the ‘the Subway guy?’ He served as the brand’s spokesperson for 15 years until his fall from grace. Today, it is no longer enough to hire a spokesperson and have them endorse your brand. While there is some overlap between celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing campaigns, the latter are designed to speak to an existing community of highly engaged followers. Influencers are the masters of their niches, and have established a high level of trust and two-way communication with their followers. They know how to incorporate a brand’s products and services into content people are watching and they do it very seamlessly, instead of taking away attention from what they really want to watch. The reason their followers keep coming back to them is because they regularly offer new and creative content to them. Followers have come to expect that. Over are the days of hammering the same message into your consumers’ heads for months, maybe even years.
“Influencers are the masters of their niches, and have established a high level of trust and two-way communication with their followers.”Social media has no prime time window — it is prime time. Any consumer behavior study worth its ink will tell you that consumers are shifting towards social at the cost of TV. While marketers chased prime time spots on TV in the past, social is prime time 24/7. The truth is, when a social media personality you follow day in and day out wears something, drinks something, shows you something, you pay attention to it. And the key word here is attention. How to win your customer’s attention is quickly changing, and the brands that fail to adapt are going to get left in the dust by their competitors. In God we trust. Everyone else bring data. Why should you believe me when I say that influencer marketing is on the rise and more effective than many other popular marketing channels?
- A poll conducted by Tomoson found that 59% of marketers are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets year-over-year. It is also the most cost-effective and fastest-growing online customer acquisition channel, outpacing organic search, paid search and email marketing.
- In an advertising landscape where returns on ad spend (ROAS) of $2 for every $1 spent are considered a success, influencer marketing delivers an average return of $6.50, with the top 13% of marketers making $20 or more.
- It’s not just about the quantity, quality matters too — 51% of marketers believe customers acquired through influencer marketing are of better quality because they spend more money and are more likely to spread the word to family and friends.
- According to a Think with Google study, 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers say they relate to YouTubers more than to traditional celebrities — and you can bet that is not just happening on YouTube.
“According to a Think with Google study, 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers say they relate to YouTubers more than to traditional celebrities.”On the day of launch, ‘yule log’ was a trending topic on Facebook and more than 175 stories were written about it, earning the brand a lot of free media mentions. As the campaign rapidly gained momentum in social conversations and got further amplified by streams through Sony, Tumblr and GoDaddy, the team behind it created a 10-hour loop for holiday gatherings. In the first two days alone, the video garnered 1.1 million YouTube views, growing to 2 million in just one week before any paid media was activated. The brand’s channel subscribers skyrocketed from 5,500 to 23,000. Adding More Juice Influencer marketing isn’t just for the big brands. It is quite popular because companies of any size can benefit from it. Naked Juice, a smaller juice and smoothie company that started in the 1980s in Santa Monica, Calif., collaborated with young influencer Beth Norton. They sought her out on Instagram to promote their juices and smoothies to people on the go, whether they are running errands or planning projects. They also entered the beauty, fashion, and health scene on Instagram with help from lifestyle blogger Kate La Vie, who shares sponsored posts featuring images of her daily outfits and beauty essentials — including a strategically placed Naked Juice in the mix.
Accompanied by other marketing channel strategies, this influencer campaign allowed Naked Juice to defend its position in the premium juice category by establishing itself in the minds and hearts of their core audience — known as ‘Bare Believers.’ Naked Juice now commands a market share of 58%, far ahead of any competitors, and saw an eight-fold increase in consumer social engagement.
Taking Action
How does one get started in this form of marketing? How do you find influencers and measure the impact of your efforts?
Eighty-four percent of marketers manually search social media platforms to find influencers that may be right for their brand. Many rely on recommendations, social media monitoring tools or attending events and conferences. It is one of the most challenging and time-consuming steps to take as you are getting started with this new medium of advertising, but today there is a plethora of influencer marketplaces that can make this much easier, such as Famebit by YouTube. These online platforms can be used to quickly search for influencers based on specific criteria (follower count, demographics, interests, etc.), to negotiate deals with them as well as give them a clear brief to stay ‘on brand.’ A marketplace makes it easier to not only negotiate a fair price but also find influencers that you may have not heard of before.
First, consider these three criteria when choosing influencers:
- Context: Who has the largest overlap between their followers and your target audience? Keep in mind this is one of the very few — if not the only — type of advertising that works in an ‘opt-in’ model. Influencers don’t force themselves on their audience. Their audience actively subscribes to them. As a result, the audience is far more engaged than on other channels.
- Reach: How large is their following? Just like you choose a TV ad spot based on its reach, you can look at how many followers a certain influencer caters to.
- Actionability: This is the influencer’s ability to cause action and likely the most subtle, yet important, selection criteria to get right. The more skilled an influencer is at convincing their followers to take action related to your product or service the higher your conversion rate will be.
“Influencer marketing delivers an average return of $6.50 (per dollar spent), with the top 13% of marketers making $20 or more.”Second, decide which pricing model is the best fit for your brand. The four most common pricing models are:
- Pay-per-post or flat-rate pricing: This is the most common method, with 68% of marketers choosing it. The influencer is paid a flat fee per piece of sponsored content they create, whether it’s a photo, tweet, pin, video or blog post. Depending on who you are working with, prices can range from as little as $50 per piece to as much as $250,000 for top-tier influencers.
- Product compensation: Some influencers can be wooed with free products or services. This type of compensation is commonly used by travel brands as influencers can creatively endorse their personal travel stories. This model is ideal for smaller campaigns or for brands looking to establish a brand ambassador group.
- Pay-per-click: In this model, influencers are compensated for how well their content performs. The key metric is number of clicks to a brand’s site. Because influencers rely a lot more on audience interaction in this performance-based model, they are motivated to create larger volumes of content.
- Pay-per-acquisition: Here, influencers are rewarded for the number of purchases, actions or sign-ups driven by their content. It is the least common payment model because consumers rarely purchase or sign up for something the first time they get introduced to a product or service. Often, repeat exposure is required. The first introduction usually needs to be followed up by discovery, research and validation before resulting in a purchase or conversion.