The Phenomenon called Influencer Marketing
🤿Percolator Deep Dive: A Primer on Influencer Marketing with Intellifluence
Percolator Deep Dive 🤿 unpacks for you business, operations & technology concepts and processes. This article is written in partnership with Intellifluence.
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The Phenomenon called Influencer Marketing
Storytelling has been foundational to human evolution. We could come together and form a cohesive society only because we were capable of creating stories, spreading it wide and then build shared behaviour based on those tales . Narrative instinct sits so deeply in our genetic memory, that we naturally prefer things told to us as a coherent story over a set of information.
This tendency of humans, to seek narrative, was responded by brands in form of creating advertising and communication is beautifully crafted format to market their products to consumers. As tools progressed so did marketing - print, radio, motion and then digital. The stories were told in many voices ranging from mythical characters to celebrated actors; from expert physicians to wise elders. Marketing channels evolved with time and technology.
But, all this while there was one channel which brands didn’t own, at least directly, the word of mouth. The word of mouth has always been an incredible promotion for any brand because along with the product and story, it offered one thing which no other channel could have - the trust, that the consumer already had on the person who recommended a product to them.
In the simplest words, influencer marketing is word of mouth gone viral.
Unraveling Influencer Marketing
At the very core of it, influencer marketing is having an influential individual be an ambassador for your product to the people who trust them. This form of advertising have been around for a very long time, and brand have engaged celebrities - often actors and sportspersons, but at times doctors, solicitors, politicians etc as well - to promote their products to the people who followed them. It was in a way, word of mouth, but from one to many leveraging the fan following.
Another format which tried to leverage the ‘word of mouth’ effect was community selling, workshop etc. But that had the challenge of scale. A community ambassador could reach a very small number of people at a time.
Entered internet and social media. The game was changed.
With billions of people creating and curating content on various platform a new age celebrity and influencer class was born. These internet celebrities interacted with their followers and opened their life to them. Internet users saw them as peers and often trusted them more than traditional ‘celebrities’ on the matter of endorsements - products or ideas. With their constant content creation, high engagement rate and greater trust value, these celebrities carried great influence on consumption behaviours of their followers, and thus the profession of social media influencer was born.
Influencer marketing as it stands today, is a mix of all kind of influencers - the tradition celebrities, social media content creators and the niche experts. All these kind of influencers are described in three categories:
Aspirational Influencers: These were our old school celebrity influencers. We aspired to be like them and thus we decided to buy things that they endorsed. With social media, aspiration drivers have increased. Now aspirational influencers do not need to be a superstar. Social media has created its own aspirational influencers.
Authoritative Influencers: These are the topical experts who have either through their profession, or through their content authority on the web have built a reputation of delivering high quality information and insight about their niche. People trust their knowledge and thus believe their suggestions.
Peer Influencers: This category, at the scale is a phenomenon that came true with social media itself. Our peers are the ones who influence us the strongest. Thus, the users who build a community solely based on relatability and adoration by a large number of followers tend to influence us way more.
With e-commerce, the biggest trust buyers started imposing is in the reviews left by fellow buyers. There also the tendency to rely more on peer than expert played a role. As the online buying increased, peer suggestion for discovery took the center stage.
In past few years, influencer marketing has become the one of the most effective channel for brands to reach to its consumer. Instead of crafted adverts, buyers tends to watch and follow more the demonstration and unpacking videos created by influencers.
2021 has shown a considerable increase in brands engaging with influencers. Influencer Marketing industry was $13.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $16.4 billion in 2022. It has been estimated that business are making an ROI of $5.8 on every dollar spent on influencer marketing.
Building Effective Influencer Marketing Campaign
Influencer marketing is being used from large brands like Coca Cola, Netflix etc. as well as by small creator owned direct to consumer brands. It has shown tremendous results in establishing a lot of challenger brands. So, no matter what business you are in, it makes sense to have an influencer strategy. A Gartner report says, ‘On an average 55% of brands across sectors underperformed influencers’ branded post by engagement.’
But, with its efficacy recognized, the place has become very crowded and highly competitive. Thus it require a fair bit of hard work to design an effective influencer marking campaign. Key components to look at are the platform mix, influencer mix and the content design.
Here is a framework from Gartner to design your strategy determine the state of influencer marketing readiness.
The three key decisions that you need to make while devising your influencer marketing strategy are:
What media channels to use?
The available options for the media channel ranges from self hosted blogs to accounts on massive media platform such as Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube. Identify what kind of platform jives most with the personality of your brand and offering. B2B communication, technology services often find better engagement through blogs, newsletter, discussion forums like reddit, answer platforms like Quora or professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Whereas, consumer brands find better uptake on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok or YouTube etc.
Irrespective of the kind of business you are, it makes sense to create a mix of both kind of channels to have a wholistic presence of your brand across all medium. Your KPIs will be different on different channel. While on one you might be looking for sales uplift, other might be for brand awareness and some for building corporate collaboration.
How to select Influencers?
Your influencers are your ambassadors to a large number of people. It becomes extremely critical, who and how you are selecting the influencers. The one with largest following might not always be the best fit for you.
It is prudent to create a good mix of small and large influencers. You want both, those with very high engagement rate and also those who bring you large number of eye balls. Also, ensure that the persona of the influencers align well with your brand personality.
Goals, KPIs and Iterations
Influencer marketing requires a lot of iteration to get the grip of how content consumers respond to messaging sent across by the influencers. Thus, it is very important that you have very clear understanding of what you want out of your campaign.
Set up very specific goals for both, the platforms and the influencers in terms of the part of customer journey that you want to target in specific campaign. Define your KPIs for each of them. Benchmark performance not only against your own brand pages but also with the competitors Evaluate downstream impact and the lift created by the campaign.
An effective influencer strategy is extremely data driven. Good news is that the platforms have many ways to track that.
The Challenges of Influencer Marketing
Of course it is not all rosy and easy, as it is not with anything. Influencer Marketing has grown large but still is an evolving space. Not many business understand how to effectively operate here, not many content creators understand how to be an influencer. There is also a general lack of understanding on the terms of engagement between brand and influencers. Then managing a large number of influencers, keeping track of their media postings, engagements, contracts, exclusivity etc. can also be very overwhelming, specially for small companies.
There is also the peril that you brands reputation invariably gets tied to the influencer, so any kind of unacceptable public behaviour on their account can adversely affect the brand.
It helps to work with good agencies or platforms which bring well vetted high performing influencers for every category, size, reach etc., and also take care of engagement terms.
On the influencer marketing benchmarking survey, 75% brand marketeer said that they intend to have separate budget for influencer marketing. With growing brand options and e-commerce penetration, it would not be a long stretch to speculate that influencer marketing will become the primary marketing channel for many product categories not too far in the future.
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