How brands can make influencer partnerships meaningful, believable and measurable
Influencer Marketing. If the government charged a cent for every time the term was mentioned among marketers and agencies in India, the country would have reached its target of becoming a 5 trillion dollar economy in 2019 itself.
Jokes apart, the meteoric rise in influencer marketing is there for all to see. The volume of searches on Google for the term “influencer marketing” has more than doubled in the last 2 years. Since February this year it has consistently outgrown searches for “video advertising”, indicating its growing importance among marketers. From being a good to have in the plan, influencer marketing has now become a significant pillar in all digital marketing initiatives. It’s fairly clear why influencer marketing has become so popular. Gen Z and younger millennials don’t want to see interruptive ads anymore and research shows they trust the opinions of social media influencers only second to family and friends when they decide to buy products and services.
However this is not to say that influencer marketing is without its share of problems. Influencer fraud, less than optimal ways to measure impact and the same set of celebrity influencers being chased by marketers which has resulted in a seller’s market with rising costs and audience fatigue with sponsored posts. These problems however in my opinion are more to do with the flawed way in which influencer campaigns are run and can easily be fixed. Influencer marketing if done right can be a very effective channel to drive brand love, traffic and conversions. Most marketers still view influencer marketing as any other ad spend, focussing solely on metrics such as cost per reach and cost per engagement. That is a very restrictive way of looking at this channel. To extract maximum mileage from your spends, you need to move influencer marketing from a transactional to a transformational role in your business. Here are a few thoughts on how you can do that
Set relevant KPIs
Before you include influencers in your marketing mix, be very clear what you wish to achieve through them. Do you want traffic to your site, qualified leads, online sales or top of the funnel goals such as building awareness and generating social conversations. High quality content generation for your brand through influencers is also a legit goal.
Use the 3R model to select your influencers
After you’ve set your KPIs, the next step which is essentially the heart of a successful influencer campaign is to thoroughly research your prospective influencers. Most marketers get fixated on the follower count of influencers when deciding whom to collaborate with. Hence they keep going back to the same list of film, TV and sports stars. Actually Reach is just one of the parameters to look at and arguably the least important in the context of influencer marketing. Relevance is perhaps the most important. How relevant is the influencer and his/her followers to your business? How authoritative and trustworthy is the influencer on the subject relevant to your brand? Does his/her social media content have keywords and phrases that are important to your business? As you go deeper into the marketing funnel, the domain expertise of your influencer becomes more critical. The third R is Resonance which is the outcome of reach and relevance. This is the secret sauce of influencer marketing and captures the level of engagement for the content.
Consider a plan skewed towards micro-influencers who capture relevant niches
A study earlier this year by analytics firm InfluencerDB showed that while average engagement on Instagram worldwide for influencers with followers greater than 10K is 3.6%, those with 5K to 10K followers have an engagement rate of 6.3% and those with a following of 1K to 5K have the highest rate at 8.8%. The Trust Barometer Survey by Edelman also shows that when it comes to trusting influencers, relatability is nearly twice as important as popularity. “People like me” gained the most trust. So instead of going for that big celebrity with millions of followers who may or may not be relevant to your brand, curating a list of micro-influencers with loyal and highly engaged communities will better serve you if engagement is your KPI. A good influencer agency could do this for you
Integrate influencers early in your marketing campaign
Most often marketers use influencers as a layer on top of existing campaigns. But the impact of influencers can be maximised if they are woven early in to campaign planning. They know their communities best and their ideas and feedback should be used to sharpen the communication which can be customised to their followers.
Build a partnership with your influencers beyond a financial transaction
Speak to your influencers on how you as a brand can add value to them and their followers. Think beyond the pay and use model. Some incentives can be more powerful than money. Early access to products, invites to exclusive events, badges of honour etc. can be powerful motivators. At Indiatimes Lifestyle Network’s influencer agency Hypp we give micro influencers access to our creative team and our production facilities. That’s a big draw for many influencers to work with us
Constantly measure impact and use it to iterate your influencer strategy
Measure the performance of your influencers against the KPIs you had set. You can provide influencers custom urls or offer them discount codes to measure direct impact on sales or you can measure increase in brand mentions, improvement in sentiment through brand lift surveys etc. for more top of the funnel campaigns. The data will help you learn and iterate and over a period of time you will know which influencers and what kind of messaging works best for your brand. Influencer marketing is a great way to establish authenticity, capture traffic and engagement with communities that otherwise would be hard to attract, build a content pipeline that helps drive sales. Influencer marketing is an art and science that when deployed deftly and with patience can work wonders for your brand.
