5 important strategies that big brands implement with influencers
Traditional forms of advertising no longer work. Commercials and online ads are easily overlooked, skipped, and muted, leaving budgets with little to show for customer acquisition and brand awareness.
It’s 2018 and people are seeking information from those they trust or view as experts. That’s what makes influencer marketing so valuable. It opens the door for authentic stories and experiences to be formulated around brands in a way that cannot be achieved through other types of advertising.
If you’ve been hesitant about taking the plunge into influencer marketing, hopefully these five strategies big brands implement will change your mind.
1. Celebrities or non-celebs? That is the question.
It makes sense to think that if a brand signed a celebrity with millions of followers, its campaign would be more successful because it would reach a broader audience.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Recent research has shown that engagement actually starts to drop as the number of followers increases. After evaluating more than 800,000 Instagram users, Markerly found that those with 1,000 or fewer followers had an 8% engagement rate, while users with more than 10 million followers only had a 1% engagement rate. 6%. Research continues to show that hiring influencers with 10,000 to 100,000 followers gets you the best results.
One of the main reasons for this is that micro-influencers tend to build a following based on what they share on their blog or social channels. If someone consistently posts about being a mom, chances are other moms will follow and engage with that influencer’s content. With each new post, more and more credibility is built, and eventually, this influencer can become their audience’s expert on the subject.
By the time the influencer publishes a sponsored post about a product they are excited about, they have already gained the trust of their audience, and those followers will want to try the product too. This is a win-win situation because as more followers start talking about or buying the product, the brand should experience an increase in its own follower counts as well as sales.
In addition to having better engagement rates and a more targeted audience, micro-influencers also cost significantly less than celebrities. Hopper HQ recently shared that a single Selena Gomez Instagram post costs $550,000. In contrast, it costs $214 on average to hire a micro-influencer in the United States to post on Instagram. That means a brand could hire approximately 2,570 micro-influencers in exchange for a Selena Gomez post.
Bigelow Tea, working with Walmart, realized their money was better spent with micro-influencers, so they worked with Collective Bias on their Tea Moments campaign and the results were amazing. By recruiting influencers in the healthy living and wellness verticals, the product authentically fits into their blogs and social channels. The content was so well received by influencer audiences that Bigelow Tea experienced an 18.5% sales increase and more than 44 million campaign impressions.
2. Creative freedom: what it means and why it is important
A common mistake brands make when first working with influencers is trying to have too much control over the process. If you chat with an influencer, they will most likely tell you that creative freedom is one of the most important things they look for before agreeing to participate in a campaign. They understand their unique voice, and if they are not given the chance to maintain that voice, they are likely to refuse to work on the campaign. Or even worse, if they participate in the campaign and their followers don’t respond well because it doesn’t look authentic, the brand may develop a negative conversation among its target audience.
While it can be difficult for brands to relinquish control of the creative process, it’s important that influencers are trusted to do their best work. This is why it’s so important to hire influencers who live up to your values and style.
DSW’s 12 Days of Converse campaign found five influencers that fit their ideal demo and hired them to design two or three pairs of Chuck Taylors, then announced to their followers that they could win a pair of their own. Those simple details paved the way for influencers to unleash their creativity, and the response from their followers was insane. For less than $15,000, the campaign generated more than 3 million impressions and more than 100,000 interactions.
DSW continues to be an active participant in influencer marketing campaigns and its revenue has been steadily increasing year on year. For fiscal 2016, DSW Company revenue was $2.7 billion and is now at $2.8 billion for 2017, a record for the company.
3. Exist where your audience exists
Ten years ago, blogs and websites were some of the only ways online to inform audiences about your product. Today, there are various social platforms available for advertising such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. So how do you know which platform is best for influencers to post on?
With social networks constantly changing, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where you need to have live content for your ideal target audience to see, so an alternative strategy is to have influencers post to multiple platforms.
Bertolli hired nine influencers to publish blog posts, social amplifications and videos about their olive oil products so no audience was left out. In doing so, her campaign generated an estimated total of 6.8 million views and $14.37 in earned media revenue for every $1 spent on the campaign.
The blog posts were great for sharing recipes that required the use of the product, and in turn, those recipes were easy to get on Pinterest. Instagram was a useful platform for displaying one of the final recipe images and for directing readers to get the full recipe on her blog.
Airheads had a similar strategy. In his campaign, the anchor videos lived on YouTube and were amplified on other social platforms to drive more traffic. This strategy resulted in more than 1.3 million video views from just three influencers and more than 44,000 social interactions across all channels.
4. Do you think numbers are everything? Not so fast!
It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers you see from the viewer’s perspective. For example, if your campaign goal is to get more than 20 million impressions and 10,000 interactions, it can be very tempting to look for influencers who have a large following and many comments or likes on their posts.
The unfortunate reality is that numbers don’t tell the whole story. In fact, many influencers participate in Instagram pods and Facebook threads where they share their content with their peer influencers, and then everyone likes and comments to help make it look like that influencer has an engaged following.
On the surface, the numbers seem solid, but on a deeper level, the goal of reaching the target audience is not achieved.
One way brands can avoid this pitfall is to hire influencers who consistently create quality content and fit the brand image. According to Jonathan Long, founder of Market Domination Media, small accounts often outperform large ones, sometimes by as much as 300%. That’s right – 300%.
When brands stop looking at numbers, they are forced to look at each influencer as an individual. What does that person bring to the table? Do they regularly interact with their followers? Are your photos telling a story?
These are all questions that brands need to ask themselves before launching an influencer marketing campaign.
Subaru understood the importance of quality over quantity and hired influencers to publish a total of 58 sponsored posts for its Meet an Owner campaign. Since almost everyone owns a car, Subaru found relevant influencers in a variety of verticals, like fitness and art, to share their story.
1.9 million likes and 9,000 comments later, Subaru has not only received increased brand sentiment and recognition, but is also positioned for another outstanding year in the automotive industry. In fact, influencer marketing is partly due to its 10% sales growth in 2016.
5. Surface data doesn’t tell the whole story
Once a campaign is over, it can be easy to walk away from it and start the next big project. But in order to continually execute a solid influencer marketing strategy, it’s important to review the data and dig deeper into the analysis of each campaign.
For example, knowing how many referrals are being sent to you, how many new leads you’ve gotten, what sales growth you’ve seen, and customer acquisition costs are all metrics that need to be evaluated on a deeper level.
Charmin partnered with Mavrck to help track coupon clicks, product reviews, and subscriptions for an entire quarter so they could look for trends in the data, like the ones mentioned above. Over the course of that quarter, Charmin was able to see that they received more than 5,300 coupon clicks, 1,800 product reviews, and an average product rating of 4.82 out of 5.
If you’re not sure how or where to look to analyze your results, Social Media Examiner has some great advice on how brands can do analytics themselves with a little help from Google Analytics.