DEVELOPING THE FOUNDATIONS OF AN INFLUENCER MARKETING STRATEGY
Before undertaking an influencer marketing-specific strategy, it’s important to look at the grand scheme of your social media strategy to holistically understand the layout of the landscape and where influencers fit in. As with any business program, knowing the playing field is key to knowing how to strategize and engage. It’s essential to look at this from a business perspective to understand what return you want from influencer engagement.
Social media is the new convergence of communication and information, the aftermath of which is the further democratization of communication and influence. Since influencers are dominant in social media, they hold the power to communicate and—obviously—influence on platforms. But there’s a catch: The platforms are always evolving. Your strategy has to take into consideration this constantly changing environment rather than one goal.
Resisting the evolution of social media leaves your brand stuck in the past. By promoting a hashtag or campaign or product in the same way you engaged and promoted a photo last time, you miss the opportunity to engage and capitalize on the changing audience. The old Zen koan “You can’t step in the same river twice” accepts the fluidity of the environment. The same applies here: “You can’t run the same social media campaign twice.” Engaging with influencers does, in some ways, help get around the pitfalls of a constantly changing footing.
EXPERIMENTING WITH EVOLUTION
In order to understand social media strategy and influencer plans, in general we have to understand and accept that the digital world is constantly evolving. Whatever you’re doing in marketing can be complemented by the work you do on social media and with influencers. But since social media is a constantly changing and shifting beast, engaging effectively is more than just a challenge.
The majority of Facebook users are now over thirty-five.1 The college students who it was first created for have grown up, while older age groups have taken up—some would say hijacked—the platform. It’s no longer being used how it was first intended because the user demographic has shifted so drastically. The platform has evolved and added new features to engage with this shift and address changing user needs. The average demographic of Facebook is also affected by the rise of other platforms more appealing to younger users. Teenagers have other levels of engagement now.2 They often have multiple Instagram accounts, one to tell their parents about and one for more personal use. They look in other places, especially Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Tumblr. Many teenagers might never make a Facebook account.
Every culture uses social media in a different way, which also affects how platforms develop. In Japan, I’ve found that they use Facebook much like we use LinkedIn here in the United States. After going to a business meeting I’ve often received friend requests over Facebook that same night. It can be a little unsettling to see connection in an unfamiliar way on a forum normally used for different purposes, but it can also be a way to leverage Facebook for sales and not rely just on LinkedIn. This shows how social networks morph and merge into something that they weren’t originally designed to be and don’t remain static over time.
Twitter was the result of an internal hackathon at a podcasting company and the focus on someone’s “status” or what people were doing at a given time, but it has evolved to become a network where news breaks.3 The news of the aircraft landing on the Hudson River in New York broke on Twitter.4 So did the news surrounding Whitney Houston’s death.5 Platforms will constantly evolve. Facebook was meant to be a communication tool among college students, not a forum that swayed public opinion in elections but, as evidenced by the need for CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in Congress and calls from the U.K. parliament, Facebook is much more than that now.6 Social media platforms evolve due to pressures from both users and the functionality of the network. What people want changes and how people engage changes. Your effectiveness in engagement and the effectiveness of influencers always changes, too.
Social media is one grand experiment in audience engagement, and the same is true of influencers. To take a business perspective of this changing flow relies on engaging different levels of measurement and data points. The only way we can manage social media and influencer marketing is through looking at data. We have to understand that data and investment returns are always changing. So, we adapt. There is no tried-and-tested road, no stepping back in the same social media river. Paths that you would expect results from don’t always work. Sometimes you’ll find small audiences with huge levels of engagement, or the other way around. The only way to make it work is through experimenting and maintaining a data-driven approach. Luckily, we can measure how we experiment and develop our program, working with influencers and the changing landscape to engage our intended audience with our message.
TUNG BRUSH
CAN INFLUENCER MARKETING BE USEFUL TO HIT several goals at once? How can you leverage influencers in a personal way to test which products would be well-received in your market?
Tying an influencer campaign into an early stage of a new product launch can inspire more than just sales. TUNG Brush is the highest selling tongue brush in the United States.7 When the brand was on the verge of adding a range of new colors to their catalogue, they tied the color-selection process into their influencer program in order to widen engagement. Increased presence on Instagram, sales, and color selection were all driving forces behind the campaign. This way of engagement brought results on many levels.
In order to increase their Instagram presence, TUNG Brush worked with social media consultant Kristen Matthews and identified twenty-six relevant influencers with presence on blogs and Instagram, across the United States.8 The brand aimed to engage with a group of influencers but wanted to keep the number manageable so they could have a personal relationship with each influencer. For TUNG Brush, it was important to remain on a personal level with influencers while tracking and knowing where each influencer was on the campaign cycle.
Each influencer was asked to create a blog post and an Instagram post. A key element of the campaign was further engagement on Instagram and building a folio of influencer images they could publish again at a later date. To inspire creativity, TUNG Brush offered a $250 Amazon gift card to the most creative Instagram post. The blog posts ranged from product-specific posts to more organic general posts that highlighted the tongue brush.
The influencers were each sent the ten colors of brushes being considered, along with a link for their followers to vote on the new colors to be added to the range. Each vote required submitting an email address. Voting was encouraged by entering each email address into the drawing for a $250 Amazon gift card. (Influencers were given a unique code for their posts so that TUNG Brush could identify and track the sales from each influencer.)
A large amount of content was created for republication on TUNG Brush’s own channel. The data for numbers was not available but a definite increase in sales was reported. The voting link also harvested 5,000 email addresses for the brand’s database, adding another level of ROI to the single campaign.
THE DEMING CIRCLE
Almost a decade ago, when I first began developing social media strategies for businesses, there wasn’t any framework available to create and measure the effectiveness of one’s presence in social media. I had worked in Japan for a number of years and been exposed to the teachings of Professor W. Edwards Deming at a former company.9 In Japan, Deming is considered the Godfather of Quality Control. He is still revered for his teachings in the 1950s which led to the high-quality, low-cost mass production that helped revolutionize Japan. It’s partially through his teachings that companies like Sony and Toyota were able to find success. One of his teachings involved refining processes that can be measured and running the operations through a process called the Deming circle (or Plan, Do, Check, Act [PDCA] circle). Professor Deming adapted and developed the Deming circle from the Shewhart cycle, the work of his own mentor, Walter Shewhart, in order to bring a scientific approach to experiments—but in Japan the same concept was utilized for business.
Figure 10.1 shows how the Deming circle works.
Originally, Deming developed it for quality control and for experiments in production. He was a physicist by trade and saw the potential benefits of transposing the elements of scientific experimentation to business and production. The circle encourages planning in order to understand what results are wanted before initiating the action, then followed by checking the results and refining them before acting on them and planning the next stage. The cycle continues, encouraging refinement and increased success each time. Since social media is always changing and the Deming Circle is never-ending, I’ve found that they fit together well to refine results. It’s the most appropriate and fitting process for developing social media strategies and influencer marketing programs.
Figure 10.1
Beginning to build a social media strategy or an influencer program starts in the same place—with the ending in mind. The problem for many social media strategies and influencer marketing programs is that companies don’t know how to measure their success. This is new ground and, unlike the traditional marketing landscape, the usual signifiers of a successful campaign are not the same. Often companies embark on engaging influencers in marketing or a social media program without knowing what the signs of success will be. They don’t agree on which measuring stick they will use to gauge their efforts, and this leads to constant questioning of their return on investment. If you start with a plan and outline the key performance indicators, then you know from the very start what you will measure and what results mean the work has been a success.
The old saying regarding not measuring a fish by its ability to climb a tree is important to keep in mind when approaching influencer marketing and social media marketing in general. Defining the terms of measurement is essential in understanding how the program is developing. What do you want to achieve? We outline this to start with, then work back to the start, refining the next plan. Then you can define the goals of the program. This allows you to measure and refine the path while developing and adjusting what you’re doing to ensure you find the ROI that you’re chasing.
WHERE TO START PLANNING YOUR STRATEGY
Start with the end in mind. What return do you want on the investment of time and money? Where do you have strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors, and which ones are worth developing or improving? What ground do you want to cover by engaging with influencers? To cover these questions, we have to work through several points.
Taking a step back and looking at what is happening on social media with your brand, your industry, and how your competitors measure allows you to understand weaknesses in your brand’s approach to social media.
There are a number of tools that businesses should be using to evaluate their digital and social footprint. Before the internet this information was limited and expensive, only available for certain industries in the form of market research reports. While these reports are still relevant, the internet and social media are open frontiers where you can literally spy on the activities of your competitors and easily compare yourselves to them. While you can’t glean 100 percent of the information you might like, there is an incredible amount of business intelligence that should serve as benchmarks and competitive KPIs as part of your digital and social efforts.
For instance, monitoring tools on websites like alexa.com give you a rough idea of traffic over different platforms so you can understand how you compare with your competitors. The data shows how you and your competitors fare over different points, allowing you to gain a stronger understanding of the weaknesses in your strategy. Other search engine optimization-specific tools such as SEMrush will actually show you how your search engine rankings compare with your competitors and which keywords and what content drive traffic to their sites. From a social media perspective, data that anyone can access shows the level of fan engagement on any given social network, how much you and your competitors differ on average engagement, and post frequency, along with other points. Running an assessment over recent posts to see where you rank on the social networks that are a critical part of your strategy also gives you a good perspective on how you’re faring compared to your competitors. Data points on websites also hint at the strategic importance of their blog and social media presence. Are your competitors proactive and engaging? Is there a strategy?
Other insights you can learn from your competitors’ strategies is that perhaps you see they’re posting once a day, and far more on Instagram than on Facebook. These insights help you make decisions on what steps to take, where you lead, and what you have to do if you want to challenge in certain ways. Look at the engagement rate and size of community for you and your competitors. Where is the gap? Perhaps you don’t want to engage on Instagram or want to allow influencers to do it for you. This is where influencer marketing can help you cover ground. Now you know which areas you want to strategize and prioritize, along with the areas in which you want to use an influencer strategy, paid social strategy, or engage more content marketing.
This information also allows you to refine your target audience and customer. Perhaps your main competitor is aiming at a different demographic than the one you’re targeting, and for that reason you have no interest in engaging on the platform they dominate. The more you know and the more you strategize, the more precisely you can target, and the more powerful your influencer marketing engagement can be. You need to know who your audience is and who your customer is. You need to know how they engage on social media and how they engage with you. Which channels are appropriate with your target audience? Millennials are more likely to be engaged through Instagram than Facebook. If you’re unable to translate your message to that platform, then find the influencer who can bring your message to your audience there. Gauging and understanding this requires you to listen, so you’re better positioned to broadcast your own message to your audience. To do this you need to understand the audience—who is talking, who is the trusted voice, and on what platforms.
Once you have charted the differences between your brand and your competitors’, and the ways in which you’re engaging on social media, combined with your own internal business and marketing strategies, you have enough background information to begin to define your objectives for your influencer program. Marketing objectives can be divided into two categories—increasing income and decreasing costs. Social media marketing in many ways shares these objectives. In a similar way, these objectives must be clear before implementing the strategy.
Objectives tied to increasing income directly or indirectly are predominantly: increasing brand awareness, building consumer trust and credibility, developing a larger social media community, garnering more engagement for branded content, lead generation and sales, specific product or product-related event promotion, customer retention, search engine optimization through link building, and increased web traffic to fill the funnel. When the objective lies more in decreasing costs, they usually fall into finding ways to use social media for recruiting, customer support, as well as an overall shift away from traditional marketing. Most recently, this also includes the shift of content costs toward influencers in terms of content creation outsourcing. A later section of this chapter will explore some of the more popular objectives in more depth.
A mixture of these objectives is encouraged. Influencer marketing brings a number of intangible benefits as well. These relate to a longer term view of relationship development and support, and include finding new partners, reputation management, customer satisfaction, and empowering advocates. To put things in perspective, Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2019 survey of brands engaging in influencer marketing found that most companies were prioritizing objectives around generating brand awareness, increasing sales, or content creation.10
Influencer marketing is a process. Defining the objectives early allows you to engage in the process by being able to measure exactly what you need to do for each objective, then work through the Deming circle again, adjust the plan, act accordingly, and put into action the next part of the program. When the objectives are clear, you gain a clearer picture of what is happening when you engage influencers. If you’re engaging for one reason but then measuring by another metric or data point, then you will not be able to adjust your strategy accordingly, and you might actually get negative results.
One of the beauties of influencer marketing is that the definition of its success is up to you. Unless you also define the data points of reference, then the results are meaningless. You will not be able to refine the points and then you can’t refine what it is that you’re doing.
TINY ARMIES
ENGAGING WITH INFLUENCERS WHO SPEAK THE language of your targeted demographic is essential. These influencers have successfully built their own followings on the platforms of their choice because they know how to engage with their audience on those networks. They speak that language and know how to communicate.
To launch their new game Tiny Armies, game developer PlayStack worked with GameInfluencer. They identified four German mobile game influencers to anchor their campaign.11 The campaign focused on publicizing the release of the game and encouraging downloads, utilizing the influencers’ popularity on YouTube and Twitch. More than just having the influencers show the game off, the campaign was designed around engaging the influencers’ followers in a tournament-style battle royale.
PlayStack added a feature to the game specifically for the tournament campaign to help the influencers build their teams. Each influencer founded a team inside the game and on the official game website. Users could then join a team in the game to support their favorite game streamer. The user would collect points while battling other players in the player-vs.-player mode, going toward the influencer’s overall score. Building the community was a handy side effect. Involvement and enlistment were incentivized by a series of prizes including a paid trip to Gamescom 2017.
The four influencers launched the campaign on YouTube in their own LetsPlay videos, then live streamed play on Twitch to promote their team and gather their army of users. While the tournament was underway, each influencer published several other shout outs to their communities to encourage involvement while gathering as many players as possible to build their numbers. The final day’s play was streamed live, allowing all users and an extended audience to be part of the final part of the tournament as the teams battled for victory.
The results of the campaign were overwhelmingly successful. Data showed that there were 173,530 total views resulting in 9,090 installations of the game. This returned an eCPI (effective cost per installation) of €1.66. The results also showed that the developer experienced a retention rate 14 percent higher than usual.
PLAN OBJECTIVES AND HOW TO MEASURE THEM
Each objective has a corresponding data point, a key performance indicator, or a metric to show the return on investment. These are the most common ones, or the objectives and data points that I’ve found most effective in my work. This is by no means an exhaustive list. I cannot overemphasize how important it is to be clear about your objectives and how you will measure the data. Once the program is in action, you will get data across a lot of fields. Through this you can compare how different programs work, and the effectiveness of different networks, along with a host of other data metrics. The level of data available can be confusing and overwhelming, and can distract you from your original purpose. However it is essential to stay clear and on point.
You will also have baseline metrics on each influencer and be able to measure them against each other. This can determine who you want to work with going forward and in what way. These data points also provide a baseline when you recruit a new influencer and outline your expected return on investment.
For startups and brands entering new territory, a new industry or sector, or launching a new product, Increasing Brand Awareness is often a key objective. Visibility and spread of voice or message through influencers can be an extremely effective way to work toward this. Key indicators to gauge your share of voice and content reach can be measured through social media tools, measuring activity with posts and content shares, along with hashtag engagement.
Often the objective lies in original content or brand messages with the stated aim to Amplify the Reach and Engagement of Content. This can be a single piece of content that’s shared, or something that’s blogged about, mentioned on social media, and discussed. Or it can be defined as ongoing content engagement. This can be measured through content reaction, the number of impressions or clicks, and measuring engagement through social media analytic tools.
Growing Your Social Media Community is especially important for platforms like Instagram where you cannot do a paid follow campaign. On Facebook you can do a campaign to get people to like your page but brands are more limited with Instagram. Obviously, the instant numbers that show whether your community is growing, whether you have more followers or likes, is the immediate indicator here. Taking this one step further, we can also look at comparative measurements. A truer picture will be seen when you look not only at your community but also at the comparative growth rate and engagement rate of your competitors.
Generating Website Traffic or Generating Leads and Sales is a common objective, often swinging or adapting the goals of traditional marketing. To measure the effectiveness and the ROI, and level of engagement here, we can use analytic tools to measure the level of referred traffic to your website or to your ecommerce site. There are ways to use special URLs containing UTM parameters to easily measure which influencers are generating the most clicks and traffic and analyze them in web analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Discussion by influencers on social media can be measured through each platform’s analytics to see the level of engagement. For a specific gauge on leads and sales, we can measure the effectiveness of each influencer through their codes and discounts.
If your objective is to tie your influencer strategy into your SEO efforts, there are analytics to measure the back links from a site to yours. Through social SEO, when people search for your product or a hashtag or similar, they find information about your brand, therefore you can gauge the competitiveness of your content simply by doing searches in the relevant social network and seeing how high your brand ranks.
For many brands it’s about a Shifting Budget from Traditional Marketing strategy to influencer marketing. The appropriate analytic or point of measurement here would be to look directly at the figures for return on investment. We can compare the ad spend ROI to the influencer spend to see the effectiveness. Measuring and comparing the cost per impression, the cost per click, and the cost per action is easily done using analytical tools, some of which are covered in chapter 13 (the tools chapter) later in this book.
MOCKBERG
HOW DO YOU CONVERT A STRONG FOLLOWING into spending customers? Once you’ve built a following, perhaps even through influencer campaigns, turning that social media presence into sales often presents a hurdle. Swedish watch brand Mockberg redesigned the buyer’s journey, converting followers into sales while broadening their social media reach using only Instagram.
Mockberg realized they were reaching 60,000 followers on Instagram but while their followers had grown, sales hadn’t experienced the same upward swing. Working with the Relatable agency, Mockberg recognized that lead generation is driven by a strong incentive—an irresistible, attention-catching hook of an offer. At this point, Mockberg was past the awareness stage of the traditional buyer’s journey. Anchoring the campaign to Mockberg’s 60,000 followers, they established a giveaway offer.12
After becoming aware of your brand, and by following you, users are certainly aware of what you do, but they need a reason to act and buy your product—identified by Relatable and Mockberg as an irresistible offer with real scarcity and urgency, followed by a clear call to action. In this case, Mockberg offered vouchers of €60, having users share their email addresses and tag a friend for a chance to win one of the sixty vouchers. Mockberg was able to capture the emails in the comments, saving the new emails in real time and making a personalized offer to each lead. This expanded the way Mockberg could reach their fans by creating a new platform for contact, and another way to turn them into customers.
Within a week Mockberg generated 326 new leads backed with data that showed that 30 percent of users who interacted with the post participated in the campaign. The post in the campaign generated $7,406 in revenue and 1,117 interactions.
On top of using their own Instagram to reach out, Mockberg enlisted the help of influencers. Working with an agency, Mockberg identified a small but highly relevant group of fashion influencers, focusing on their level of reach and engagement. Seven influencers were brought on board as brand ambassadors, expanding the reach of the campaign to more than a million further Instagram users. At the end of the campaign Mockberg had reached 1,010,078 followers by collaborating with the seven fashion influencers who each posted the link once. The seven posts received 23,452 likes, comments, and mentions in total, generating 1,363 new leads. The campaign generated $13,061 in revenue. This new channel projected $100,000 in extra revenue over the next year.
STRATEGIZING THROUGH EXCLUSION
One of the key elements of strategy that is so often overlooked is deciding what not to do. You don’t have to be everywhere. Social media is so broad now that it’s practically impossible to be everywhere. And trying to do so actually hurts your efforts. Engaging on Snapchat or Twitch when you’re a B2B office equipment firm takes away from your key message and misses the demographic completely. If you have a profile on a medium that you don’t use or don’t know how to engage with effectively, then it’s detrimental to your overall strategy. When people search for your brand you don’t want them to find a dormant account with few followers. Every interaction with your brand is an opportunity to add to your image or lose prestige. Deciding what not to engage in and what to not do is as important a decision as what you will do. It will help you refine strategy and decide how to build on your strengths.
This is also where influencers can do the work for you and cover ground that you can’t reach or with which you are unfamiliar. Perhaps you don’t know how to best communicate through YouTube, or you have difficulty communicating visually through Instagram. Engaging with influencers who know how to communicate through these platforms benefits your brand and message more than running blindly into the fray. Integrating influencers into your entire social media program to help your weaker parts is part of a coherent strategy. Engaging and developing your social media and influencer strategy does not mean that you have to do everything. It’s about choosing and prioritizing what is important, then using this information to strategize.
SALVATION ARMY
NONPROFITS CAN ALSO BENEFIT FROM THE tools influencers bring to the table to spread their message and create awareness.
The Salvation Army engaged an agency to work with influencers during a recent Red Kettle season campaign. The program utilized several influencers, harnessing them as brand ambassadors, involving them in fundraising efforts, and leveraging the influencers’ social media followings for further recognition and publicity. However, it was the results from influencer Chris Strub that stood out the most.
The #FightForGoodTour put Chris on the road for over a month.13 He traveled through twenty-five of the eastern United States, interacting with the local community, helping out at Salvation Army–operated charities and collecting money, while documenting the experience. Chris was one of a handful of influencers who worked with the Salvation Army during these weeks to raise awareness of the charity’s efforts leading up to Christmas. The influencers used their network to spread the news and information about what was happening and the multifaceted approach of the Salvation Army.
Chris posted all the content about his travels on various social media accounts. He created videos and shared the experience of meeting those who benefit from the Salvation Army’s work. The Salvation Army allowed Chris to document his travels however he wanted, allowing his organic voice to spread the message. These included Instagram story takeovers, Facebook Live events, and videos on his own personal channels with the appropriate hashtags.
Across Facebook and YouTube, the video series was viewed a total of 14,200 times, The Instagram Stories received 24,276 impressions, while the Instagram grid received 39,605 impressions. Based on average views, the campaign brought around 25,000 Snapchat impressions. Over the course of the campaign, Chris’s 1,676 Tweets had a total of 885,245 impressions and 16,378 engagements, including 1,566 retweets. When looking at the entire Salvation Army Red Kettle season period at the end of December, the total tweet impressions for @ChrisStrub exceeded 1 million. The campaign to raise awareness, along with the fundraising drive, was considered a success.