This document discusses influencer marketing strategies. It defines influencer marketing as marketing brands through individuals who influence purchasing decisions. It notes that celebrities and bloggers are most used due to their reach and audience authenticity. The document outlines different types of influencers from celebrities to word-of-mouth influencers. It stresses the importance of shareable, engaging content and having influencers, brands, and agencies collaborate on campaign strategies.
2. Table of Contents
• What is influencer marketing?
• Influencer Marketing in SA
• The Role Of Influencers
• Types of Influencers
• Influencer Strategy/How to work with Influencers
• How does it benefit Brands?
• Examples of good vs bad influencer campaigns
• Leading Brand in Influencer Marketing
3. • Involves marketing brands through individuals who have an influence over other
people’s purchasing decisions.
• Celebrities and bloggers are the most used form of influencer.
• Celebrities because of their vast reach
• And bloggers because their audience is believe in the bloggers authenticity.
• It is the modern day word of mouth on digital.
Influencer Marketing
4. Shareable Content
• Shareability is the holy grail of good content, as
this means that consumers are willing to put
branded content on to their own personal
social feed. They have now become an
advocate.
The Role of Influencers
5. Interactive/Engaging Content
• How interactive/engaging is their content?
When consumers comment/like/amplify
content it increases the brands SOV.
• The content has caused a reaction from the
consumer.
The Role of Influencers
6. • Celebrities would be considered Tier 1
influencer. Their reach is the highest but it
means their engagement usually isn’t great.
• Bloggers/Social Influencers would be Tier 2.
Their reach is slightly lower but their
engagement is greater than celebrities.
• Word of mouth influencers are Tier 3. They
don’t operate on social but on the ground. Their
objective is heavily focused on sales and
conversion.
Types of Influencers
Celebrities
Bloggers/Social
Influencers
Word of Mouth
Influencers
8. • There are 3 crucial parts to formulating an
influencer lead campaign strategy.
• The agency team, the brand team and the
influencer/s.
• In most cases this process excludes the
influencer and only involves them at the
execution phase of the project.
• This causes mixed brand messages,
confusion around strategy and an overall
disjointed campaign
Influencer Strategy
Brand Team
Agency TeamInfluencer/s
Brand Campaign
Strategy
9. How To Work With Influencers
Communication
ConsistencyCollaboration
10. How Does It Benefit Brands?
Branded content vs Influencer content
What I aim to get out of this presentation is to give everyone a slightly better understanding of the influencer content field. What its about, what works and what doesn’t work and hopefully if we as an agency move into this space we can justify to our clients why it works and how it works for them.
Seems boring right? What I will share with you is a fresh outtake on this highly debated topic within the industry. To start off raise your hand if a person has directly influenced you to purchase a product or pay for a service. And those that have their hands raised I want to know who it was and how they influenced you.
Influencer marketing blew up around 2014 with mainly fashion bloggers and has now progressed to all different industries. Measuring influence is the biggest conundrum at the moment. It’s tangible in terms of calculating mentions and retweets, however what does that mean for brands? There is quite a bit of pressure on agencies to effect sales for their brands, however sales should never be a primary objective for digital. Digital objectives must be marked against digital ROI and not any other ROI.
This is one of the contentious topics of influencer marketing. What is their role? Remember they need to be advocates of your brand and project a good understanding of the brand and the campaign for it to be effective. Most importantly there HAS to be a brand fit with an influencer. If they don’t already talk about your brand and/or consume your brand, consumers see through that and you lose your credibility and authenticity which is of utmost importance. Also all content has to be in their own language on their preferred platforms.
Its important to tier influencers based on budget, based on objectives. The best campaigns have a bit of each so that you hit BTL and TTL at the same time and the conversation pushes against each other to cause a bubble of talkability.
Influencer marketing in SA has grown exponenetially over the last 3/4 years. With brands increasing their spend on IM as a marketing tool. However SA is far behind the global lead in terms of the use of IM as well as the execution of IM campaigns. In SA brands are still unsure of how to successfully execute an IM campaign and to achieve positive results. Later on I’ll be highlighting a few campaigns and showing the differences between a good campaign and a not so good campaign.
When developing influencer strategy it is important for all role players to collaborate from the beginning of the process. More often than not influencers are brought into the dynamic well after strategy has been completely signed off and they have to work within those parameters and are not given an opportunity to share their opinion. Influencers are not just meant to execute. They’re meant to be part of the strategic process. This helps a great deal in a streamlined and cohesive campaign.
The 3 C’s. Communication is vital. In all the work I’ve done with influencers all they really want is for you to be clear and transparent with them about what they are expected to do and what the objectives are. ALL THE TIME. It puts them at ease. Consistency. Be consistent with them. If you start a particular working process with them then stick to it as it leaves less room for mistakes and poor execution. Collaboration. Influencers have normal jobs or at least had normal jobs, most of them in adverting or creative arts, some are designers, strategists, SMM, brand managers etc so they have a lot to contribute to a campaign so utilise that and involve them in as much as humanely possible.
Branded content within the social media space doesn’t do as well unless you have big budget for a huge campaign. Influencer content is more authentic and tends to resonate better with consumers. As much as brands try to be more human in the digital space, consumers still view brands for what they are and as soon as they see a marketing campaign coming from a brand they are turned off somewhat. Ideally for a successful campaign you would have a combination of branded content and influencer content. Brands have to create awareness and influencers have to create talkability and when these work together at the same time the outcomes are better.
Quite often from the outside looking in we struggle to evaluate the objective of a campaign. Carvelas is a popular shoe make, generally worn by izikhotane from Soweto. The brand commissioned middle-upper class black influencers to post visuals of them wearing the shoes with the hashtag #LoveMyCarvelas. The issue here is how disingenious the campaign seems as the brand TM and positioning does not relate to those of the influencers they worked with. The people they worked with would never under normal circumstances be interested in Carvela’s. This shows how important it is to have a brand and influencer fit. Otherwise the message is lost and even worse taken in a negative light.
The BF round table was part of the #SheRocks campaign and created a video series with influencers meant to be discussing women empowerment and celebrating SA women. It was commissioned as a 4 part series during Womens’ Month. The campaign received the most backlash I’ve ever seen for a influencer campaign and rightly so. The content re-enforced patriarchal and misogynistic norms. With the entire first episode being a discussion about men. The fail here was that the brand didn’t do their research on the influencers and didn’t plan properly. All the panellist had the same backwards views. There was no differing opinion or perspective and left the consumers’ view feeling extremely under-represented. The key is to know who you collaborating with, know your audience and plan and execute accordingly.
This is a campaign I managed over a year ago. In the wake of the backlash H&M received for the lack of representation with their models, we were tasked with trying to change the narrative but in as natural a way as possible. They were launching a new line and wanted to use models more representative of SA. We got Aisha Baker and Siya Beyile, who are well versed in the world of fashion and are two people who are very passionate about representation in the fashion industry. We briefed them to interpret the new line in their own unique way and provided them with creative license and complete carte blanche over the content they produced and how they produced it. If you’ve noticed, nobody talks about ‘that’ incident anymore. Play Aisha video
One brand that not only understands the power of influencer marketing but has become somewhat of a pioneer of it is Adidas. The German multinational giant has not only introduced collaborations and unparalleled campaigns with unconventional artists alike, but is unequivocally disrupting influencer marketing as we’ve come to know it. Adidas has meticulously placed itself at the forefront of influencer marketing and has cultivated benchmark status by forming a unique and forward-thinking approach. Their USP is collaborating creative influencers from different vocations in different countries to produce a story with powerful visuals and an unorthodox aesthetic which resonates strongly with their target audience
This is one of the contentious topics of influencer marketing. What is their role? Remember they need to be advocates of your brand and project a good understanding of the brand and the campaign for it to be effective. Most importantly there HAS to be a brand fit with an influencer. If they don’t already talk about your brand and/or consume your brand, consumers see through that and you lose your credibility and authenticity which is of utmost importance. Also all content has to be in their own language on their preferred platforms.