e-journal #3 Influencer Marketing

For this week, we were delighted to welcome Ashley Walsh, Account Director at North Strategic, to discuss influencer marketing. It is not news that influencers are being used in marketing initiatives. Ashley has over one decade of expertise in social and digital media. She has been with North Strategic, Publicis Groupe as a social media and influencer leader for clients such as American Express, Sobeys, and Samsung.

What is Influencer Marketing? 

With the advent of social media stars, influencer marketing has boomed in recent years. This form of marketing is far more effective than it appears, which is why an influencer marketing approach is required. Influencer marketing is a business approach that involves collaborating with prominent social media users or bloggers to promote their products and services (Baker, 2022). Influencers typically have a huge, engaged following through which businesses may gain credibility and potentially drive sales (McGinley, 2022) Unlike celebrities, influencers might be found anywhere and might be anybody. Some may have hundreds of thousands of followers or may only have 10,000 followers, or even fewer in some circumstances. Nonetheless, they have earned a reputation as specialists in their industry. They create interesting social postings on their particular themes, depending on their field of expertise, by posting beautiful photos, creating amusing movies, and interacting with their audience or followers. 

What Are the 4 Types of Influencers? How to identify the RIGHT Influencer?

There are various kinds of influencers, and they are classified into four groups based on their audience size, measurements of impact, commercial objectives, and budget. Ashley's presentation included and shared the below graph about influencer types and characteristics with us.

Source: Ashley's presentation

As an agency, most important task is to identify the suitable influencer for the client. How an agency to make sure the chosen influencer can help the brand to achieve the marketing goals in an effective way? When we asked about how to identify the right influencer to marketing campaign, Ashley shared there’s mainly 3 steps. 

1. Define and determine the campaign/ brand criteria 

What is the purpose of the campaign? What is the expectation to the influencer?

Examples: Reach, Location, Demographics, content category, creative capabilities, social media platform and the desired action

2. Identify influencer partners

Is the influencer aligning with the brand’s value?

Look into influencers in terms of their content and insights to make sure they are aligning with the brand’s value and no potential risks. In this stage, identification tools can be used to discover new partners.

3. Validate following and engagement

As there’s influencer fraud issue in the industry such as fake followers and hiring click, company should validate the engagement rates as a brand safety measurement. Validation tools such as Fake Check , Social Blade, and Phalanx can be used in the stage. 

Apart from the above steps, sometimes the client may have additional requirements to the chosen influencer such as enough Canadian audience, not working with their competitors at least for past 30 days, content standard, relationship disclosure, etc.  The partner criteria will be determined by the campaign objectives and brand goals.

Trends in Influencer Marketing 

1. Rise of Creator-Led Short Form Video Content 

As audiences increasingly look to TikTok, Reels, and live videos to be amused, find items, and even discover about fascinating new businesses, social media platforms are bringing video content front and center on their feeds. Short-form video content is a mature approach for companies to raise brand recognition, gain new consumers organically, and achieve great ROIs from ad campaigns. Although Instagram is still the most popular platform for influencer relationships and where the most marketing campaigns focus on, there is a growing demand for TikTok and YouTube creator-led short form content. TikTok has become the most popular website, allowing companies to utilize relationships with creators to reach a largely Gen Z / millennial population. 

More details about the short-form videos trend can be found at: Hubspot

2. “No Edit Edit” Aesthetic 

Content on social media has shifted from the polished materials and well-manicured Instagram Posts to more real-time clips or photos by hosting livestream or posting on Instagram Stories. This new content style is believed to be more interesting and realistic way to interact with audience and spread the brand message. 

3. AI / Virtual Influencers

Moe brands are going to develop their marketing strategy with the AI technology while virtual influencer is one of the ideas which has potential to grow and become dominant in social media marketing. With this new trend, the brand can have higher control on it and more flexible to design their marketing plan and activities. Meta is one of the great examples recently. 

More trends in influencer marketing can be found here

Takeaways from Case study – Marketing activity for a beauty brand 

Every group has come up various ideas on how to promote the products and the brand via social media with different types of content. We were also asked about the suggestion way to amplify the content. As we just brainstormed the creative ideas, Ashley reminded us that budget is also a key consideration though it was not provided in the case study. Although it was just a case study, we had to brainstorm in a realistic way (e.g. How to do it?) and be aware of different brand considerations. This case study provided us the realistic practice which is beneficial for job search while some of us may not have actual working experience in this area. 

Despite the fact that influencers play important roles in marketing initiatives, marketers are nonetheless extremely busy. Marketers must link creative initiatives with quantifiable business objectives in order to define strategy direction and supporting techniques. With this new trend, marketers are required to track and measure campaigns to develop benchmarks based on creator impact level, channels, and so on. It also indicates that what we, marketer-to-be, can prepare for this new duty in marketing industry.