An online course in growth marketing [part 12] ‘Review’
By: Bahaaldin Alhassan
Tags: Cxl Minidegree, Cxl Institute, Cxl, Influencer Marketing

Photo by Diggity Marketing on Unsplash

The science of influence is a relatively complicated and comprehensive topic, to be honest. So much like anything in human psychology, it really depends on the culture, it really depends on the person and kind of the circumstances. However, there’s a couple of sources of inspiration that have told us some pretty interesting things. One of them is sales and then another one is UX teams. Teams that are researching user experience, design. When we think about influence, it’s really made up of a couple of different points. Number one, it’s about being consistent. It’s about being consistent with your message and telling very often the same story repeatedly, or at least with slightly different flavors. Number two, it’s about having social proof. We did a fun little poll just not too long ago asking how much do you think social media influencers engagement about looks versus content can see a lot of the people, unfortunately, think that it’s really about the looks. I think we’re going through some sort of normalization in the industry and authenticity and content quality and entertainment value will supersede looks by far. It’s the same that is happening, TV, and in any other broadcast industry, and we were kind of just lost with Instagram for a while, and I think that is about to change. Social proof, very important though, that people think that that person has credibility. Important to mention that. Number three, liking. Think about the Hollywood artists that you know that is not necessarily picture perfect. No offense, Will Ferrell, for example, a fantastic actor, so many good movies. Whoopi Goldberg, many others. I will not name further names, but you can think of it in this way. What is more entertaining to you as a person? Is it someone that looks just phenomenally well or is really likable? I think pretty much everybody will choose the latter. Number four, authority. When you think about authority, in social especially, with someone like Unbox Therapy or MKBHD, they’ve clearly built their domain and consumer tag. With every review and review, their authority is growing, and definitely, a lot more people are getting exposed to their content, but you can clearly see that they know their field from inside and out. Number five, I think this is important, kindness. So I’ve seen that also from various research pieces that if leaders are kind, and they are perceived kindly, it doesn’t mean that they have to be pushovers, but being kind doesn’t mean that. Think about Donald Trump versus Barack Obama. Think about the appeal that they have globally. There’s no doubt Trump has a lot of appeal to some audiences in the US, but it’s not even comparable to the name and kind of the reputation that Obama had globally. Now, commonly in sales, you’d also look at scarcity theory. I don’t think that’s really that important in society. At this moment in time, we’re kind of bombarded with all sorts of messages.However, number six, what I think is maybe the most important out of all these five points that kind of makeup influence and is backed also by science is entertainment value. This is fairly new, and I haven’t seen a lot of research around this but it’s pretty clear that there’s a big difference between the influencers and the creators that are thought of that have come up with their own style and are very entertaining before the screen, and they make a big difference in terms of the audiences they also attract. A few years ago, Unbox Therapy and YouTube had around 2.5 million subscribers. Today it’s 12 million, so Lou has effectively added10 million subs over the past three years. How can that be done? So let’s have a look at both of these videos, one from three years ago and one that is more recent. Open your eyes, Lou.It’s time for another video. What’s up guys, Lou here back with another video. And as you can tell, I’ve got a few items today.It’s not just one. This is a big chunk of the. (suspenseful music)(raspily exhaling)Well you know I had to do it, right? I mean it’s part of the job. New iPhones.You need me to check ’em out because I tell it like it is. No special privilege. These came from the store. Money bought these things right here. Tim Cook, he never came around.The tweets went out.The retweets went out from you guys. He never came around. No special treatment for Unbox Therapy here on YouTube. So what did you notice?There’s a bunch of things going on. I mean, the quality, the technical aspects, etc.But one thing that is clearly standing out is the entertainment value. Look at just how engaging he is. Look at how opinionated he is.Look at the tonality.Look at the pausing.It’s all the stuff that we, I think everybody will enjoy watching videos, and he clearly has that, and that’s the type of content, even if you’re not into unboxing, you’re going to want to share with your friends. That’s what a lot of influence is about. • Who are influencers? • All right, so let’s talk a little bit about who are these people that we call creators or influencers? They’re very often in different types of groups.We have grouped them into types A, B, C, D, and E.You kind of get the idea.It’s based on the number of followers.The main reason why we categorize influencers not just to label them, but it’s actually for benchmarking reasons, especially it gives us a good idea how market to market differences span out. For example, one of the fastest-growing influencers in Malaysia, Jenn Chia, we absolutely adore her.She’s very authentic, very good at kind of multiple different things, and what’s really astonishing is, to be honest, her ability to pick up briefs and brands and kind of make that look really engaging. That is one of the hardest things for influencers to pull off. And we can see her being a good example of what I believe influencer marketing should be all about. Someone that has found their voice online, and there’s a lot of people that are following and can agree with me for sure, but also she has figured out how to be creative with commercial partnerships. So very impressive. Her engagement rate is 7.66on average, which is very impressive. Globally on Instagram, we’re looking at 1.66 as an average, so that’s well beyond any sort of average. Another example, Peter McKinney, Canada, YouTube, and he had only one K subs in late 2016 and now it’s 2.5 million.The thing that he’s really pulled off wellies how-to videos and tutorials, clearly something that photographers are very interested in all the time. Kind of making sure that they know the best tricks and knowledge when it comes to making their pictures aesthetically pleasing or working with a client.There’re two things that I think combine them. Kind of jumping into the previous topic that we had about the science of influence, one thing that you probably notice is the content quality is something that it just takes time to get right. Jenn and Peter have definitely nailed that, and you can clearly see that.The other side of it is humor. Not taking yourself too seriously or not taking, I guess life too seriously. So you can see that definitely shining through. Another fun fact here is the Global Web Index, in its latest report, has mentioned that actually it’s recently changed, the way how we look at social, whereas in the beginning, it used to be about connecting with friends and family. Then today it is much more about entertainment. So there you have it. These are influencers. Let’s get going. • Influencers challenges • Unfortunately, being an influencer is not always rainbows and unicorns. Here are the top five frustrations influencers faced when they collaborated with brands. Number one, creative freedom. Only 1/3 of them are apparently asked for their opinion on the content direction. Number two, late payments. Number three, short deadlines.Number four, last-minute changes in campaign requirements. And number five, brands who don’t have a clear brief. Now, it’s important to mention that by some accounts over 80% of the influencers’ income comes from branded partnerships. This means that AdSense or any other income streams they have is probably contributing a much lesser percentage and is not that important.It’s important to keep these challenges in mind, not to be the brand that, first of all, is frustrating to work with, but also clearly contributes to people’s problems rather than helping them. To build a long-term relationship, these challenges are important to think about. • When not to use influencer marketing? • Before we get any further with our programming, let’s talk a little bit about when it is not a good idea to do influencer marketing. Number one, what is really our marketing objective? If it’s reaching awareness, I might argue that it’s not a great idea to rely on influencer marketing. And here’s the thing, so my daily job includes looking at campaigns and their effectiveness, whether it’s been integrated, social only, digital, what have you. Now, chances are that if you’re going to add up all the costs that go into influencer marketing, the agencies, the perks, the travel, everything, and you compare that with paid social, which yes, is not exactly one-to-one, then still chances are that you’re going to have a much, much higher CPM rate when you calculate influencer marketing versus paid social. Now, there are some exceptions. If your audience is very small and you are perhaps in the B2B space or your target audience generally is very smaller within a certain area, then this might not hold, but what I’m talking about generally applies to consumer-led brands where you need a substantial amount of reach to actually have any kind of bottom-line effect.The second important thing is that the synergy between the influencer and the brand is really something that you can plan for, but things can happen along the way that you couldn’t even foresee. Here is, for example, one of the top influencers who has close to 30 million followers on Instagram in Indonesia, and you can see there for example the partnership that she’s had with a watch company, a good watch store, has a drop of 71%in the engagement rate when you compare to her general engagement rate. So the branded messages that she’s putting out, and by the way, this is not an isolated case, are tiny in terms of engagement than the general ones.She’s clearly not that great at working with other brands and tying that sort of commercial relationship in a seamless experience for the audience that is following her.My advice is definitely to focus on influencers on telling an authentic story through them, and focus on engagement, focus on advocacy, focus on something that generates user-generated content. And then you use that influencer, that content to amplify that through other channels and utilize that in TV, out of home, display, what have you. Number two, what is the value of your message? A lot of the marketers are kind of stuck with trying to figure out, how do we now make it sexy that we have a new bottle for the wonderful drink that we’re selling? Now, chances are that if you’re not Coke, then that bottle might not be that interesting to advertise, to begin with or, to market, to begin with.It’s very important to always, as a marketer, to take a step back and think about, what are actually those moments in the business that is so unique and so valuable to the users that really would have a compelling story in marketing?So that’s very important. Nike, for example, sells 25 pairs of shoes every single second. Not every type of shoe obviously becomes part of marketing. For example, have you ever heard of the Nike Aqua Socks 360? Well, me neither. Probably nobody has, or very few people have, and definitely not through marketing. So pick your battles. Number three, how much creative freedom can I really give as a marketer? That’s important. As we previously mentioned about the top frustrations of influencers, try not to be the brand that just contributes to the same problem. Remember, influencers are big because they’ve actually figured out something that the audience likes. They’ve actually already figured a stickiness aspect that audiences tend to value. So it’s very important to embrace that. If you can’t give a lot of freedom or a significant amount of freedom to the influencers, then maybe influencer marketing is not for you. And it’s also a lot easier just to do display or search or Facebook. Consider all these aspects and think about whether it’s really a good idea to do influencer marketing if your barriers are not high or your message is not that great, or you don’t have enough freedom to give. Or you really need a lot of reaches. Think about those aspects.There’re ways around that, and let’s continue in the chapter by wrapping it up with what we learned. • Recap • Let’s do a quick recap of what we talked about in chapter one, and by the way, a head’s up that in chapter two we’ll be talking about planning. So exciting things to come. So chapter one, what did we learn? 76% of marketers say that they have difficulties measuring their ROI after campaigns, yet some others say that they have 11 times the ROI.There’s really a lot of value.It really depends on how you use the channel and the media.The fundamentals in marketing are still the same, good news. Drive demand, build a brand distinction and tell a story.The very simplified ways, obviously. That is what you’re supposed to do.1/3 of the influencers are not being asked of their opinion of content direction. Try not to be that brand.55% of the brands admit that by the time they engage the influencers, the campaign direction is already long set. Influencer marketing is a $5 to $10 billion industry by the year 2020, wonderful. Social is still comparatively affordable versus other channels, important to mention, remember that. Influence in itself is really about consistency.It’s about social proof.It’s about liking authority.It’s about kindness, and it’s about entertainment value. People used to use social media primarily for connecting with others. Now it’s a lot more about entertainment. Try to avoid common complaints of influencers that we just talked about, and don’t rely on influencer marketing to reach alone.There are definitely risks related to that. And lastly, don’t market with influencers if you don’t have a relevant message. Thank you so much for this chapter.There are a couple more resources for you to go through. Some great books and otherwise.