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Here’s Why You’re About to See a Lot More “Micro-Influencers” on Instagram

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Sourced from HIGHSNOBIETY

Influencer marketing on Instagram is now a billion dollar industry.

With more than 700 million people scrolling through their feed each month, prices have been hitting serious highs. According to Forbes, an account with over a million followers can earn upwards of $50k for a single sponsored post. When Buzzfeed analyzed sponsored content by the top 50 celebrities on Instagram, they found that nearly half were part of long-term brand collaborations, which can earn celebrities millions over the campaign’s lifetime.

Marketers have noticed that once an account is over a certain size, however, fewer people bother to engage. The ratio of likes and comments to followers peaks when an account has around 1,000 followers. Get more than 100,000 followers, and engagement starts to flatten out; users just aren’t as keen to interact with a celebrity as with someone they can relate to more closely.

 

@ jordanvickors

Enter the micro-influencer: accounts with followers in the tens rather than hundreds of thousands, and usually working a particular niche. These users are reckoned to represent a more authentic and creative voice than famous influencers, and an ever-expanding set of agencies, tools and services is appearing to help them and brands get the most benefit out of each other.

Takumi, an app which matches brands with users, is vying to become a leader in the field. Co-Founder and CEO Mats Stigzelius says: “Influencer marketing is still in its early stages but will grow into a major marketing channel over the next five years. Brands are increasingly leveraging social media influencers to reach their ideal consumers more organically.”

Takumi’s founders say they wanted to replicate sharing-economy companies Uber and Airbnb. “We thought this is just obviously the way to do influencer marketing. Through real people and an efficient marketplace.”

 

@mathbern

Takumi joins agencies like Dovetale and Fohr Card which use differing degrees of automation to match and manage influencer campaigns. Other apps, such as Liketoknow.it, pay influencers based on the amount of interest they generate for the products they feature.

The bar to entry can be surprisingly low. Spread It, a Hong Kong-based start-up which offers micro-influencers in-kind rewards rather than hard cash, invites sign-ups from users who get an average of just 50 likes per post.

Previously, the route to monetizing even a large follower base was far less clear. Either businesses had to reach out to potential influencers or Instagrammers had to pitch their promotional services to brands on a case-by-case basis. Not everyone who’s good at taking photos can also sell advertising; successful marketing departments are rarely a one-person show.

 

@ciesay

Dan Chizzoniti, a menswear and fitness influencer from New York who also works for an influencer marketing agency, says these services make the experience more streamlined. “From a blogger standpoint I just have to sign up and they send me things that would work for me. They do all the heavy lifting that I would be spending hours and hours trying to do. I don’t have to worry about sifting through Instagram; I can focus on strategy and doing more for my brand.”

After years of building a following on different platforms, Dan says he earns “a few thousand dollars” a month for 10 to 15 hours spent on his Instagram each week.

As Mashable recently reported, it is still surprisingly easy to game the system using bots, fake followers and stock photos. But the industry is finding ways to weed out the scammers to satisfy their clients’ demands for authentic engagement. “A lot of these influencers don’t know that it’s coming, but brands are getting smarter and getting new tools to show who has fake followers,” says Dan.

 

@bellahadid

Brands are also paying more attention to the strengths and weaknesses of each influencer, and spreading their budget across different accounts – especially important on a platform where the average user misses an estimated 70% of the posts in their feed.

All of which means that as influencer marketing professionalises and grows, you’re going to see much more #spon and #ad on your feed. The number of brand-sponsored posts – and the amount of money spent on them – is projected to double in the next two years.

 

@tom.emmerson

Yet, not everyone is comfortable with leveraging their account to sling merch. “I’ve been offered to promote products, but it wasn’t worth the money to upload some ridiculous mirror selfie in a piece of clothing that I’d never wear,” says Mathilda, 26, a former fashion model turned photographer from Sweden with a sizable Instagram following. “It’s already hard enough to be taken seriously as a young female.”

As more start-ups and agencies enter the game, it’s reasonable to expect a lot of the cash, and recognition, to flow to influencers who are most comfortable with corporate advertising. That might be great for them, but not so great for the creativity which made the platform so appealing to brands in the first place.

Sourced from HIGHSNOBIETY

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Cheatsheet: How brands can work with influencers

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By Shareen Pathak.

As influencer marketing has grown, it’s gone way beyond a one-note business transaction between advertisers and a so-called social star. Between agents, platforms and the rise of self-serve, how brands work with influencers has turned into a complex undertaking. Here, we break down all the ways they do it.

Business models

  • Spray and pray: Brands ship product to a star and hope the influencer creates content. This runs the risk of being mocked in the influencer community for that approach, according to Collectively co-founder Alexa Tonner.
  • Production: Marketers approach social stars with detailed requests for creative that include storyboards. Influencers will then fulfill the request and post the content — videos, storytelling or pictures — on their own blogs or social channels.
  • Agency: Marketers come to influencers with RFPs and then let the influencers plan and execute entire campaigns. The campaigns can then be fulfilled via the influencer’s own network or also appear in advertising by the brand.
  • Publisher: A growing number of self-serve tools has meant advertisers can create a list of influencers they want to work with, then send the influencers in-house creative. The influencers will post it on their own social platforms, essentially forming a bond resembling a media relationship. Essentially, influencers become mini media companies. A brand that uses an influencer in this capacity wants to distribute a brand message or raise awareness through an influencer with multiple channels, a high number of followers and strong engagement.
  • Branded content: Media companies such as Hearst Magazines Digital Media will use influencers in branded content to give the posts extra oomph. For example, a story about a bag line could feature influencers styling the bags rather than a model posing with the bags. That gives the influencers more creative freedom and gets the content more reach.
  • Brand ambassador programs: These are more popular with influencers, as they guarantee a revenue stream. A brand will sign someone up for a longer time period, booking them, for example, across prom season, back to school and the summer. For brands, these can be a cheaper get: If you booked an influencer who had 150,000 followers in January but grew her following fivefold during the year, you’re still locked in at the cheaper price.
  • Events: Influencers can show up to launches to take a photo or two and share them with their followers.
  • Product lines: Possibly the most difficult model, brands can work to create co-branded products with influencers — tapping into the “creator” aspect to work on the product and packaging.

How brands find influencers

  • In-house talent team: Major brands like L’Oréal run in-house talent teams that scour the social web to find new stars.
  • Tools: An increasing number of brands are working with tech companies to create large-scale whitelists of approved influencers who can then be tapped programmatically or manually for campaigns on an ongoing basis.

How influencers get paid

  • Commission: Akin to affiliate models, influencers get a cut every time a promo code is used to purchase whatever they’re selling.
  • Upfront fee: Reserved for more top-tier influencers, fees are paid upfront, followed by a rolling commission-based model.
  • Gift card: Influencers — particularly smaller ones — will render services for a brand gift card.
  • Per click: Used particularly by YouTube influencers, this compensates influencers every time people click on product links in their bios or in videos.
  • Cost per engagement: Brands can measure engagement metrics, then apply them as an attribute against different platforms so influencers get paid per engagement (like or comment) they receive.
  • Invitations: Influencers receive party invites for exclusive events where it’s normally difficult to get in. In exchange, they cover the event.

The numbers

  • Upfront fees can range from a basic $1,000 per 100,000 followers on Facebook or Instagram to a flat fee per photo of up to $200,000 for celebrity influencers.
  • Appearance fees start at about $30,000.
  • Commissions are usually 25 percent of the sale.

The top-tier influencer view
“One of the things I always ask when a brand reaches out to me to work together on social is what is their objective and what they want to achieve,” said Will Taylor, the influencer behind lifestyle blog Bright Bazaar. “One thing that I always say is, you get the best results working with influencers when you don’t plug influencers in at the last minute. You work with them throughout.”

The agency buyer view
“How an influencer is compensated can vary from campaign to campaign and brand to brand, even within specific verticals,” said Corey Martin, 360i head of influencer marketing. “Outside of simple dollars, it is important to have a good sense of your brand’s cultural cachet and inherent worth to help set pricing or when determining what the ultimate value exchange should be.”

The publisher view
“The influencers who rise to the top not only have a high number of followers, but also have great conversion rates,” said Brittany Hennessy, director of influencer talent for Hearst Magazines Digital Media’s branded content studio. “They’re moving products for brands, and because they’re able to make that happen, these brands want to collaborate with them on product lines. So many of these creators want to be designers or to have their own range of products, so this is a natural evolution for influencer marketing at the highest level.”

The influencer platform view
“The influencer space needs to continue to move toward a true dialogue between brand and influencer. Right now, it’s very much one direction: Brand talks to influencer, influencer talks to audience,” said Tonner. “I’d like to see those lines blur a little bit more: Influencers and their audiences should help inform brands on the market and trends. In the spirit of this dialogue, we’ve started to host influencer roundtables and conversations with our clients, and they’ve been incredibly enlightening.”

By Shareen Pathak

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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Has Influencer Marketing Effectively Become Clickbait?

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By .

Brands using influencer marketing for content likely had the best of intentions when they began.

But like much of the internet, things went south. Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s altruistic goal to create a more open and connected world with Facebook. Today, Facebook now has to hire thousands of screeners to monitor its Live product — weeding out low-quality clickbait articles, fake news, and worthless, sometimes extremely heinous video content.

The same thing happened to Twitter. As a result of an ongoing assault of abusive, bullying and harassing tweets, Twitter too is on a hiring spree, onboarding hundreds of engineers to help them automate the identification and removal of low-quality or abusive content.

Like much of the internet and our social media news feeds, influencer marketing started off with the best intentions: Brands hired the instafamous to help them promote their products. Sadly, the industry has effectively devolved into one similar to clickbait advertising, an industry filled with publishers that monetize their content through shocking headlines, while the instafamous monetize their large followings.

Instead of click-baity blogger titles like “How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World,” the instafamous are now romanticizing their followers with the promise of glamour and the “good life,” as long as they “Like” their incessant updates and buy the products they’re pushing.

This is bad news for brands have embraced influencers to create “authentic conversations” with their fans and customers.

Brands continue to get eviscerated almost daily as a result of staged influencer advertising campaigns gone wrong. Why? Because consumers know better and can easily see through the inauthentic.

A bad business model
These repeated failed attempts are why the Federal Trade Commission has been forced to remind the industry, repeatedly, of their new rules regarding disclosure requirements. And whenever the FTC has to step into an industry and institute regulations in order to protect consumers, you know there’s a real problem. The FTC has better things to do with their time than monitoring IG posts from Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, making sure they’re following the rules and including the #ads hashtag on their IG posts.

Another Ogilvy quote that hopefully helps drive home the point:

“Viewers have a way of remembering the celebrity while forgetting the product. I did not know this when I paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. She reported that her mail was equally divided. “One-half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation. Not one of my proudest memories.”

The future of marketing isn’t in engaging influencers for over-staged, over-styled, made-to-look-authentic branded content. It’s an incredibly deceptive tactic, sure to follow a downward spiral from initial excitement to the ultimate letdown.

Busier than ever and armed with the smartest of smartphones, consumers are also smarter than ever. As a result, they demand straightforward, authentic conversations with their friends and the brands they love. They also demand full transparency.

Unfortunately, influencer marketing is manipulative and misrepresentative, and has effectively become the clickbait of marketing. And just like the major social networks having to deal with the consequences of clickbait in their newsfeeds, brands will need to address the inherent issues with influencer marketing.

Rather than engaging celebrities and the instafamous in order to engineer campaigns, brands should be engaging real fans and customers for authentic, brand stories — using those stories to help drive like-minded consumers down the path to purchase.

The future of marketing must be one where brands look to their real fans and customers for less (yet, better) branded content for their marketing campaigns. It’s a natural, authentic and, most importantly, honest approach to branded content creation. And it’s exactly what fans and customers need to stay engaged for the long term.

Unlike clickbait.

Image Credit: istockphoto  

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Sourced from Ad Age

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Influencer Marketing Is on the Rise for Good Reason

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By Dianna Labrien.

Every few years, a new marketing tactic hits the business world. Most recently, influencer marketing has taken up that title.

The practice is defined by using respected and trusted people who will act as promoters of a brand or product, in some capacity. Sometimes, these influencers are paid and sometimes other reciprocal arrangements are worked out.

The question is: does it work? The answer is yes. It’s powerful, it’s affordable, and, perhaps most importantly, it works really well.

The Golden Age of the Micro-Influencer

The use of micro-influencers will be the biggest trend in influencer marketing in the coming years. Experticity recently conducted a study on micro-influencers. According to the study, 82% of consumers surveyed were far more likely to take a recommendation from a micro-influencer than from those with larger, less personal followings. Obviously, getting relationships with a few micro-influencers is far more effective than a single macro-influencer.

Simply put, micro-influencers are the best. They may have only around 10,000 followers, but they are easier to approach, their following is more intimate, and they are trusted by that following. They can be far more influential than the other types, and they are perceived as being far more “authentic.”

Finding and Securing Micro-Influencers

Start with a strong customer persona. From there you can identify niches that they frequent. For example, if your product is moderately-priced jewelry for female millennials, you’ll want to look for micro-influencers that market to the same demographic.

These influencers are approachable, because they don’t have “agents” or a lot of gatekeepers. They may be clothiers, shoe retailers, or any other smaller niche. Identify as many as possible and send samples of your product to them and ask for a review and mention. Offer to do the same in return so both of you benefit from the transaction. But remember:

It Takes Time

Understand that this is not a quick process. You have to identify potential influencers, court them, and figure out what value you can offer them in return. You are looking for long-term relationships, because you don’t want them partnering up with a competitor. In the long term, however, these relationships will bring far greater revenue rewards at far less cost than any paid advertising.

It’s About Trust

Micro-influencer marketing is a huge trend. Why? Because intimate and personal relationships are what will drive the new online consumer to make a purchase – not the latest media celebrity.

A Few Stats

To understand the importance of influencer marketing, it is a good idea to look at some recent statistics:

  • In a recent survey of content marketers 81% found it effective.
  • Adblock software is becoming more widely used by consumers, and this figure will continue to grow.
  • 84% of online consumers seek out and trust recommendations from peers as opposed to direct brand marketing.
  • Consumers use social media as a source of product and service reviews – over 70% actually
  • ROI from influencer marketer, as much as it can currently be tracked, is probably about 6X the cost, if there is a cost.
  • Millennials, now the largest online purchasing demographic, seeks reviews and peer recommendations before making purchasing decisions.

Clearly, traditional advertising, even on the web, is facing demise. There is just so much digital advertising out there, that people are irritated with the disruptions and annoyed by the pop-ups, the banners. They use ad blocking software to get a cleaner, less noisy experience.

Consumers want to know what other real people are saying about a product. And this is why influencer marketing has become so important to any web-based enterprise.

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Sourced from Tech.co

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