Influencer Marketing Archives - Page 7 of 10

In News

Let’s Keep Influencer Marketing Accountable

September 11, 2018 No Comments

One of the top challenges facing influencer marketing is one common across the entire arena of digital marketing: brand safety.

At this year’s Cannes Lions, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed warned that influencer marketing has an integrity issue. The proliferation of fake followers, aided and abetted by a lack of transparency and proper measurement reporting, threatens to destabilize the entire industry.

Weed warned that the industry must take “urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever,” and he pledged that Unilever’s brands will never buy followers nor work with influencers who buy followers.

Any brand conducting influencer marketing programs should heed the call to ensure greater transparency and integrity.

The relationship between social media and influencer marketing is at a crossroads. To be clear, the challenge is not one of growth: According to a recent study by the Association of National Advertisers, 75% of brands use influencer marketing, and almost half are planning to increase budgets in the next year. However, in order for influencer marketing to continue to thrive, brands will need to improve their campaign strategies.

Brand safety is of paramount importance in the development of influencer marketing tools and in ongoing campaign monitoring and management. Campaigns – and the technologies that support them – should be designed to track telltale signs of suspicious activity such as sudden bursts in followers or suspicious letter replacements in profile names, such as the use of “1” to replace the letter “I.” More sophisticated algorithms can flag dramatic shifts in performance and unanticipated engagement patterns.

In addition to ensuring transparency and integrity, influencer marketing campaigns should focus on authentic engagement. Influencer marketing is inherently social; when implemented well it can be an open (but directed) conversation that is amplified to the masses. This is why it is vital to focus on follower engagement.

While metrics like volume are of course important (e.g., follower count, posts per day/week, etc.), engagement may have the biggest impact on meeting or even exceeding KPIs. One of the highlights of influencer marketing is the opportunity for a brand to leverage an influencer’s unique voice. That unique voice has a big impact on the type of content an influencer can produce for brands — and it is that unique, authentic voice that ultimately drives consumer engagement with the branded content.

For brands, a trusted environment is one of the most effective places to engage consumers. Passionate influencers who authentically weave branded stories into social platforms that consumers trust are the ones who deliver powerful results.

Whether it is a story told through a blog post, video, a picture, or any combination of these, working with influencers can bring brands and products to life with engaging, custom content delivered to the right audience — amplified through the channels that has the potential to make the greatest impact.

But to help ensure that this marriage between influencer marketing and social not only survives, but thrives, it is up to everyone in the industry to work to ensure that engagements remain authentic, honest, transparent, and measurable.

By Katie Paulsen

By Katie Paulsen, Vice President of Influencer Marketing, RhythmOne

Sourced from MediaPost

In News

Instagram Leads as a Global Platform for Influencer Marketing

August 16, 2018 No Comments

By Jasmine Enberg

Influencer marketing is a powerful tactic that targets consumers where they already spend much of their time: social media. Globally speaking, Instagram is the primary platform for many influencer-brand campaigns, but it’s hardly the only one.

Take China, for example. Most of the major international social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, are banned by the government. That means that the country’s influencers hold court on local services, of which Weibo and WeChat are the most popular.

And in the DACH region—which includes Austria, Germany and Switzerland—Instagram and YouTube are neck and neck, at least in terms of influencer marketing spending. According to Goldmedia data, sponsored content on the two platforms accounted for 34% and 31% of total influencer revenues in 2017, respectively.

Spending figures don’t always tell the whole story. While Goldmedia took into account both monetary and nonmonetary compensation, such as product gifting, influencers may charge a premium for a post on a certain platform, which could inflate its share of spending.

But those findings make sense when looking at where consumers in the region follow influencers. According to a March 2018 survey by M Science for Wavemaker, social media users in Germany were just as likely to follow an influencer on YouTube as they were Instagram, each cited by 73% of respondents. Roughly half said they followed influencers on Facebook.

That said, the importance of Instagram for influencer campaigns is rising in nearly every market worldwide.

In a February 2018 survey by influencer marketing agency Activate, 88.9% of worldwide influencers said they were using Instagram for influencer marketing campaigns more than they did one year ago. Excluding posts on their feeds, Instagram Stories was the most popular tactic used for sponsored campaigns.

Instagram’s rising popularity for influencer campaigns goes hand in hand with the platform’s strong user growth, as marketers tend to go where their customers are.

India is one example of that. According to our latest forecast, the number of Instagram users in the country grew by an explosive 123% in 2017—the fastest growth rate worldwide. So it’s no surprise that 78% of influencers in India cited Instagram as the platform that would rise in importance for influencer marketing this year, according to a December 2017 survey from influencer marketing agency Buzzoka.

By Jasmine Enberg

Sourced from eMarketer

In News

3 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Work For Any Brand

June 18, 2018 No Comments

By Adrian Fisher

Despite the fact that influencer marketing campaigns are a fairly new branding strategy, they are one of the fastest-growing sectors of digital marketing. A unique business model made possible by the prominence of social media, influencers partner with brands and recommend products to their followers for a fee. This benefits the brand by increasing their online presence and social media exposure while allowing them to learn more about their target audience through the influencer’s reach.

But because influencer marketing is a recent phenomenon, it is often seen as an untested advertisement method. However, influencer marketing provides an array of possibilities and can be a valuable asset to a marketer’s arsenal of campaign strategies. For example, my team finds real estate professionals who have become experts in marketing themselves online through our Facebook group. Then, we like to invite the top experts to guest post, record a podcast interview or webcast or even create a series of videos discussing their top tips that we can easily share across all of our marketing channels. This is a great way to show our audience real-world examples of how they can market their own personal brands and businesses. Here are a few key ways that partnering with an influencer can benefit your business, too.

Increase Public Perception And Conversions

Many businesses struggle to understand how partnering with an influencer can be more beneficial than simply running ads on social media. My advice is to think of influencer recommendations like word-of-mouth references.

Having an influencer that consumers are already engaging with recommending a service is not much different than having a friend make the same suggestion. This makes an influencer partnership the perfect strategy both for increasing overall online reputation and increasing the likelihood of acquiring a new customer.

If you don’t know where to begin, there are several tools that can help you get started with an influencer campaign. For example, IZEA and Brand Backer are great options for companies new to influencer marketing. There are also options dedicated to helping you connect with video or YouTube influencers only, such as FameBit and Octoly.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Adrian Fisher

Adrian Fisher is the founder and CEO of PropertySimple, a real estate technology company.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Understanding the Tools of Influencer Marketing [Infographic]

April 25, 2018 No Comments

By Laura Forer

our email service provider deploys emails. Your programmatic ad platform makes your ad buys efficient. And your influencer marketing platform connects you with influencers… Right?

Yes, but an influencer marketing strategy requires more than simply finding influencers, and you want to have the right tools in place to create a robust and successful program.

An infographic by influencer platform Izea illustrates the features you want to have as you execute your influencer marketing program:

The ability to discover and search for influencers
Easy contract and payment negotiations
Assurance that you’re in compliance
Workflow tools for working with influencers
The ability to promote and amplify posts
Facilitation of payment
Analytics, metrics, tracking, and reporting

The infographic explains what each of those facets of your influencer marketing program entails and why each is important, and it concludes with a section about how to choose the right influencer marketing platform for your program.

To make sure you’re on the right path to influencer marketing success, check out the graphic. Just tap or click to see a larger version.

By Laura Forer

Sourced from MarketingProfs

In News

Digital Marketers Will Devote More Resources to Online Reputation Management in 2018

March 28, 2018 No Comments

Online reputation management is very necessary all of a sudden.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Businesses say they plan to allocate more resources to their online reputations in response to the growing popularity of social media and online reviews.

According to a new survey from Clutch, 40% of businesses will increase their investment in online reputation management (ORM) this year.

All this is due to the growing power of social media and third-party reviews sites, which impact businesses’ control over their online reputation.

Clutch surveyed 224 digital marketers and found that more than half of businesses (54%) consider ORM “very necessary” for success. As a result, 34% said they allocated more resources to ORM in 2018, and an additional 43% said they plan to hire a professional public relations or ORM agency in 2018.

Businesses already invest a significant amount of time observing their online reputation, Clutch found. More than 40% of digital marketers (42%) monitor their companies’ brand online daily, while 21% monitor their online reputation hourly.

According to public relations experts, businesses frequently monitor how their brand is portrayed online because they know even one negative media mention can quickly damage the public’s perception of their company.

“When people search for brands online, they tend to search for stamps of credibility,” explained Simon Wadsworth, managing partner at Igniyte, an online reputation management agency in the UK. “If potential customers find anything negative, that could end up being a significant amount of leads the business won’t get from people who are put off from using the service.”

Social media also has shifted the ORM landscape because it gives consumers free-reign to share their opinions and experiences quickly and frequently: 46% of businesses look to social media most often to monitor their online reputation.

By using professional agencies that have expertise in online reputation management, businesses can minimise losing new customers who may be dissuaded from purchasing their product or service.

To read the complete report, click here.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Women-Owned Small Businesses More Likely to Use Social Media

March 23, 2018 No Comments

Women-owned businesses are most likely to use social media. Men! What y’all doing?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A woman-owned small business is more likely to use social media, according to a new survey from Clutch, a leading B2B research and reviews firm.

Among women-owned businesses, 74% use social media, compared to 66% of men-owned businesses.

The findings came as no surprise to experts, who said women overall are more likely to use social media. Given that trend, female small business owners more easily can bring their business onto social media.

“Women are generally better conversationalists than men,” said Jeff Gibbard, chief social strategist at digital agency I’m From the Future. “They tend to be more expressive and more emotive. It’s no surprise to me why more women business owners use social media.”

Women often communicate better than men, which translates to the online world where they are more likely to use social media effectively.

Millennial-Owned Small Businesses Lead Social Media Use

There is also a generational divide among small businesses’ social media use. The survey finds that 79% of millennial-owned small businesses use social media compared to 65% of small businesses owned by older generations.

Millennials, like women in general, frequently use social media for their personal lives. Their social media skills easily carry over into their businesses – unlike older generations, experts say.

“The older people didn’t grow up with social media, so many don’t understand how to use it for their business,” said Shawn Alain, president of social media agency Viral in Nature. “They went through a significant part of their life without even the internet, and they remember what it was like not to have a smartphone or email.”

Millennials are also more likely to use Instagram and Snapchat than older generations, but Generation Xers and Baby Boomers are more likely to use LinkedIn.

Most Small Businesses Use Facebook

Facebook remains the most popular social media channel for small businesses, no matter the gender or generation of the owner – 86% say they use it, which is nearly twice the number of small businesses that use the second-place channel, Instagram (48%).

Among small business users of social media, 12% say they use Facebook exclusively for their social media efforts.

Overall, 71% of small businesses use social media, and more than half (52%) share content at least once per day. Images and infographics (54%) are the most popular content types that businesses post to social media.

Read the full report here.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Facebook’s Trust Crisis: What Now?

March 22, 2018 No Comments

Less than 1 in 3 people call Facebook a responsible company, according to a new survey.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Barraged by accusations of spreading divisive fake news and amid new allegations that it handed over personal information on up to 50 million users without their consent, Facebook is losing the faith of the people, according to a new survey.

Almost 4 out of 10 people surveyed said: “Facebook is not a responsible company because it puts making profits most of the time ahead of trying to do the right thing.” Less than 1 in 3 said that Facebook is a “responsible company because it tries to do the right thing most of the time even if that gets in the way of it making profits.” The rest were unsure.

By a 7-1 ratio people surveyed said that Facebook has had a negative influence on political discourse. Sixty-one percent said that “Facebook has damaged American politics and made it more negative by enabling manipulation and falsehoods that polarize people.”

The survey was conducted as new revelations surfaced that the company connected to the 2016 Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, inappropriately harvested personal information on millions of Facebook users.

The sharp rise in negative feelings is a significant departure from Facebook’s standing prior to the 2016 election, when the rise of so-called Fake News and polarizing content led to calls for the company to take greater responsibility for the content on the popular social media site – or face government regulation.

By a 2-1 margin, people surveyed said it’s Facebook’s responsibility to remove or warn about posts that contain false or misleading information. And 59 percent reported that the company is not doing enough to address the issues of false and inflammatory information that appear on its site.

“Facebook is at a crossroads because of its inability – nearly a year-and-a-half after the election – to get a handle on its divisive effects on society,” said Tom Galvin, Executive Director of Digital Citizens, who commissioned the survey. “From spreading fake and manipulative information to becoming a ‘Dark Web-like’ place for illicit commerce, Facebook seems to losing the trust of the American public. Regulation will not be far behind for social media companies if things don’t change.”

This declining trust reflects a growing concern about the impact Facebook and other social media sites have on young teens. In the survey, more than two in five people surveyed said that the minimum age to have a Facebook account should be at least 18 years old.

“Digital platforms have to rise to the occasion and assure internet users that their personal information will be safe, that the content will be legal, safe and not contrived to manipulate. In short, they have to demonstrate they will be the positive influence on our society that they espouse to be,” said Galvin.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

How to Win at Marketing Using a Hashtag

March 21, 2018 No Comments

A travel company has managed to stir up a lot of viral traffic with their hashtag. Watch and learn, people.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

What do a dream wedding in New York, an adventure through the mountains of Sri Lanka and a family’s search for their roots in Scotland all have in common? All saw a hospitality professional going out of their way to make or save someone’s trip. And a holiday booking company use this mushy sequence of events with a hashtag to fire up social media views and get a great repsonse from them.

Booking.com call themselves the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in 198 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

So, what are they doing with their social media marketing? They are riding hastags like a showjumper would a prize horse.

They have had some great success with their recent hashtag #BookingHero. They asked people to share their travel stories using the hashtag. The best story won travel prizes and big kudos online.

Following thousands of submissions via social media, Booking.com selected the three most touching and inspiring accounts of hospitality professionals going above and beyond to create unique and unforgettable travel experiences for their guests.

The customers were then flown back to say thank you to the person who saved their trips. Here are the stories.

The point isn’t the stories though. The point is that real people’s journeys made the hashtag come alive and generate traffic for booking.com. In fact, the call out for submissions via social media has been so successsful that Booking.com is now using the hashtag to extend the social media campaign with long-form video content that extends the #BookingHero message, with TV to follow.

According to recent research conducted by Booking.com across 25 markets in 2017, a personal connection is essential for many travellers with 29% saying that an accommodation feeling like home is key and 24% sharing that a welcoming host is a make or break factor during the first 24 hours of their trip.

Said Pepijn Rijvers, Chief Marketing Officer, Booking.com. “These stories beautifully demonstrate that an amazing trip is about more than simply finding the right destination or the perfect accommodation– it’s also about the people you meet along the way which truly make for an unforgettable journey. And that’s what travel is all about.”

And for the company, it is about finding the right hashtag and getting it to go viral.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

Uh-Oh. How Do We Mobile-Advertise to Gen-Z When They Don’t Like Their Phones That Much?

March 20, 2018 No Comments

Gen Z use their phones a lot, but are relieved when they are taken away. So how do marketers reach this age group if they have a love/hate relationship with their smartphones?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Members of Generation Z are relieved when placed in a situation where they are unable to access their smartphones for several weeks. This is according to a new study conducted by Screen Education, a non-profit organisation that addresses smartphone addiction.

The study involved participants aged from 12 to 16, who spent 2-4 weeks at Camp Livingston during the summer of 2017. Because Camp Livingston does not permit its campers to bring smartphones with them, they are an ideal group for conducting research about refraining from smartphone use.

According to Michael Mercier, President of Screen Education, “Many children said they have become overwhelmed by their smartphones. They no longer can keep up with all their notifications, and they are burdened by the ‘drama’ they encounter through social media via their smartphones. Consequently, they were relieved to be separated from their smartphones because it eliminated that stress.”

This relief was reflected in a survey conducted with the campers after they had returned home. The campers were asked the extent to which they experienced feelings of gladness and frustration from being without their phones. “A large number − 92% − experienced gladness, while only 41% felt any frustration. We had expected the opposite,” said Mercier.

When asked what their experience would have been like if they had been allowed to bring their phones to camp, campers revealed just how severe smartphone addiction is among their age group. “They almost unanimously admitted they would have spent the entire time on their phones,” recounts Max Yamson, Executive Director of Camp Livingston. “They said they would not have formed deep relationships with the staff and fellow campers, would not have connected with their surroundings and nature on the same level, and would not have engaged as much in recreational activities.”

According to Yamson, “The study shows that the campers were glad to have left their phones behind so that they could experience a deeper level of engagement.”

“The research also revealed a stunning insight,” said Mercier. “Many campers discussed the experience of face-to-face communication as though it were a novel one. They exhibited a sense of discovery at learning that face-to-face communication is far superior to screen communication when it comes to building friendships and getting to know other people.”

Yamson added, “One camper said that in four short weeks she got to know her friends at camp better than she knows some of her friends at home – because she mostly communicates with her friends at home through screens.”

Other key findings include:

92% said it was beneficial to have gone without their phones while at camp
83% considered having gone without their phones for several weeks to be an important life experience
35% were successful at curbing their smartphone use after leaving camp
17% tried to influence a friend to spend less time on their phone after leaving camp

The researchers plan to follow this study up with additional research during the summer of 2018.

Marketers trying to catch the attention of this demographic may need to think carefully about how they approach mobile advertising for this generation of digital natives. It’s another day in the life of modern media.

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

In News

A New App Can Create Facebook Ads Without the Cost

March 16, 2018 No Comments

This handy app can help you create ads with impact but with very little effort.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An app called Plotaverse helps marketers to create great ads without the dreaded and costly content creation process. Quickly bypassing established app giants, the young startup’s iOS app made the list of Facebook’s top 10 mobile apps.

The photo app’s animation features allow businesses of any calibre to create impactful ads fast and on a budget. More or less, you can choose from many artistically appealling gifs and put your message over them. The artwork on the site is truly eye-catching.

But how did Plotaverse’s 8 months old mobile app manage to disrupt visual advertising, going up against 8 billion video views a day on Facebook alone?

Images animated with Plotaverse, formerly known as Plotagraph, are the key to its success. The app ads movement to any single still photo. This creates ads that stand out in saturated media feeds.

Brands like Coca Cola, Wella, Chevrolet and Red Bull were seen boosting their brand with captivating Plotagraphs. There is no need for video, multiple photos or video editing skills to turn a photograph into a Plotagraph. Users of any skill level can quickly animate and post uniquely moving images to their business and social page.

On Instagram and Facebook, Plotagraphs have proven to attract up to 5 times the amount of views and engagement than surrounding images.

Every day, 4.5 million business pages on Facebook are trying to cut through 1.32 billion daily active users according to WordStream. As expected, Adobe’s titan apps, Photoshop Express and Spark Post head Facebook’s list of Photo Enhancing apps. But the tiny startup’s photo animation app has unexpectedly spearheaded the looping content industry.

To check it out, click here

Do you supply services to the Irish Media Industry? Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.