Authenticity
Influencer marketing’s greatest strength is the fact that audiences perceive creators as more authentic than brands and traditional media. Influencers can share their personal lives, express their feelings, and communicate directly with followers in a way that feels relatable and organic. When you work with influencers, you’re tapping into the close personal connection between audience and creator, which helps you forge deeper connections with your customers.
Brief
Naturally, we’re talking about the most important document in all of advertising – the Creative Brief. This humble document is how companies like us translate our clients’ ideas into creative concepts for influencers to work with. Armed with a clear, concise brief, excellent content is right at your fingertips. However, brands have to understand that a creative brief is not a simple list of requirements! Briefs are guidelines, inspiration, requests – but at the end of the day, influencers must create what feels right for their audience.
Contextual Relevance
The influencer selection process can be tricky to navigate, but it’s absolutely critical to campaign success. How do you know which influencers will deliver the best results?
To identify the most relevant match, we take a “content-first approach.” Instead of relying on textual analysis such as the keywords found in comments and captions, advanced image-recognition software allows us to categorize and tag an influencer’s entire catalog based on the visual data in their posts.
This gives marketers an unprecedented level of insight on what qualities make a piece of content resonate.
Diversity
Today’s consumers are more diverse than ever before – in culture, ethnicity, gender, and every aspect of the human condition. Increasingly, customers expect brands to represent and celebrate all walks of life.
With influencer marketing, brands can reach any audience in a truly authentic way. As a colleague from YouTube recently put it: “If you want to reach customers in Brazil, why don’t you ask a Brazilian? If you want to reach Italians, don’t assume you know everything – work with an Italian!”
Engagement
Engagement is a metric that aggregates the total interactions on a post, such as likes, comments and shares, divided by the total followers of the account. Instead of relying on “Vanity Metrics,” such as follower count, Engagement is a far more reliable way to determine campaign success, as it shows whether or not your content resonated with viewers.
Focusing on engagement also reduces the risk of paying for false results, such as paying to put your content in front of spam accounts. Which brings us to…
Fraudulent Activity
Fraudulent activity comes in many forms. Whether it’s bots or click farms, marketers must protect their clients’ investments from suspicious or fraudulent activity. But with the right technology, global influencer agency can cut through the noise and target real potential customers that are likely to resonate with your brand.
Gamers
The competitive video game industry is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2021. In fact, video game sales outpace the entire U.S. box office by a factor of 2. Some professional gamers make more than NFL stars – let that sink in for a minute. This explosion is due, in large part, to the rise of streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube that make live broadcasting accessible. Celebrity gamers frequently partner with brands to promote products during their live streams. Gaming partnerships can be extremely effective, especially as gamers are of the most engaged audiences on the web.
Human-centric
Have you ever felt like an advertisement was talking at you, instead of to you? Well with influencer marketing, we can take it one step further: advertisements that talk with you. Creators are humans, and humans love humans (not logos). Influencer marketing brings the human element back to advertising.
Informed Creative
We’ll say it loud for the people in the back: Creativity is King. So what happens when you combine the most creative online voices with data-driven insights?
Campaigns guaranteed to get results. Creators intrinsically understand their audiences better than anymore, but it’s important to incorporate research and data points into the planning process. It’s how we’ve been able to help creators uncover insights about their audiences they didn’t even know were there!
JOMO
A play on the popular acronym FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) is an emerging trend among 6-24 year olds. JOMO encourages social media users to take the occasional phone break and enjoy disconnection from the constant chatter. We’ve all experienced looking at our friends’ photos only to feel a pang of envy. JOMO is the solution, especially as we grow more informed about mental health in our space.
KPIs
In the beginning stages of campaign planning, knowing which KPs to drive is vital. Are you trying to drum up ticket sales? Increase clicks to a particular webpage? Whatever your goals are, influencers can tailor their content to align with them.
Common KPIs in the influencer space are: engagement, reach, site traffic, and of course, sales.
Link-In-Bio
Clickable links are not allowed in Instagram captions. As a workaround, clever Instagrammers discovered they could copy and paste any link within their bios (such as a link to purchase products). Thus, the phrase “Link-In Bio” was born.
No matter how fast influencer marketing evolves, creators will always find inventive solutions to accomplish their goals. After all, influencer culture is all about experimentation and innovation!
Microlearning
No longer YouTube is the only go-to place for learning online, its long-form content still offers tremendous value, however the short-form aka microlearning solutions are the preferred way of learning on social media, with TikTok leading the way.
Niche-Audiences
Micro influencer communities that are built on a fundamental truth: people finding comfort in knowing that there are others out there who love what they love. Social media has rapidly expanded the amount of available information, resulting in a more interconnected world than ever before. Our digital transformation has allowed audiences to discover content tailored just for them – no matter how specific, niche-driven or obscure.
Original Sound
When making a TikTok video or Instagram Reel, the audio file from that video is registered as an original sound. Other users can then record their own videos or Reels using that same sound. Users can also search for videos on both TikTok communities and Instagram by searching for a specific sound.
Psychographics
Psychographics is a relatively new type of qualitative consumer analysis that has thrived with the rise of social media networking. It tracks and evaluates points that were previously largely inaccessible for advertisers. For decades, brands relied on demographics to predict success of their products. Psychographics include Social attitudes beliefs, opinions, values, interests, hobbies, leisure activities, behavioral patterns, among others.
Questions and Quizzes
Social media platforms are home to plenty of interactive features. Some of the most popular right now are Questions and Quizzes, such as on Instagram Stories and Snapchat. These features are quick and easy to use, and data shows they increase engagement.
Regulations
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees advertising in the U.S., and has ruled that all brand partnerships on social media must be clearly disclosed. Without proper disclosure, influencers run the risk of getting hit with massive fines, not to mention losing out on future deals. Some industry verticals have additional restrictions as well, such as requiring a given percentage of an audience be above the age of 21.
Regulations also apply to social media giveaways and contests. It is important to check with a lawyer before moving forward with this type of initiative.
Stories
Instagram Stories, Snapchat Stories, Tik Toks – vertical, short-form, ephemeral content is the currently hottest thing on social media. Most platforms include their own version of a Story feature. Even though every platform adds their own creative features to Stories, the concept remains the same: bite-sized content that only lives for 24 hours.
Social Commerce
Social commerce allows users to make a product purchase from a third-party company within a social media platform. This means that the whole customer journey can take place on a single social platform, from awareness to purchase.
Twitch
Launched in 2011, Twitch is the world’s leading live streaming platform for people to come together live to chat, interact, and make their own entertainment together. There’s incredible opportunities for advertisers on Twitch. Brands can partner with Twitch creators to do unboxings, giveaways, reviews, or product demos. Marketing possibilities on the platform are almost endless.
Usage Rights
In influencer marketing, usage rights define who owns the content and where it can be used. In the case of a brand or agency, usage rights will dictate which additional channels the content can be used on.
Virtual Influencers
We know, it’s hard to wrap you head around – but virtual influencers exist, and they’re definitely a thing. The most famous example right now is Lil Miquela, a computer- generated model who currently sits at 1.6 million followers. Lil Miquela has worked with some of the biggest fashion labels, despite not actually existing.
Word-of-Mouth
Influencer marketing brings word-of-mouth to the digital age. Conversations that could only take place between friends and colleagues are now happening with people across the entire globe. Influencers promote products and services in a way that informs and entertains in a casual way, just like any recommendation from a friend.
Gen-X
Gen X makes up approximately 25 percent of the population and 75 percent of them are online, so they’re definitely a demographic to pay attention to. Gen-Xers can be critical audiences for products such as finance and banking, as many of them are now coming of age and are beginning to explore these products. And looking at the current pop culture, we see an ongoing fascination with the 80’s, aka the flagship decade for Gen X. Don’t overlook this important demo!
YouTube
Founded in 2004, YouTube is arguably the birthplace of influencer culture. It’s on this platform – now the second largest search engine in the world – that creators learned to grow and cultivate their own audiences. It’s also where video content got it’s big break – prior to YouTube, it was often too slow or buggy to enjoy. Thanks, YouTube!
Gen-Z
Ah, the elusive and enigmatic Gen Z. Marketers are working hard to understand how best to reach what many refer to as “millennials”, those born between the years 1995-2015. Perhaps what’s most important to know about Gen Z is that they’re completely digitally native. They’ve never known a world without computers! As Steve Jobs famously remarked, kids know more about computers than he ever did because grew up with technology. If there were ever a more compelling reason to tap into the power of digitally-native content creators, this is it!