How influencer marketing campaigns can be built to last
The influencer market reached new heights in 2020. Compounded by the surge in digital activity on the back of lockdowns globally. Last year saw 50% YOY growth, no small feat considering half a decade ago this industry was just achieving a 10 figure market size. As can be expected this meteoric growth has revealed some key challenges for marketers, which can be distilled down into; Standardisation (or the lack thereof), Scaling (the seemingly unscalable), proper programming.
1. Standardisation
Dollars can't be exchanged for social currency. The inability to separate between celebrity endorsements and creator partnerships has resulted in brands who pay for vanity metrics and creators who exploit this naiveté. The obfuscation of influencer campaign pricing is rooted in marketers calibrating their campaigns for the wrong outcomes. Views, followers, likes, and comments aren't synonymous with ROAS.
The recommended approach here as seen with other more programmatic marketing efforts is to start with your KPIs and work backwards. If you know you want to increase sign-ups for your mobile app, and an increase is defined as 10,000 sign-ups, you can assess creators on their projected conversion rates, and price this per your expected user LTV. While this is not a deterministic method for pricing, it will help to create a standardised approach that rewards a creator for their results as opposed to the ill-conceived notion of "they have a lot of followers so they are worth more".
2. Scaling (the seemingly unscalable)
Influencer marketing needs to be treated as a standalone discipline in marketing as opposed to just a part of social. Whether you are building an internal influencer marketing team or constructing an influencer mar-tech stack from various service providers. It is multifaceted. To have a properly informed influencer program you need audience data, creator segmentation, attribution, creative data/curation, payment processing, and creator management.
If your goal is to have an influencer program that is achieving over 7 figures annual spend, you’ll need 6 figures set aside for the salaries and tools that will allow you to sustain this volume. The part of scaling an influencer program that requires the most leg work is building up your network of creators. There are search engines and pre-populated databases. But none of these tools can supplement a network of creators segmented against your target audience, contacted and vetted end to end. All of this is doable and being done, but influencer programs are often viewed as unscalable due to an underestimation of the investment required.
3. Proper Programming
The foundation of every influencer campaign is selection, creative curation, and payment terms. As we touched on in standardisation, you can’t buy social currency. Creators need to be measured by potential performance, correlation with your product/brand, and the impact they have within their community. Sometimes the largest social footprints are found in the smallest communities. Your goal should be to open a partnership, not run a one-time campaign. Creators may have a pre-set price, but any that are worth working with will take into consideration your brand, and goals. Hence why the top consideration for influencers when opening a partnership is not the earnings but the context of the product in their community
Creatives should also be considered community-specific. “High quality” is subjective and generally defined by the audience. You want your influencers to generate brand/product placements that are native to the channel. Finally, when it comes to pricing many approaches should be explored, purely performance-based, flat fee, flat fee tied to guaranteed performance, and so on. If you have well-defined objectives pricing should be an intuitive process, if it feels like guesswork, ask yourself what outcomes do you want to drive?
