Top Tips for Working With Influencers
A recap of SocialDay’s expert top tips on influencer marketing, all in one place
With new social media platforms and creators constantly changing the landscape for marketers, it can be hard to keep up. Influencers, though, are firmly here to stay. And with lockdown now pushing more consumers onto social media and encouraging them to spend longer on digital platforms, working with influencers is crucial to the growth and development of a successful brand.
But when it comes to influencer marketing, one thing’s for sure: not all influencers are created equal. We’ve put together this top tips guide to help you navigate the world of influencers using SocialDay’s very own speaker sessions, delivered by some of the biggest experts in the industry, including Ian Randolph, Timothy Armoo, Jennifer Quigley-Jones, Ian Shepherd, Ben Jeffries, and Beckii Flint.
Check out the full sessions over on the SocialDay Club app now!
Jennifer Quigley-Jones - How to Drive Sales with YouTube Creators
Jennifer Quigley-Jones, CEO of Digital Voices, kicked off SocialDay’s influencer sessions with a mind-blowing statistic: 4 in 10 millennial subscribers say that they trust their favourite influencer more than their friends. With this in mind, Jennifer gave us all the best insights and top tips on how to work with influencers effectively, especially on YouTube. Here are some of the highlights...
Why YouTube?
Jennifer highlighted three key reasons why your brand should utilise YouTube and its influencer market:
Attention
Consumers watch YouTube videos in full screen with the sound on for the longest time compared to any other platform. This means that your brand has the potential to engage with your target audience and hold their attention for a uniquely large amount of time.
Engagement
YouTube is home to 2 billion monthly active users and 1 billion hours of content are consumed on the platform every day. Thus, the potential for audience engagement on long form videos, where you can sell all the benefits to your brand and utilise influencers’ audiences, is unparalleled.
Affinity
YouTube creators marry the trust of a friend with the reach of a celebrity...and it’s measurable. This is something that could transform your brand’s audience, both in its size and its loyalty to your products.
Some of Jennifer’s top tips:
Though it may be tempting to try and work with influencers you like personally, it’s essential that you don’t source creators purely based on their personality. Instead, focus primarily on influencers’ data and statistics, such as their audience demographics, otherwise your campaign falls at the first hurdle.
Stick to one clear call to action in your marketing campaigns. Using too many influencers or overloading your audience with too much information will only confuse your consumers rather than engaging them.
Tracking results and re-investing in influencers and campaign strategies that you know work (based on data, of course) will allow you to build a loyal audience amongst an influencer’s fanbase. If you find that a campaign hasn’t quite worked, but the audience of an influencer is still the right fit, Jennifer suggests going back to the influencer and working with them to deliver a more effective campaign; sometimes it’s as simple as tweaking the messaging and experimenting with the delivery.
For performance campaigns, Jennifer recommends taking the sponsorship route rather than developing dedicated videos, as sponsorships allow more embedded ‘Ad’ messaging and thus feel more organic. For audiences of smaller creators, however, dedicated videos with ‘Ad’ in the title are often less of an issue.
Ian Shepherd - Influencing Retail - Digital Talent’s Impact on Driving Sales
Ian Shepherd, Founder and CEO of The Social Store, delivered his session from a fascinating perspective, having worked on the marketing for tween influencer Tiana and her popular brand Hearts by Tiana. Ian also discussed Chinese livestream shopping sensation Taobao, which is home to 100,000 brands selling products to more than 500 million customers in the country. Livestream shopping is an e-commerce feature which is slowly making its way into the Western digital space, and Ian predicts that influencers will be at the heart of this new ecosystem.
In the meantime, here are some of Ian’s top tips for getting started with your influencer marketing strategy:
Get your business onto an e-commerce platform. Digital sales are a growing trend and allow your brand to access a huge number and variety of consumers.
Make use of all of Facebook and Instagram’s new e-commerce features, particularly as they begin to experiment with livestream shopping.
Consider selling your products on Amazon. Ian explained that selling some products is actually cheaper on Amazon’s next day Prime service than selling and posting through Shopify and Royal Mail.
Use influencers to your advantage by building long-term partnerships with creators, repurposing influencer content, monitoring data and sales conversion, and combining micro and macro creators.
Prioritise building your brand’s TikTok account!
Beckii Flint - Test and Learn: Using Influencers for Market Research
Once a viral YouTube hit herself, Pepper Studio Co-Founder Beckii Flint gave her insights into the world of YouTube and influencer marketing. Her key to delivering a great campaign across social media? Using different platforms to achieve different results from a campaign and make sure you don’t neglect YouTube, where evergreen content thrives and where campaigns can gain traction and grow massively.
Researching, testing, and learning
Beckii talked us through her ‘test and learn’ approach to influencer marketing. Beginning by using YouTube community tab polls and Instagram polls to gather data will allow your brand to gage the demand and interests of a creator’s audience. Alongside this, building a relationship with influencers is something which Beckii says is crucial to forging mutually beneficial relationships in marketing campaigns. Next, the data received from polls can inform your brand’s marketing strategy, enabling you to determine which influencers to proceed with. Once you’ve determined that an influencer is a good fit, you can move on with your campaign...
Here are some more of Beckii’s top tips:
Don’t be disheartened if a smaller percentage of an influencer’s following responds to an Instagram or YouTube poll. Keep in mind that the people who respond to these polls will be the cream of the crop - the most highly engaged and most likely to engage with your product - of these influencers’ audience.
Measure the efficacy of your campaign beyond the face-value stats.
Not all influencers are the same - performance between different influencers can be vastly different, so keep your options open.
Foster meaningful conversations with your potential consumers and allow audiences and creators to have a voice within your campaign This will help to generate positive conversation around your brand and sit you in good stead for future campaigns.
Like many of our other speakers, Beckii noted that considering emerging platforms like TikTok, which are home to cheaper influencers and good reach, is something worth doing, particularly for smaller businesses with a more restricted budget.
Timothy Armoo and Joe Saw - How to Build a Global Media Brand Just from TikTok
Fanbytes’ Timothy Armoo and Joe Saw talked us through their TikTok initiative ‘ByteHouse’, where they brought together well-known TikTok creators with a combined following of 27 million under one roof. Timothy outlined 3 reasons for its huge success:
Real influence
The social media ecosystem no longer favours big numbers of followers above all else, particularly on TikTok, where small creators often garner hundreds of thousands of views and incredible watch times. What ByteHouse did was to demonstrate that the landscape is changing and that real influence now comes from true friendship and deep audience insight.
Audience representation
ByteHouse was representative of its influencers’ audiences in terms of its diversity, including different races, sexualities and identities. With content and real life increasingly blurring, it is crucial that content mirrors the diversity of its audience.
Multiplatform approach
In the modern digital era, it is crucial to implement a multiplatform approach from the outset of a campaign or initiative in order to maximise its effectiveness. As Timothy Armoo put it: platform dependency will kill you.
But how do you insert brands into the conversation?
Timothy and Joe gave us their own case studies to demonstrate how to insert your brand into influencer marketing. Two of their top tips included:
Interactive content: allow the audience to collaborate and have a voice by producing content which they can repurpose or actively engage with.
Regular, scheduled content: create a content series which your audience can engage with on a regular basis. This will help your target audience get to know your brand and come to rely on you for entertainment.
Ben Jeffries - How Covid-19 Propelled Brands into the Era of Influencer Marketing
With 72% of people saying that they’re spending more time on social media since the pandemic outbreak, influencer marketing has never been more pivotal in brands’ marketing strategies. Ben Jeffries, CEO and Co-Founder of Influencer, gave us some highlights of the company’s recent research report, which found that:
40% of people want more how-to tutorial content (this is the top content type for Gen X and Boomers) and 37% want more memes/funny content (this is the top content type for Millennials and Gen Z consumers).
YouTube remains the top platform used to follow creators by all generations.
40% of consumers who follow influencers say they value seeing the product in action when discovering products through creators.
Like Ian Shepherd, Ben also highlighted the emerging livestream selling market, in which creators are becoming shopping channels themselves, offering products to their followers and teaming up with brands to offer discounted rates. As well as accelerating this area of e-commerce, the pandemic has forced creators to produce more innovative, authentic content, learn new skills, and ultimately adapt to the ‘new normal’. Brands have done the same in their marketing campaigns, with social media seeing a wave of super innovative and creative campaigns, many of them influencer-led, in the last two months.
Ian Randolph - The Influence Economy is Coming
Tailify’s Ian Randolph took us into the psychology of influencer marketing, explaining that attention can be bought, but influence must be earnt. The key ingredient to turning attention into influence is trust, something which influencers have in bucket loads from their audience. Understanding your brand as if it were a human - considering its values and matchmaking these values with influencers - is a good approach to take when choosing creators to work with and ensuring this trust amongst your target audience.
If this has given you some content for thought, make sure to check out Ian and our other incredible speakers’ sessions over on our SocialDay Club app now
You can read SocialDay’s guide to creating winning content, where we highlight some of the top tips from our content panel, by clicking here. Keep an eye out next week for our guide to utilising the power of community, including some more fantastic insights from SocialDay’s expert speakers.