Learnings from Influencer Marketing Experts

Earlier this year, Kobe Global Technologies took part in an online webinar organized by Econsultancy and the title of the online webinar is Ask Me Anything (AMA) – Influencer Marketing 2018.

In this video, the industry experts discussed and exchanged views on the current stage of influencer marketing industry. Additionally, some of the points discussed included the challenges, best practices and the trends of influencer marketing 2019. This would serve as a good influencer marketing 2019 guide for your strategy.

However, before we get into the learning shared by the experts, let us first look at what is influencer marketing is really all about.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Introduction to influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the use of “influential” individuals by businesses to promote their products or services and these “influential” individuals, who are also known as Social Media Influencers, have a substantial number of followers on their social media accounts.

Because of the huge followings, businesses engage the social media influencers to share its products or services with their followers.

 

Why would businesses do that?

This is one of the ways to make your advertisement visible to consumers or your target audience.

According to Google, 63% of users installed an ad blocker because they are receiving too many advertisements. Which leads to this question: What are the chances that your online ad (Facebook and YouTube) are seen by your audience?

Furthermore, 92% trust recommendation that comes from families and friends. There is a reason why people follow influencers in the first place and it is because they trust their opinions as well as reviews.

Now that you know why businesses are using influencer marketing strategy as their marketing effort, let us take a look at some statistics.

Influencer Marketing Statistics

Also, according to research done by Econsultancy, 73% of the luxury brands are using Influencer Marketing strategy as part of their marketing efforts. Every marketer, globally, is considering using influencer marketing strategy in the coming years.

With growing demand in this area, influencer marketing agencies have been surfacing very quickly and many big brands such as Pepsi, Apple as well as Microsoft have been using influencers.

Furthermore, here in Singapore, many brands have also started using Influencer Marketing strategy. In the next section, you will be able to see some of the influencer marketing examples.

Influencer Marketing Examples

Subsequently, if you are interested in knowing how these brands use influencer marketing strategy, or if you would like to find out more about other influencer marketing examples, contact us at contact@getkobe.com

3 Learning from Experts

Now, after learning what is influencer marketing and why businesses use influencer marketing strategy as well as some influencer marketing examples, let’s move on to what the industry experts have to share about influencer marketing.

Aligning Influencer Marketing with your business objective

Certainly, as influencer marketing strategy is getting popular, it is still a strategy that must be well thought through. Because it is not about just picking any influencers that you like to run the campaign.

Influencer Marketing strategy must be aligned with your social media marketing and business objective.

In the marketing field, we heard about the marketing funnel.

In the influencer marketing field, we too, have the influencer marketing funnel.

Depending on what is your business objective, it will be segmented at the different part of the funnel.

Thus, if your business objective is to generate awareness, the strategy will be to use celebrity or macro influencer at the top of the funnel.

Also, if your business objective is to build engagement with your audiences, the strategy is to use micro influencers at the bottom of the funnel because micro influencers tend to have more engagements with their followers.

For a long-term strategy such as looking for a brand ambassador, it is important to look for influencers that do not promote for too many brands. The reason is simple. You want people to associate the influencer to your brand. If the influencer is promoting for too many brands, consumers might not be able to recognize your brand.

Finding the right influencers for your brands

Moreover, as the industry is still relatively new, the selection of influencers can be still a manual process. Which means to say, it requires human to pick and select the influencers for the brands.

Yes, if the influencers are handpicked by a human, how can we ensure that the selection is not biased? What about personality fit? Not everyone is suitable to represent all the brands because everyone has their own niche and specialty.

The most common mistake that brands make is selecting influencers base on the number of followings. The higher the following, the better it is for my brands.

It is logical to have this mindset, especially when you are using part of your marketing budget. However, one must take note that high following does not mean high engagement. In addition, the influencer might popular in one particular industry, but not the one you are in.

To overcome this problem, the use of technology is necessary.

Artificial Intelligence technology allows influencers to be paired with brands in a more objective manner. The A.I helps with data analysis, studying the influencers’ profiles and their audiences. With this data, brands can have the confidence that the influencers pair to them are of the right fit.

Here are the best practices shared by the experts:

1. Don’t look at reach and like anymore.
2. Place emphasis on the relevancy score, which means how fitting is the influencer to your brands.
3. Measure the reach base on the number of traffic that the influencer directs to your channel.

Getting the ROI for your Influencer Marketing Campaigns

This is the questions that most people have been asking. How do I measure the ROI for my influencer marketing effort?

Well, for sure we all want the ROI to be sales at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, we cannot contribute influencer marketing to sales as the ROI and in some cases, it might be.

Influencer marketing is one of the marketing efforts that help your brand to get search in other marketing channels.

Hence, what we want to achieve through Influencer Marketing is ultimately brand love because it is the relationship that people establish with the brand.

How do you measure brand love? This is a research done by Turner Ignite.

1. Branded content makes people happy.
2. Happy people remember your brand.
3. Happy people who remember your brand will purchase your product.

Influencer Marketing serves as a storytelling element for brands to connect with people through relevant content that resonates well them.

As of now, if you are looking at numbers for your tangible ROI, there are a few methods you can use.

1. Bit.ly
2. Promo Code
3. Tracking links
4. Instagram Stories Swipe Up Function

The Future of Influencer Marketing

As mentioned above, the demand for influencer marketing is growing, and it will be getting even bigger in the years to come. For influencer marketing 2019, these will be the focus:

Focus on the audience

One point to note, as mentioned by the experts, the focus will always be on the audience. All the contents that marketers create are ultimately catered for their target audience.

The contents share by the influencers are to be authentic and relevant, something that the followers want to consume. If it is just like a normal advertisement, they will be turned off by it.

The use of Technology

With this understanding, influencer marketing companies are adopting technology such as Artificial Intelligence (A.I) and Blockchain to identify the factors of relevance and authenticity.

A.I is currently used to data analysis, such as language and content analysis.

Kobe uses A.I to analyze multiple data touch points such as demographic, content strength, interest, life stages and many more to identify relevant influencers for brands.

If you are interested to find out how Kobe uses A.I technology to identify the right influencers for your brands, hit us up here: contact@getkobe.com.

In the future, A.I will also be used to analyze real-time content streaming. It will be able to identify how each real-time content will be able to give off different response, giving marketers the ability to decide on the spot whether there is a need to change the content.

B2B Influencer Marketing

For B2B space, the influencer marketing scene will be slightly different. Instead of finding external influencers, the focus will be the employees. Training the employees to be thought leaders (the term for influencer in B2B space) in their respective industry, they will be able to help spread word-of-mouth for the company.

Also, if you look at LinkedIn’s feed now, employees are already actively sharing their views and opinion. This is because it is going to get more popular in time to come and businesses have come to realize that employees are the best influencers that they can ever get to spread word-of-mouth.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is relatively new in Singapore and it is going to get more popular.

We hope through this article and influencer marketing examples, you will have a better understanding of influencer marketing and how you can use it for your influencer marketing 2019 strategy.

If you want to find out more about influencer marketing or request to see more influencer marketing examples or how it can help you with your business, contact us at contact@getkobe.com and we would be glad to share with you.

This article summarizes some of the points shared by the industry experts. For full details, you can watch the video at your free time. Enjoy!