Much of the social marketing today for consumer brand is done through what is called influencer marketing. For a number of these influencers who have a large social following, working with brand has become very lucrative. But one of the hottest tickets at the moment within communications agencies are ‘micro-influencers’; Edelman Digital lists it as a key area in Digital Trends Report . There is widely cited research by Marketly that claims there is an engagement ceiling (at least on Instagram). Once a follower count gets beyond that, engagement rates decline. This micro-influencer sweet spot is apparently 1,000 – 100,000 followers.
What are micro-influencers?
Brown & Fiorella (2013) described micro influencers
Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.
Brown & Fiorella wanted to focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion. It sounds like an adjunct to integrating marketing automation from the likes of Hubspot and Marketo into a public relations campaign.
This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances:
- Low barrier to conversion (e-tailing)
- Business-to-business marketing – for instance Quocirca did some interesting research back in 2006 that showed endorsements by a finance directors peers at other companies was likely to have a positive effect on a prospective supplier
Brown & Fiorella’s thinking tends to fall down, when you deploy their approach to:
- Consumer marketing
- Mature product sectors
- Mature brands
Brand preference and purchase is much more dependent on reach and repetition to build familiarity and being ‘top-of-mind’ as a product.
Most money in influence marketing is spent in the consumer space as B2B marketing tends to struggle with:
- Reach
- Volume of conversation interaction
(At least outside of the US).
Brown and Fiorella are 180 degrees away from the approach of consumer marketing maven Byron Sharp and his ‘smart’ mass marketing approach. This means that PR and social agencies are often out-of-step with the thinking of marketing clients, their media planners and other agency partners.
Engagement matters less than reach or repetition of brand message for mature sectors or brands. For many consumer brands the drop off in engagement amongst macro-influencers is a non-issue, a red herring.
The only part of the engagement measure that I would be concerned about in that case would be content propagation amongst my defined target audience – how widely had it been repeatedly shared as this would affect total reach.
If the client and planner are using Sharp’s thinking then this audience would be wide, but a certain amount of the propagation would be wasted – for instance outside targeted geographies.
From the perspective of communications agencies I can understand the obsession with engagement being part of their DNA. These businesses are in the offline world are engagement agencies; whether its politicians, regulators, fashion stylists, movie set designers, editors, journalists, TV producers or DJs.
Why are micro-influencers a hot topic now?
The most obvious reason is that more popular ‘macro-influencers’ are well informed about their commercial value which has been driven up to a point where they look expensive in terms of cost, even if you charitably look at it on a ‘per follower’ basis.
On the supply side of the equation influencer representation benefit from having more ‘inventory’ that can be sold at various price points to marketers.
Challenges in influencer marketing
From a marketing perspective there are a number of issues in influencer marketing – these factors are either unknown data points or represent an issue with the brand experience
- Quality of brand placement
- Cost per reach
- Consistency of reach (how confident is the media planner that the influencer will achieve a certain level of reach)
- Message repetition amongst the audience that I want to reach
Which makes it harder to factor into an econometric model that would help justify the investment in influencer marketing as a contribution to sales.
Let’s have a look at data around a campaign for a smartphone manufacturer that has been touted as successful by the agency involved. We don’t know the cost as its likely to be client confidential.
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2 million YouTube views (we don’t know how many of these were driven by advertising)
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75,000 likes
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13,587,159 impressions driven by 6 influencers
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10,689 clicks from 90 posts
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10 million impressions for the promotion of a colour variant of the smartphone model and 92,320 engaged
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4.6% engagement rate (which we’re assured is 41% higher than the industry average for branded content)
What this doesn’t tell us:
- Reach amongst target audience
- Repetition amongst target audience
Which could then be used to provide an estimate of its contributory factor to sales if you had an econometrics model. You can’t access how it works next to other tactics and there are limited outtakes for the learning marketing organisation.
Quality of brand placement
Many brands have struggled to get their brand in the influencers content in a way that:
- Represents it in a meaningful way (for example beyond unboxing videos, one smartphone looks rather like another)
- Doesn’t feel ad-hoc or awkward
Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. (It’s obviously an oversight on their part that I haven’t had an invite yet.)
De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the best of both worlds: influencer marketing but with a high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the achieved reach.
There is a school of thought that micro-influencers will be easier to manage in order to assure quality of brand placement. However, micro-influencers are likely to be aspiring macro-influencers and each will have a clear line of demarcation in their own head that they won’t cross. The reality is one of complexity dependent on:
- Brand power
- Relationships
- Credibility of proposed idea
- Impact on aspirations – could they get more followers by taking a stand and strategically burning a brand?
Cost per reach
Influencers tend to talk about themselves in terms of the number of followers that they have. However many followers seldom engage with the influencers content. This happens for a number of reasons:
- The follow button is often used as a book mark or a like button
- Algorithmic changes to social platforms and the volume of the social firehouse itself drown out brands (and these influencers are all about the brand of ‘me’). Whatley and Manson’s research at Ogilvy on the decline of organic reach in Facebook pages is worthwhile having a look at
Followers as a data point is not the straight analogue of reach that the industry and influencers would have you believe based on how they present their data.
Reach numbers that are presented are often not that much more useful:
(Data via Golin, TapInfluence and Marriott)
Consistency of reach
So influencers may give us follower numbers or ‘total reach’ calculations but how do we know what reach their brand placement content is likely to achieve? At the moment, I don’t know how consistent influencers are, I have a ‘personal time’ data project currently in progress on it. More on that hopefully in a later post. There isn’t off-the-peg data that I know of, so I am pulling together a data set.
Message repetition
Until we understand the ‘quality of brand placement’ we wouldn’t be able to understand whether a piece of influencer content was a point of content delivery. We’d also need to know do audiences of influencer A also look at media channels or other influencers that we have in our overall media plan. There often isn’t an overall media plan and there often isn’t sufficient quality of audience data for influencers.
More information
Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach
– a great book, right up there with Ogilvy on Advertising in my estimation
