Influencer Marketing

There are memes everywhere about “the rise of the influencer”.  The reality is – influencers can be good to reach your target market.  But that is the key question – who can influence your target customers?

What to watch out for:

One of the larger fallacies is the use of vanity metrics in a measure of value.  Sometimes one will see influencers that identify their reach as the sum of the followers among multiple platforms.  The reality is that many individuals will follow a personality on every platform – which artificially inflates the overall number.

Another vanity metric problem that gets misunderstood is the number of likes/follows for single platforms.  Which may sound great, but are those potential customers.  I have done a deep dive into influencer accounts to really find out that from the 25k likes/Followers on Facebook or Instagram, they might have less than 50 within an hours drive of your business.  Unless you are an online business – do they help people drive to see you?

The other aspect of an influencer is the demographic data.  Is the age group of the influencer follower base in alignment with your desired target market?

Now, don’t expect someone trying to make money as an influencer to openly give complete access to their analytics and data, but those are questions to be asked.  There are other avenues for you to passively assess their quality.

 One of the things to consider is how the engagement rates compare.  To do this – look at the influencer with the larger account – when you see a post, how many likes/comment do they have vs your existing business account.  You will be surprised to see that they may have 10x the follower count, but might not get more engagement on a post.

There have been a number of blog posts and articles in recent times for what I will call “the rise of the micro influencer”.  This phenomenon is showing that vanity metrics and big numbers aren’t what a business wants or needs.  It pays homage in entrepreneurial speak to having 100 true friends vs 10000 acquaintances.  If an influencer has a small engaged following of people in your target demographic, they hold more value to a marketer than a bigger channel that may have larger reach – but won’t reach the right potential customer.

Another factor to consider is the “brand” of the influencer.  In marketing terms – the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL).  As the influencer space grows, the content and quality of the influencer is important.  Many have built a following over antics and shenanigans that have landed influencers in front of a judge in this quest for likes/follows.  Is that the spokesmodel you want for your business?  Making headlines for the wrong reasons – the answer might be yes based on what you want to get from this influencer.  Probably not, but it could be.

There is another term coming in the marketing space similar to influencer marketing, but that is called User Generated Content (UGC), but that is the topic for the next blog post.