Your Weekly Influencer Marketing Update 🚀
01.03.2021
☀️ Happy Monday! ☀️
The influencer effect: 'Love Island star transformed my business'
What a great start to the week! The BBC has published an article on its website that talks about influencers/influencer marketing positively. Hopefully this will be the start of more to come. The scene has to - of course - be set with the insightful sentence below:
Say the word "influencer" and you may well hear audible groans - they don't always enjoy the best of reputations.
During the pandemic, a struggling local furniture business called Still & Bloom decided to shift from a physical to an online business, focusing on digital platforms such as Etsy and Instagram.
A few months in, Love Islander Olivia Bowen, featured one of Still & Bloom’s products on an interior design account run by the celebrity. The company’s owner reached out and she offered to make a video of the product, tagging the company in the process.
What followed was audience growth and sales for the small, family run business in Hampshire - and the company has not paid for any of the engagements (yet), either. On the topic of potentially paying creators in the future, the owner says:
"If you have one million followers that is a full-time job, and it's stressful. Anyone can message you anything they want, it's all consuming. It's only fair that they should be able to earn some sort of income from it. It provides a huge service to everyone."
The article then talks to an influencer agency - which provides us with the following advice:
"It's important to just look at that top level follower number - but you also have to understand the authenticity, what sort of relationship the creator has with their audience.
💡 Our Opinion
First off, I have to say it’s great to see some positive influencer (marketing) exposure on the BBC!
If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, I don’t have to tell you that influencers have the potential to shift the needle in a meaningful way. They can sell out products, they can make small businesses bloom, they’re able to reach new audiences, and (most of them) are able to convey messages in an authentic, meaningful way.
I enjoyed reading the example in the article, where an influencer purchased something on their own accord, without necessarily being paid to promote it.
In the example of Still & Bloom, the owner could have gone to an agency and drop £30,000 on an influencer campaign where tech would have dictated the “right” creator for the brand, and there could have been a lot of short-term #paid content generated but the impact of Olivia Bowen finding his products by herself, and falling in love with it organically is much more effective - and allows for a direct relationship to be built between brand and influencer. Something that £30,000 would have prohibited him from doing.
This leads me to my main point - and this is coming from someone who has agency, tech, and brand experience.
The industry is too influencer centric
The conversation is too often about finding the right influencer for your brand - and rarely about the value you can bring and creating the right conditions for influencers to find you.
Most platforms & agencies focus heavily on the outward identification of influencers, and the majority now have their home made, generalist scores that help determine who the right fit is. Realistically though, you end up in one of two situations:
A) you have to do a lot of heavy lifting, and become a keyword guru to obtain the right results.
B) you tend to receive a “ranked” list of influencers in any given category - which tends to be limited.
An alternative (as showcased by the BBC article), perhaps more cost effective and authentic starting point would be asking for social handles when people purchase your product - so you can cross-reference at a later point, or actively identifying who is talking about / mentioning your brand. The best part is that anyone can do this.
We’ve spoken before at length about how the industry tends to view influencers and creators from an “external” perspective, rather than an integrated one. The goal is often to pay creators to deliver short-term oomph to boost whatever you/your client may be doing.
In other terms - people tend to “push” messaging out to influencers and aligning them with with what you have to say, versus “pulling” influencers in with value and a relevant narrative, and providing an opportunity to fall in love with what you have to offer, and empowering them to create fantastic content around it. Something that clearly worked foor Still & Bloom.
If the starting point and only lever you can pull in a relationship between brand and influencer is cash instead of the ability to add actual value - it’s not going to bring you a long-term, sustainable partnership. Reading the article, and looking at some of the content that Olivia has tagged Still & Bloom in, they are off to a great start. And that’s not even mentioning the earned PR that’s been generated by the BBC.
🏭 Industry Headlines
Study Reveals Instagram Reels Better For Brands, TikTok Better For Influencers
Markerly, an influencer marketing agency, recently analyzed posts from 80 influencers and 10 brands on both TikTok and Instagram and found Reels is currently the best place for brands, whereas TikTok remains Queen of influencer and celebrity culture. According to the study, celebrities and influencers received almost double the likes and engagement on TikTok as compared to Reels. Meanwhile, brands such as the NBA demonstrated that the same post on TikTok received over 63K likes versus 425K on Reels.
The rise of the creator house
Houses like the one in Nashville have increasingly come to market, though with various names: There are creator houses, content creation studios, creation spaces and hype houses in locales from Los Angeles to Atlanta. For its part, Note House has Of Note as the middleman and conduit for local influencers to connect with major national brands. At the same time, it provides a one-stop shop for brands like H&M, L’Oreal, and Bauble Bar (all of which have worked with Of Note) to infiltrate a mid-sized city. Among Of Note’s influencers, the largest segment of their followers lives in Nashville at least 95% of the time. Of Note requests analytics from all of its members prior to joining Note House so it can track this type of data.
How influencer marketing will evolve as Gen Z's sway grows
Social influencers are poised to have a bigger presence in advertising campaigns in 2021 as marketers eye younger consumers who spend more time online. That engagement will help to support several key trends this year, including the evolution of social media creators into long-term brand ambassadors and the growing role of customers who act as influencers.
Newness raises $3.5 million for its ‘Twitch for beauty streamers’
Newness, a startup co-founded by former Twitch employees, has raised $3.5 million in a Sequoia-led seed round for its live-streaming platform aimed at beauty creators and their fan communities. Though today’s creators are not without options when it comes to livestreaming — Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook are all popular choices — Newness is focused on building differentiated tools and features that work well for the beauty streamer market in particular. This includes offering options for both public and private streams, engagement mechanisms that reward positive contributions, moderation features and the ability for fans to earn access to free beauty products by community participation.
The time for esports’ professionalization is now
With traditional sports and entertainment evaporating overnight amid the COVID-19 outbreak last spring, esports became the solution for stakeholders across many industries to ensure the show did indeed go on. This resulted in the injection of professional gaming into the social mainstream, providing hours of entertainment for content-starved audiences while playerbases skyrocketed as a means of staying connected during a time when many were apart.