March 9, 2017 12:37 pm
Published by Murray Legg
Every day there’s a disruption to the process of retailing. Amazon is now the biggest retailer of fashion. Laast month, Berkshire Hathaway, the investment firm run by Warren Buffett, sold 90% of its holdings in Walmart because it believes the traditional approach of retailing is changing fast. What’s core to these changes? The consumers are spoilt for choice, deals, and convenience through delivery and easy exchange. The question remains, which marketing and advertising initiatives work best in light of these changes?
What’s staying very much the same is that retailers have to continue advertising to their prospective audiences. More digital players are retailing through e-commerce (e-tailing) and are attracting potential customers from where they spend a lot of their time: online.
Influencer marketing is the traditional approach to “word of mouth”, but in a 2017 setting. It is collaborating with a credible creator to produce content and share it with audiences by highlighting the retailer’s brand, campaign, or specific product. Awareness leads into a funnel of conversion, and ultimately, a sale. To help motivate your next marketing initiative, here are some of the important motivators behind the use of influencer marketing as a core strategy.
Influencers are your partners in user-generated content
Imagine having any number of creative agencies on tap, each owning access to a niche audience that you’re after, who can work with your brand to share relevant content? Creators understand the product or service in a way that’s important to their audience. They help brands make meaningful marketing material for their target market.
Influencers help build trust and credibility
If you’re a brand breaking into a new territory or a startup with a new product wanting to launch, your brand probably lacks credibility. The most promising way to make up for that is by leveraging the social credibility of a creator and making use of their reach to convey your message to a wide audience.
Celebrate your customers like celebrities
Not every brand can afford Justin Bieber as their brand advocate. Forbes recently covered the rise of the micro-influencer, the everyman with a social following of 10,000 people. Enabling them, and rewarding them, for being brand advocates can do wonders for sustained awareness online. Attracting their friends and people of similar interests to buy your product or service.
Create experiences for consumers
Associating the experience of the outdoors with your dog and buying a vehicle to enable that full experience is where you will need great storytellers to share their experience, and bridge the gap from the showroom floor to the smell of the forest. Creators provide a means to share the use cases of your product or service with their audiences and convert the consumers from the phase of consideration to action.
Research online purchase offline (“ROPO”)
More consumers will ask friends and family about their potential decision before making a purchase and run a search for reviews on the product or service. By sharing content through influencers, this becomes a readily available source of insight from respected peers in assisting with the purchase decision.
As a brand, if you were spending money on traditional advertising or display media, influencer marketing provides the same access to audience with the added benefits of credibility. Influencer marketing can also stimulate a feedback loop to learn about how the market receives and interacts with your product or service. The cream on top is the trust and credibility that tips a person considering your product, to actually buying it. Try your first campaign today.
Making use of great influencer marketing technology to leverage and report on your efforts also helps you win at your influencer marketing campaigns.
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January 10, 2017 3:18 pm
Published by Kirsty Sharman
With sites like Forbes, SocialMediaToday and Adweek listing Influencer Marketing as one of the hottest trends to watch in 2017, we thought it was time to give our registered marketers more features and flexibility – empowering your brands to make an impact through influencers in 2017.
Most marketers understand Webfluential to be an influencer marketing agency – but what most marketers don’t know is that all the tools and technology required to find influencers are available to use as self-serve. In addition, we have recently introduced regional agency partnerships – to support marketers with the running of larger scale campaigns. Our accredited partners can be found here.
If you’re already registered as a marketer – I’d like to encourage you to log into your Webfluential account and have a look around. If you aren’t, you can register here to try out the platform for free. You’ll be able to see first hand just how easy it is to find and connect with the right influencers, you’ll also be able to see all the new benefits you have access to once you upgrade your account. If you’re not quite ready to upgrade, you’ll still have access to our partners to help you run great campaigns.
This is a sneak peek under the hood of the new Webfluential self-serve platform:
Connecting with influencers has never been so simple
Get influencers to pitch creative ideas to you
Build relationships with influencers in your Networks (please note that managed Networks are only available through partners)
Chat directly to influencers about briefs and pricing
Think of how Hootsuite helps you run your social campaigns, and how Adwords helps you run your search ads. In the same way, Webfluential and Webfluential accredited partners can help you run your Influencer Marketing campaigns. The above images show the tools that can help you overcome the challenges you expect walking into your first influencer marketing campaign.
The new features below will help you with the challenges you only discover once you get going…
Guidance on pricing: helping you understand how much to pay
Ensuring your campaign is a success and that each influencer delivers
Creating basic reports for all your campaigns
PLEASE NOTE: The trial period on your marketer account will only last a few days so login to upgrade if you are looking to utilize the self-serve platform. Alternatively, you can get in touch with one of our partners via our partner directory found here.
Webfluential accredited partners offer a wider support network to brands and agencies looking to run large scale influencer campaigns. If you don’t have the time, experience or resources to run your own brand campaigns then you’ll have access to regional partners to help you do so. Webfluential currently has Partner agencies in South Africa, UAE, United Kingdom and South America.
Our partners have years of experience working with content, media, and Influencers, across multiple verticals. They also run a premium Webfluential technology stack, which means they have access to deeper influencer analytics, the ability to manage influencer networks on your behalf, paid media integration and most importantly – fully integrated reporting on campaigns. The images below are just some of the examples of what our partners can offer.
Costings for large scale campaigns, including management
Campaign Management tools, with paid media integration
Creating integrated reports for campaigns
Track only reports for brands and clients to find the most relevant influencers in real time
PLEASE NOTE: Managed Networks are exclusive to Clockwork Media in South Africa, so if you already have a network of influencers and you’d like to manage them more effectively please get in touch with Clockwork Media through your ‘Partners’ tab.
That’s it from us, if you’re looking to understand a bit more around how influencer marketing can work in your brands vertical you can see some examples of influencer campaigns here. If you’re ready to get going, and kick start your 2017 with an Influencer campaign, then head over to our marketers area to get going. Good luck!
Kirsty Sharman
Head Of Global Operations
https://webfluential.com/marketers
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January 1, 2017 11:02 am
Published by Webfluential
Why is it changing?
Until now, Webfluential has subsidized all the costs related to serving our creator community. These costs include the cost of acquiring and servicing our network of over 5,000 marketers, sourcing you campaign work, giving you a great platform at no cost, and helping you connect with the right opportunities, and educating you on being a better creator.
From January, Webfluential will introduce a charge of 12.5% service fee for creators on work that they receive from Partner campaigns and job requests from marketers. This is in line with universally accepted fee structures for P2P and B2C online marketplaces and will allow us to continue serving creators with the best technology without membership fees. In effect, we are giving you access to all of the technology free-of-charge until you make any money through offers that come to you, that you otherwise wouldn’t have received.
For work that you proactively seek out, through the Proposals module, will have no service charge for creators as the time and effort to create a proposal and find a marketer largely remains with the creator.
What is changing?
These updates apply to all creators within the Webfluential community. The updates are described in the table below:
| Job Type | 2016 | 2017 |
Campaign Job
Campaign booked through a Webfluential Partner | No service fees for creators | 12.5% service fee |
Direct Job
Campaign booked through Job Board or Collaboration (Booking Form) | No service fees for creators | 12.5% service fee |
Proposal
Campaign booked through a Proposal created by creator | No service fees for creators | No service fees for creators |
How does this affect me?
The service fee will be taken from your rate-card rate for the relevant campaign or direct job. We have provided a simple example below to explain the affect on your earnings:
| Before Fee Update | After Fee Update |
You have set your price as $100 to post content
Creators earns $100 | The marketer pays $100 for your content to be posted.
$12.50 service fee charged by Webfluential
Creator earns $87.50 |
As a creator you have the final say on your pricing per channel and are free to adjust however and whenever. Feel free to adjust your pricing in line with the market rates, and account for this change relative to how you wish to charge for your work.
Should you have any further questions in regards to this service fee, feel free to contact us at influencers@webfluential.com
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