June 26, 2018 11:50 am
Published by Webfluential
According to the founder of Dicks and Betties, Steve Bryant, there are only two ways to tell your story. You can find the original article here, but we’ve summarised the key points of the article below.
On getting attention
Brands do not want attention, primarily they want revenue. A brand acquires revenue by selling its products. However, in order to sell their product, they must first get people to pay attention to their product. So by default, every brand is in the business of getting attention before it gets revenue.
The only way to get attention is to tell stories and there are only really two ways to tell stories – Tell your story, or, get others to tell your story.
Getting others to tell your story
The challenge: Storytellers want to tell the brands story in their own way.
The opportunity: Storytellers have large audiences. Storytellers have large audiences because their stories cater to their audiences’ needs and aspirations. Their audience cares and wants to hear the storyteller’s story. When others tell your story, you rent their audiences’ trust.
Telling your story to others
The challenge: When you tell your own story you have control of that story, however you reach a smaller audience. Instead of understanding your audience you are asking your audience to understand you.
The opportunity: When you tell your own story you create trust with your smaller audience. Trust over time equals a growing audience. But there is no trust without consistency.
The third way
We said up front that there are only two ways. But actually, there’s a third way. Don’t tell your story at all. Tell your audience a story about themselves. Tell a story about an aspirational topic that exists between you and your audience that is born out of mutual interest.
This is how Vanity Fair or WIRED works. Editors who are experts in their field, tell stories about the topics that they are experts in, to an audience who are already interested in those topics. For Editors, these topics are an expression of their expertise, while for the audience these topics are an expression of their aspirations.
An example of this is how Google is in the business of selling information, and Google’s Think Quarterly covers the future of marketing.
By being customized to your interest, Facebook and Instagram work in the exact same way. They are interested in telling you stories that you are interested in.
That’s where influencer marketing finds its sweet spot between creators and brands. Mutual interest between brand and audience, in a story, told by a credible creator. So, pay attention to the stories people want to hear. There’s money in that banana stand.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Feel free to share this post with your audience.
Start working with influencers by creating a marketer account here. If you’re an influencer, sign up here or if you are already registered, login here.
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June 19, 2018 2:59 pm
Published by Murray Legg
Influencers can be powerful brand allies, but these collaborations require an entirely new approach to marketing, according to Carat Global Chief Strategy Officer Sanjay Nazerali. The original article can be sourced here, but for your benefit, we’ve captured the highlights.
Together with YouTube and Nielsen, the team from Carat analyzed the results of hundreds of brand and creator videos in the U.S. and the U.K. to understand the impact of influencers for brands. This is what they found:
1. Influencer marketing is not the same as celebrity marketing
YouTube influencers, however vast their reach, are absolutely not “today’s celebrities,” and celebrity marketing and influencer marketing offer fundamentally different benefits for brands.
Typically, celebrities are more effective at driving recall than creators (84% versus 73%). Given that a celebrity’s job is to be famous and memorable, that makes sense.
Where YouTube creators really start to gain the upper hand is in deeper brand involvement. Brand familiarity is a good example. If we want an audience to really understand us, our work, our values, or our products, then collaborations with YouTube creators are 4X more effective at driving lift in brand familiarity than those with celebrities [see the data].2
When it comes to purchase intent, it’s an even match: our research found that influencers were just as likely as celebrities to drive buying decisions [see the data].3
Celebrity marketing and influencer marketing offer fundamentally different benefits for brands.
2. It’s not just a ‘beauty’ thing
Beauty brands were one of the first to team up with influencers and creators have established a huge presence among the YouTube beauty community. About 86% of the top 200 beauty videos on YouTube were made by creators rather than professionals or brands.[see the data]
But what’s interesting about the findings is just how far YouTube influencers stretch beyond the beauty category.
In nine additional categories, including auto, alcohol, snacks, and toys, working with influencers lead to lifts in brand metrics, from familiarity to affinity to recommendation.
3. The ‘how’ matters as much as the ‘who’
Celebrity marketing has historically focused on endorsement, sponsorship, and product placement. Influencer marketing has developed far more options, and it’s important to understand which of these work best—and for which marketing goals.
Research found that deep thematic integrations with creators drove the highest results for brands. These are more involved integrations where the influencer plays a role in creating a piece of content—such as a demo—with the brand. They’re far deeper than product placements and they work more effectively.
While there were many consistencies across categories, there are also some nuances, which are important for brands to understand. Simpler brand integrations, like a product endorsement or an ad featuring a creator, also showed positive results for brand affinity in all categories tested.
4. Don’t lose sight of why people love YouTubers
We often assume that the right YouTube influencer is either an aspirational version of our target audience or that they’re just like celebrities. Neither of these assumptions is correct, and it’s perhaps here that celebrity and influencer marketing differ the most.
Whereas celebrities need to be trendy and stylish, consumers expect creators to be friendly, funny, and sometimes irreverent.
Irreverence is interesting because it drives credibility. Irreverence strongly suggests independence, and it’s this that builds trust. It can also be incredibly valuable for brands. If a creator usually ridicules things they don’t like, you can be sure that when they praise something, they mean it.
Influencer marketing is more than a bandwagon. It’s a powerful, scaled form of communication.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Feel free to share this post with your audience.
Start working with influencers by creating a marketer account here. If you’re an influencer, sign up here or if you are already registered, login here.
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May 21, 2018 1:45 pm
Published by Murray Legg
As influencer marketing continues to become a staple part of any brand’s digital media mix, we’re proud to welcome two new businesses to our Partner network in South Africa and Slovenia.
Nfinity Media in South Africa has acquired the rights to the Webfluential license in South Africa. The company will run the Webfluential business in the country and use its expertise to build the brand further. Nfinity will not just offer influencer marketing strategies and campaigns to the market, but also support growth in the influencer community, drive industry awareness and overall education about this emergent media channel. There remain a number of existing Partner agencies in South Africa that will continue to evangelise influencer marketing for their brands.
“Influencer marketing is on the rise, with more brands realising that recommendations from people are becoming more powerful than direct advertising,” says Ken Varejes, founder and CEO of Nfinity Media.
Webfluential is launching in Slovenia by the able team of AVI SPLET d.o.o. Tjaša Bogeljić, head of communications, says “V Sloveniji se veliko podjetij in agencij poslužuje influencer marketinga na napačen način – za doseg svojih ciljnih skupin izbirajo influencerje predvsem na podlagi števila sledilcev in nimajo vpogleda v tiste elemente, ki so za postavitev uspešne strategije ključnega pomena. Podjetja manualno upravljajo oglaševalske aktivnosti z influencerji kar terja veliko časa pa tudi denarja. Zato smo se odločili našemu tržišču ponuditi Webfluential, orodje, ki omogoča podjetjem izvajanje kampanj z influencerji na hiter, enostaven in predvsem učinkovit način ter jim nudi natančen vpogled v povračilo njihove naložbe.”
“In Slovenia, many marketers choose influencers primarily on the basis of the number of their followers and do not have the insights into the key elements for setting up a successful strategy to reach the right target groups. Marketers manually manage campaigns and that cost them a lot of time and money as well. That’s why we decided to offer Webfluential in our market, a platform that enables companies to manage campaigns with influencers in a quick, easy and above all efficient way that ensures much better returns.”
Webfluential is a software platform that offers brands a self-serve product for smaller campaigns and an enterprise product typically run by agencies. Accredited agencies offer highly effective campaign strategy, influencer selection, execution and reporting to their brands.
Webfluential currently has 35 Partners operating on six continents. Many global clients also utilise Webfluential to run their influencer marketing programmes. As part of an aggressive global roll-out strategy, the company is offering a select number of licenses in countries of Europe, Australia, Latin America and the US. A single franchise license for select countries is also available.
Interested parties can contact our partner team on partners@webfluential.com or find out more on the website.
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