July 3, 2018 2:05 pm
Published by Cara Shepherd
Every year for the past four years TIME has produced a list of the most influential people on the internet. The reason we are so encouraged by their lists is that they don’t simply include people with the highest followings. For the longest time, Webfluential have preached that high following does not always equal influence. Influence is a much more meaningful metric. Influence is the thing that causes action. These are our top picks from a digital point of view.
You can see the full TIME’s list here.
Logan and Jake Paul
Internet personalities Logan and Jake Paul
Easily the most controversial of YouTube stars, this fraternal duo have lost ad sponsors and been given a bad rap on the knuckles by YouTube for posting a disturbing video in the infamous Japanese “suicide forest” allegedly including a body. Never the less, both Paul and Jake sustain eternally loyal fans. Their accumulated net worth is around $24 million according to Forbes and with apparel lines and record deals on the table, they show no signs of slowing down.
Naomi Watanabe
Japanese actress, comedian, and fashion designer Naomi Watanabe
Watanbe has over
8 million followers on Instagram, and is Japan’s most famous Instastar. Her comedic persona mixed with her over the top fashion sense and her image-positive rhetoric has established her in as a role model not only in Japan but also, globally. With fashion endorsement deals from the likes of Gap and others, as well as her own fashion line
Punyus she is one to watch and learn from.
Sia Cooper (a.k.a. @DiaryOfAFitMommyOfficial)
Cooper is one of those Instagrammers who unknowingly hacked the Instagram Algo change in January this year. Her habit of consistently commenting on some of Instagram’s top accounts is the cause. When the algorithm change came into effect, her comments showed up as one of two “sticky” comments on accounts like Kim K and Chrissy Teigan. She
told Vogue that she gained 80,000 new followers after the algorithm’s change. She is now one of the most recognised Instagram accounts on the platform.
Kayla Itsines
Personal Trainer Kayla Itsines
Easily the most influential fitness and health influencer, Kayla shook up the lives of thousands of people with her Bikini Body Guide ebook. Her app, Sweat, is the highest-grossing app in Apple’s fitness and health category, bringing in $77 million this year alone. No doubt one of the most effective marketing strategies Kayla used was activating user-generated content by asking her customers to post before and after posts of their transformations which they did and continue to do in multitudes. Just check out the hashtag #bbg for proof.
Lil Miquela
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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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