December 11, 2017 6:18 pm
Published by Murray Legg
Once influencer search and collaboration are completed, the third and probably most important, pillar in any influencer marketing effort is measurement & reporting. We have written previously about a strategy to make the most of micro and macro influencers in a “rocks and pebbles” approach, and saw today a very well constructed analysis of L2 Insights‘ measurement of the efficacy of influencers. You can read the article in full here, but we’ve pasted below some of the key insights for your benefit.
We set out to determine the average lift in engagement associated with brand mentions of influencers of 10 different community sizes, ranging from fewer than 20,000 followers to over 7 million. Our sample includes 5,038 influencers partnered with 875 brands across 16 sectors.
Methodology: Our first task was to decide which influencers to study. We started at the brand level, cultivating a list of 875 brands balanced across sectors, and crawled these brands’ Instagram pages for mentions of other handles. Any handle that received more than one mention by the brand was flagged as an Influencer handle. The follower counts of these handles were collected, and all posts mentioning each handle were grouped.
Across the 5,038 handles mentioned, we calculated the average lift in engagement afforded by mentions of each influencer as follows:
Further analysis confirms that increased follower counts are perceived as more valuable by advertisers. Yet an overlay of all three data sets paints a clear picture of questionable efficiency in the influencer market. Many brands partner with middling influencers at middling prices in exchange for inefficiently low lifts in follower interactions. One can only wonder if these murky waters are in part muddied by cases of fraudulent influencer follower counts, resulting in low engagement in spite of large community sizes.
Key takeaways: Beware the middle ground. Micro and macro-influencers are associated with the highest lifts in engagement, while influencers with medium-sized followings produce relatively feeble results despite the relative expense incurred by working with them.
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September 14, 2017 11:46 am
Published by Webfluential
If you were a company you would care about which page on Google you appeared on, but you might also be interested in knowing how many times you appeared in searches in a month. As an influencer, you are an entrepreneur, so we’ve today released a feature to help you understand how marketers are discovering you on Webfluential.
A primary point of value that Webfluential provides tot he market is that it is a single point to discover many influencers, rather than spend days trawling through the web finding bloggers but then not knowing which one to pick over another. On Webfluential, marketers can discover your media kit in a number of ways, and how you are positioned to have them reach out to you to start a content collaboration, the better. These methods include:
Being found on Google
Webfluential features prominently on Google when marketers search for influencers. Your media kit might be discovered there, so some key factors to increase your chances of being booked are:
- Linking your Facebook Fan Page and Google Analytics, so the audience demographics are shown on your media kit
Promoting yourself on social media
You can share your media kit with your audience on Facebook or Twitter, and as the chances are good that there are brands and marketers in your audience, you increase the odds of being booked for a campaign. You can also make use of the Webfluential WordPress Plugin to take bookings from your website, which was covered in an article at launch.
Coming up inside the Webfluential marketer search results
Over 7500 brands, agencies and marketers search for influencers, creators and key opinion leaders every day. Coming up in those search results depends on a number of factors, namely:
- The more channels you have linked, the better. Add Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat
- Add as much detail to your media kit as you can. This includes featured work you’ve done with brands, a good description about content and audience, as well as tweets to showcase your online personality
- There are additional aspects that weigh on ranking such as how quickly you respond to briefs, requests from marketers to collaborate, and your rating from a marketer when a job is completed.
To start understanding how you are being found, log into your dashboard and open up your Media Kit Insights on the top right. There you’ll be able to see where in the world people were that were considering you, and in the section below, how they found you.
To increase your visibility, you can complete your profile, add tags and categories, and then share your media kit online. Here’s ours as a reference.
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August 30, 2017 9:26 am
Published by Webfluential
As commerce moves online and out of bricks and mortar stores, the storytellers that steer web traffic between the digital watering holes are poised to benefit immensely. The principle of a brand ambassador selling the lifestyle benefits of a particular brand, and people sharing that product experience with their friends and family is not new. Now, it’s just captured in the format of a digital key opinion leader (KOL) acting as a brand ambassador, with digital influencers sharing the product experience with their audience online.
Given the scale of audiences, brands, and the limited number of influencers who authentically engage online every day, those that play their strategies right, stand to become the businesspeople of the next decade. At Webfluential, our business model is built on the basis of helping people market and monetise their digital publishing platforms, and add value to their audiences as well as brands.
We work with creators and brands each day, so we want to share some of the insights we’ve learned through these experiences that will benefit influencers in their quest to make a career from their passions of creative content. In a three part content piece, we’ll share:
- The principles to live by and succeed as a digital entrepreneur
- The software that makes being an entrepreneur easy
- A list of additional resources and content that could come in handy
It’s by no means exhaustive, but a starting point of things to consider. If you’ve grown a trusting and engaged audience, have a track record of content and now want to include brands and their messages in the conversion, these are some key guidelines to position you for success.
- Remain truthful
Remain true to your content and your audience. Your unique creativity is how you developed your audience. Make sure your branded content is relevant to your audience, even though this might mean turning away certain brands. Growing and sustaining your audience is the only sustainable way to grow as a brand collaborator.
- Sell value, not reach
We’ve seen so many influencers pitch their reach to brands, only to be shown the door. With the thousand pound gorillas of Facebook and Google in the room, reach is not an issue for brands, it’s the way that content has been created to extend the brand message to the right audience.
- Showcase your track record
For most marketers, there’s work to be done vetting a long list of potential KOLs into a shortlist of content that they can share with their brand. By making a showcase page or media kit easily available through links in your bio, you increase your chances of getting onto that shortlist.
- Share in the risk
Being precious about limiting what you’ll do in exchange for a product, fee, or combination of the two will scare off brands. Often, brands are “dating” a number of influencers to ultimately find and grow their long term ambassadors. Just by going the extra mile on content, engagement and additional posts will differentiate you from the crowd.
- Put lines in the water
Given the rapid growth in the industry, there are a number of influencer platforms that offer accessibility to brands and marketers. Create profiles on a number of these. Our favourites are Famebit, Tapinfluence, and ourselves, of course.
- Network
Pitching a proposal to [email protected] might help you sleep easier at night, but it’s not going to earn you that next cheque. Networking digitally and IRL with the brand strategists, buyers and other influencers. Often, the marketing or brand decision maker is a person who loves creative content as much as you do, if they don’t already follow you.
David Ogilvy had twenty tips to win clients. Given that you’ve started in the same place as he did, with a single idea to inspire audiences, you might find these tactics applicable to your efforts, too.
Let us know what tips you have that have found to be handy in the career of digital creator. Next time, we’ll share insights on our favourite software that will help you run your business as a digital entrepreneur.
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