YouTubers are rewriting the rules of influencer marketing

June 19, 2018 2:59 pm Published by

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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Webfluential now represented on six continents with 35-strong Partner Network

May 21, 2018 1:45 pm Published by

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 [email protected] or find out more on the website.

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Shared Value: A Sustainable Approach to Influencer Relationships

April 5, 2018 9:25 am Published by

In most influencer campaigns, there are three primary stakeholders. You are probably one of them; a brand, an influencer, and an audience. Each of you has something unique to gain from the other as well as something unique to offer. Being able to both contribute and benefit is where the concept of shared value originates.

Shared value is a philosophy and a business practice that should be explored and practiced to make all those in an influencer marketing ecosystem happy. The long-term benefits of shared value relationships are loyalty, impact, enhanced communication, better return on investment and financial reward.

Let’s start with understanding the big picture, the needs of all stakeholders and where these overlap.

This graph shows some of the objectives, goals, and desires of the three groups. These are not ALL of the possible goals of each, but an example for the sake of getting across the point. You can substitute the ambitions for all on a campaign by campaign basis.

Here are some ways you can ensure you foster an environment of shared value:

  • An audience wants to be understood by a brand. Brands want to better understand their consumers. Influencers can offer a solution for both sides by providing brands with relevant insights into their audience. I have found that market research with influencers is a super underutilized benefit of influencer collaborations!

  • Influencers can take advantage of the additional production value of working with brands to create high quality, authentic content that their audience wants to consume and engage with.

  • The brand’s objective to amplify their content can be correlated to the influencers goal of getting paid for access to their audience. When a brand remunerates an influencer, they receive greater reach and impact.

  • When brands collaborate with influencers to build advocacy, influencers solidify their business, brands receive added value from the influencers and audiences develop stronger loyalty to the brand.

These are just a few of the cases where value can be shared by the community around your brand. It is important for brands not to think of themselves as islands, but as contributors to a wider economy of values. When starting to think about a strategy that involves influencer, consider using the graphic above as a template which you can fill in with your own unique objectives.

This is a concept that takes time and practice to get right. We need to be open to learning, making mistakes and trying again. When the result is one in which everyone wins, the effort is compounded to produce long-term results.

It’s important to note that sharing value does not mean meeting everyone’s needs. As a brand, you do not need to contribute something that does not provide a reciprocated value. Similarly, influencers need not provide a service if it does not benefit them to do so. Brands, influencers, and audiences are on their own journeys to meet their goals. The magic happens when there is overlap in the journey.

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