Tag Archive: Influencers

Brands look to influencer marketing to drive awareness and sales

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.

Share this article

Webfluential reaches 10,000 authenticated influencers in its marketplace

September 5, 2016 1:09 pm Published by Murray Legg

10,000 hours to master a subject. 10,000 steps per day to maintain a healthy life. 10,000 influencers to illustrate credibility in the influencer marketing industry.

When we started Webfluential, we wanted to build a data driven business, built for influencers to help them market and monetize their passion for content. To have the best data on hand to inform the statistical models that run over every bit of content our influencers create, we needed to build the trust and credibility with them to sign up, link their channels, and allow us to set the wheels of brand and influencer engagement in motion.

Today we celebrate 10,000 authenticated influencers on Webfluential. 10,000 people that trust us as their partners to work with them in growing their commercial capabilities by working effectively and transparently with brands to engage with audiences across the world. A big thank you must go out to the four principal drivers of our business – our staff, our influencers, our clients and our shareholders, without you, we’d never have grown the innovative and exciting business we have over the past three years.

We can certainly commit to our network of influencers, who now reach a combined audience of 380 million people globally, that we’ll continue to offer you the products, education and support required to establish your talent for content creation into an exciting new business.

Thank you for the road you’ve all walked with us. We look forward to the coming chapters with you!

Share this article

Influencer Marketing to play a big role in the Future of Brands

July 20, 2016 7:50 am Published by Kirsty Sharman

We’ve written a number of articles before highlighting the importance of Influencer Marketing and why more brands and marketers should care and start taking notice. This is starting to take shape with more established entities who are realizing the advantage that lies in collaborating with influencers to reach the right audience instead of sticking to the old tried and trusted means of advertising.

A perfect example of this comes in the shape of Unilever’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer (CMO), Keith Weed who, according to a blog post on JWT, spoke about “The Future of Brands” in his keynote address at Cannes Lions 2016. In the talk, Weed spoke about how consumers engage brands that challenge stereotypes and address issues of environmental and social responsibility with a specific look at the typical stereotypical portrayal of women in advertisements:

“We need to find a different way of representing beauty and move to a much more enjoyable, non-critical perspective in reflecting women and how they are in everyday life.” – Keith Weed.

In the same talk he stressed the importance of how brands need to start moving away from these (usual) stereotypes and be more progressive by challenging the status quo in their advertising campaigns. The same post goes on to highlight Weed stating two approaches as being the best representations for the future of brands, namely:

I: Individuals/influencers/impacts
N: exponentially raising the power of the I’s

“It’s no longer enough for advertisements to speak to a certain age cohort or demographic – they must target individuals.”

“One of the best ways to reach individuals is through influencers and brand ambassadors. Weed explained how campaigns can be magnified by identifying “what people are talking about and who the power influencers are.” Unilever used supermodel Kendall Jenner to promote the launch of Magnum Double last year in Cannes. According to the company’s research, purchase intent goes up 5.2 times if campaigns use influencers, like celebrities.”

Read more on J. Walter Thomson Worldwide.

Webfluential’s Account and Content Manager, Thabiso Moloi, originally wrote this piece for BizCommunity. You can view the original article here.

Share this article