Category: Influencer Marketing

Brands are now integrated into all aspects of society, and consumers expect brands to take a stand on issues. Yet, in a world full of social media fads and bandwagon philanthropy, how can brands maintain authenticity, especially when partnering with influencers?

Align Cause Marketing With Your Brand’s Mission

Nearly two-thirds of consumers buy on belief¹, making a tremendous case for brands to tie purpose into their marketing campaigns. However, audiences are savvier and more skeptical than ever, and if consumers perceive a message to be inauthentic, they will challenge it, and potentially even boycott the brand. Choose your battles. You do not need to comment on every issue. To ensure authenticity, brands should select causes that align with their product, mission or foundational story, and each cause should be integrated across multiple touch points.

Speak Their Language

Typically, brands have more than one audience, and to connect with each may require slightly different messaging across different platforms. For example, an educational program may speak to parents by leaning into how the offering delivers specific skills to prepare their children for the next big chapter of their lives. When speaking directly to kids, the brand may highlight how fun the learning will be, and how kids will make friends for life. All of these messages are true and aligned, the brand is just working to highlight the aspect that will resonate more with each audience.

Be Timely… and Potentially Brave

To be relevant and play into the weekly, daily and hourly trends on social media, a brand has to be nimble and willing to take chances. We all remember Oreo’s 2013 Super Bowl blackout tweet “You can still dunk in the dark.” Another example of leaning into tension in a fun and engaging way is Edelman and Samsung’s timely response during the launch of the GS8. Samsung’s marketing campaign asked owners to share the first picture they took with the phone. A troll wrote, “It was a dick pic.” In response, Samsung replied with a single emoji: the microscope. The timely, on par humor won over the troll and the internet, garnering more than 72,000 retweets and positive sentiment (even from the troll). While this level of direct volley will not work for all brands, there are times when having a more candid conversation can be an extremely useful tactic—and perhaps an opportunity to leverage an influencer whose voice is aligned with the brand, but more easily able to speak directly to the audience in their language than the brand.  

Leverage Authentic Influencer Voices

Influencers have a direct-to-audience relationship that can be extremely valuable to brands. However, particularly when tying in purpose marketing, brands need to ensure that the influencers they partner with are also aligned on the same mission, and that the key messages the brand is looking to communicate are already present and resonating in the influencer’s current work. The influencer does not need to have expertise on every subject the brand is focused on, but they do need to have a level of authority on the messaging or integration that they are delivering on behalf of the brand. Ideally the influencer is creatively involved with the brand, and together they work to create content that speaks directly to their target audience, reaching them on the platform of their choice, in a voice that is both relatable and aspirational.

So align your causes to your mission. Know your voice, and that you do not need to speak up on everything. Know your audiences (including where they are and what is important to them), and vet influencers to be sure you partner with the ones who are best suited to take your messages forward. And show your brand’s personality. Take a few timely chances that are bold but still on brand. Because if you’ve done the work to establish your brand’s mission and voice, the chances of failure are fairly… microscopic. 

¹Edelman Earned Brand Study

The Three Biggest Mistakes Brands Make in Influencer Marketing

1. Can We Get Kim Kardashian?

Many brands, finally won over by the success stories of influencer marketing, decide to dive in and go big. They start listing celebrities or top digital influencers they (or their children) love. But every time a client excitedly asks me “Can we get Kim Kardashian?” my response is always “Possibly, but is she the best voice for your message?”

Mistake: Putting the cart before the horse. Or, in millennial speak, the creator before the strategy. The idea of starting by selecting influencer names is the first common mistake across all sizes of brands. It’s like trying to cast a movie before it’s been written.

Solution: Start with strategy. I cannot emphasize that enough. You can go big and wild (and often you should), but you must start by doing the work and grounding yourself in strategy. Establish the key messages, target audiences, and goals of this phase of the campaign. This information will inform your Call to Action and your platform strategy… which then informs your influencer strategy, and who the right influencer partner will be for your brand.

2. Here Is The Script (And 800 Products For The Background)

Influencer marketing is not a commercial. If you are working with digital influencers, AKA creators, chances are, they have become famous for creating and performing their own content.

Mistake: People flock to the influencer’s channel because of their voice. Not yours (sorry). So, your script will likely feel out of place and simply annoy the audience. In addition, these creators are not actors – they are not accustomed to delivering someone else’s material. Their content and brand integration should feel natural, not forced or overburdened with products.

Solution: Let them create!If you have done your strategic planning correctly, then their audience aligns with a target market you are going after, and they have the right voice to communicate your messages. If that’s true, then all you need to do (I make it sound easy, but call me, because there are a number of steps that go into this) is to brief the influencers correctly on your key messages and goals, and let them create (or at least co-create) the content. They know their audience better, and will create compelling content that will be on-brand for them and for you – and that will be much more likely win over their audience.

3. The Influencer Posted, Our Work Here Is Done

Far from it. Social media has gone pay-for-play. Between algorithms, the alleged de-prioritizing of branded posts, and all the noise on social, many influencers find that only about 2% of their audience sees their posts organically (i.e., without paid amplification to boost views).

Mistake: Assuming the majority of an influencer’s followers will see their posts. And, not maximizing the potential Return on Investment of your influencer campaign.

Solution: Amplify all influencer content. You don’t buy a nice car to leave it in your garage (or, at least that wasn’t my plan pre-Covid). There are various ways to amplify influencer content, including boosting views on the influencer’s channel (i.e., paying to ensure more of their audience will see the post), sharing the post on the brand’s channels, boosting the post on the brand’s channels, and running a paid media campaign with the assets to reach an audience beyond those following the influencer’s and the brand’s channels.

If you spend a little more time up front on the strategy, and a little of your budget on the amplification of content, you are going to see a much stronger performance on your campaign. Every time. With or without Kim Kardashian.

Influencer Archetypes

From Kim Kardashian to my cats, everyone is an influencer, but how do you determine the right influencer partners for your brand? Start by defining your campaign goals – are you looking for awareness, affinity, actions? Do you need to build trust or convey difficult messaging? Determine which type of influencer you need before you start looking at individual names and this will keep you focused on your campaign goals and guide your selection process.

Defining Influence

Influential at what? The word “influencer” has become a vague catchall as the industry scrambles to find a cohesive term people will identify with in a rapidly evolving social media landscape. But there are many types of influencers. On the grand scale there are Traditional and Digital, and we delineate further under each one. *

• Traditional Influencers – These are the influencers we have seen for many decades: Experts (professionals in their field) and Celebrities (famous through film, TV, music etc.)
• Digital Influencers – These are the talent that launched their career on social media, and grew from there. While there are numerous names for the various tiers, for simplicity sake, (and because “nano” and “power-middle” make my eye twitch) let’s break Digital Influencers into three buckets: Top-Tier, Mid-Tier, Micro.

Assigning Value

Each type of influencer brings a different set of potential attributes to your brand partnership, and there are, of course, pros and cons and nuances that go along with each, but here is a quick overview to help keep your team aligned on the types of influencers that will likely perform best given your goals and your budgets.

EXPERTS – Need to gain your audience’s trust?

• Pros: Experts with authority on the key messages you are trying to communicate lend credibility to your brand
• Cons: They may not be great at creating content, or have a substantial social media following on their own
• Best Practices: Leverage them for their credibility and share the content you have co-created on your brand’s channels, being sure to boost views with ample paid media

CELEBRITIES – Need to get broad awareness or buzz around a product or service?

• Pros: Substantial reach and name cachet
• Cons: Expensive and may not be great at creating authentic, brand integrated content
• Best Practices: Ensure your brand messaging is in line with their content and conversations, and be sure your initial offer to them is buttoned up (more on this later)

TOP-TIER DIGITAL – Want to be integrated into the content people are seeking out?

• Pros: Great at creating engaging custom content, often create longer form video which can communicate more information or deliver key messages thoroughly
• Cons: Costs can be high, and for campaigns to perform best you need to let talent drive the creative process
• Best Practices: Find past content they have created that has a similar tone to your ideal content, highlight the pieces you love, and let them have creative freedom

MICRO-INFLUENCERS – Need custom assets at scale? Want to test multiple key messages?

• Pros: Custom text and image assets created quickly at scale, niche audiences
• Cons: Smaller reach, some content quality and channel quality may vary
• Best Practices: Leverage multiple micro-influencers to create large numbers of assets, testing different key messages, share on brand’s channels and boost with paid media

As there are many nuances, stay tuned for upcoming deep dives expanding on the pros, cons, and best practices for each type of potential influencer partner in much more detail. Or reach out with your brand’s specific questions!

*Keep in Mind: While there is definitely crossover between traditional celebrities building large social followings, and top-tier digital influencers crossing over to be on film and TV, for the most part, those famous for being actors are not necessarily going to be excellent content creators for your brand (though some can afford teams to help with this), and those digital influencers known for brilliantly creating new custom videos capitalizing on their own antics, expertise or personalities, often fall flat when you hand them a script. For this reason, keeping the traditional vs digital delineation often helps determine the right type for your specific activation.

Photo by Nastya Gepp