This year, influencer marketing is forecasted to grow to somewhere in the region of $9-10billion globally. This represents significant confidence in this marketing activity and surveys have shown that 89% of marketeers believe the ROI from influencer marketing is comparable or better than other channels (Mediakix). Digging deeper, this belief is not always backed up by data or confidence in actual sales. This belief is largely anecdotal and, unfortunately, few brands have managed to measure the actual impact of their influencer marketing. 

Whilst there is certainly no lack of appetite from brands to drive the influencer charge, the pandemic and various economic factors have accelerated the need for the existing model to mature rapidly, to offer brands more accountable and enhanced measurement, tied to ROI.  It is not only in the interest of brands themselves trying to justify every media pound invested during times of economic uncertainty, but also influencers who are seeing contracts change rapidly as industries are impacted differently by the pandemic. Influencers also need to make themselves stand out from the competition and be able to tie their posts back to revenue for the brands they are promoting. 

This could drive the next iteration of how brands view and collaborate with influencers through an influencer maturity index. The below framework will allow brands to plot themselves in different stages of maturity: 

Nascent is to drive Reach 

Influencers are great for driving reach organically – without using paid advertising – and for reaching an engaged, organic audience on platforms like Instagram. Both large and micro-influencers are able to drive incremental reach for marketing campaigns. 

For this type of influencer marketing, the main metric is reach. Beyond this, advertisers often look to measure effectiveness through superficial metrics like post engagement. The reason this is superficial is because of the difficulty associated with finding a clear correlation between engagement rate and business outcomes. This is consistent with relatively new marketing disciplines or platforms, for example, Facebook discovered this a few years back and began to discourage like or engagement campaigns and looked to bolster measurement capabilities. 

Engagement on posts is also extremely circumstantial – for example, a post that asks for likes and comments to enter a competition or to respond to a polling question will always get far superior likes and comments than a post that is simply an influencer showing how they use a product they are promoting in their everyday lives. This type of influencer activity has led to advertising fatigue through posts driving artificially inflated likes, shares and comments as opposed to really delivering the brand’s message, tone and value proposition. 

At this level of maturity, influencer marketing is acting like a broadcast channel or at worst like pop-up ads. 

Emerging is to be Relevant

Reach for reach’s sake is not useful. The whole power of influencers’ organic posts is an interested audience. By selecting the right audience, that reach can also be relevant. Often, brands will start out with broad-reach influencers and then move towards maturity in influencer marketing by selecting more micro or mid-size influencers who have audiences that are closer to their target. Influencers have the unique ability to command attention from their fans, so placing the right product contextually and considering the audience is essential; a beauty influencer promoting a cooking product is not as relevant (and may result in loss of followers for the influencer).  

There are many third-party tools now which aggregate influencers and help brands to find the most relevant influencers by matching audiences. These are extremely useful to find several influencers that hit a brand’s core audience: e.g. a travel brand might be looking to target luxury travellers and business travellers, so a tool like this could find one influencer who has an audience that intersects with luxury and a second influencer who intersects with business. In this way, a mosaic of influencers can be combined to build relevant reach to a brand’s target audience. 

At this level of maturity, influencer marketing can be likened to the advertorial in print marketing. 

Advanced is Response

As influencer marketing budget grows, the investment needs to be accountable to sales. When looking at effectiveness, there are both performance opportunities as well as options to look at for brand impact. When measuring performance, advertisers should look to use unique tags within their URLs in order to track traffic source by influencers. This can verify users who visit a brand’s website but depending on the complexity of the tag, can provide conversion data through Google Analytics. Secondly, for direct performance engagement, strategies should look to develop the paths of conversions through influencers and look to utilise new Facebook or Instagram platform placements including Instagram Shoppable Ads or Facebook Shops. For brands that are looking at indirect results for their business, short term and long term brand lift studies should be enacted on paid media to register the impact on upper and mid-funnel activity such as ad recall, association (between the brand and influencer), as well as affinity. 

At this level of maturity, influencer marketing is achieving the goals of performance marketing. 

Building long term and successful relationships 

Influencers can be seen as a shop and drop: brands use them once, and then drop them; consumers shop once and then may be switched to another product in their next campaign. Longer term relationships are needed to drive loyalty both from consumers and from the brands which employ them. It is often said that fewer posts from one ongoing influencer partner are more powerful than a series of one-off posts from multiple influencers. To earn the trust of an influencer’s following, brands should look to influencers more as ambassadors to verify their product or service to an organic fan base. The ideal scenario would be to have an influencer promote a range of products that would suit their audience, instead of just one product over time. Influencer marketing should be viewed as a strong brand growth opportunity, not to highlight specific product features repetitively.

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Understanding these shifts in behaviour against different stages of economic and broader recovery will help brands determine ‘where to play’ and ‘how to win’. 

1. Stay close to the trends, activate and test accordingly

Staying close to consumer behaviour in your sector, both domestically and internationally, can be achieved by close integration of your search advertising, wider Google trends and social listening. 

The emergence of new trends should fuel testing programs. It is impossible to say exactly what a new normal will look like, as some lockdown habits remain, some return to a pre-COVID state, and even more, are new to develop. With all this uncertainty, there is no guarantee that the marketing tactics which worked in 2019 will work this year. Therefore, a continuous approach to testing and iterating will stand any advertiser in good stead.  

2. Flash sales & discounting

Flash sales are a great way of getting a fast revenue injection into businesses that are already set up to sell direct to consumer, using performance channels such as affiliates search and social. The associated time limit and availability of inventory can be used to drive demand against specific audiences.

Flash sales can be controlled by smart usage of first-party data to hit only the customers you want to reach and bring a controlled revenue boost. It is also a great way to build affinity to a brand’s DTC (direct to consumer) proposition and build a customer base for later reengagement. Flash sales can also be a very effective way to reduce excess stock quickly, to free up warehouse space or reliance on items that will be going to be out of season. 

3. Virtual showrooming

Even as shops reopen, footfall is expected to be lower than pre-lockdown, as consumers’ regain confidence to hit the high street.

Immersive showroom experiences across performance channels are a great way to get your products in front of customers virtually, with VR (virtual reality) advertising opportunities available from the likes of Facebook and Snapchat. Returning to the ‘new normal’ has accelerated our path to future retail and can be used to remove typical buyer seller friction associated with in store visits (e.g. bad weather, motorway traffic) and delivering greater convenience and increased scale through virtual footfall. 

With increased demand and customisation, performance marketers will need to ensure experiences are agile, and creative is personalised according to customer centricity. Virtual showrooming should also make more customer data available to analyse and feed into performance and business planning optimisation, particularly within shopping feed promotions.

4. Pivot to retention

For many entertainment and DTC subscription brands, COVID-19 has seen a huge boom in new acquisitions. You only have to look at the rapid growth of Netflix and Disney+ over this period to see the largest examples of this, while many smaller more niche businesses also seeing a similar period of growth. The key driver for this is increased time spent at home.

The challenge post-lockdown will be to keep these customers engaged and loyal to the brands. This should be tackled with a data-centric strategy focused on CRM and paid media tactics to reach these customers before they become disengaged. Performance marketers will need to ensure that frequency and messaging is useful for the consumer, and increased engagement and loyalty is being driven by a value exchange.

5. Focus on SEO by building ‘peace of mind’ led content

With many brands re-evaluating their marketing budgets, now is a great time to ensure your SEO programme is fit for purpose and focused on driving long-term, sustainable growth. A well run SEO programme will pay dividends over time, especially as particular verticals reach a new normal.

Brands should be using this time to generate ‘peace of mind’ content in a world where consumers are more cautious about price promises, protected deposits, cleanliness and speed of delivery. Prominently promoted USPs and information that is easy to find and digest will reassure customers which, in return, will help brands win. 

The post Five Top Performance Marketing Strategies as We Return to the ‘New Normal’ appeared first on PerformanceIN.