What makes an influencer? A cheat sheet for brands

Wouldn’t an influencee actually purchasing the product or service being spruiked be the ultimate measure of engagement?

Thanks for the comment Antony – and yes, you’re absolutely right. We found in the survey I mentioned that 30% of the influencers’ audiences had purchased something recommended by that influencer. I didn’t mention it in this piece as not every brand will have access to that data; we’re fortunate that we have the feedback mechanism of the audience surveys to track that success metric. It’s not as easy to come by on a campaign-by-campaign basis, however tracking links and influencer-specific discount codes are useful.

Thanks for responding Lorraine. It appears at present that the best influencers provide a persuasive channel, where consumption (qual and quant) of media (be it influencer-generated story, embedded ad and so on) is the actual product being purchased by marketers. However, it strikes me that there is the opportunity for the influencer to generate sales drawn directly from their influence, be it in-channel transactions or trackable referrals.

I understand that influencers are chosen for their ability to add to the brand’s halo, but they are also operating within an environment that can theoretically demonstrate a direct path to consumption. This in itself seems to be of enormous potential value. At first blush, the difficulties around this would be the transition of the soft sell to the hard sell that might not fit with the influencer’s narrative style – particularly with the risk of being tarred by the ‘affiliate marketing’ brush. But as the category develops, are you seeing the emergence of a class of influencer who can do both effectively without undermining their own trust capital?

Well done Lorraine. You address the key points in the influencer landscape and your experience mirrors our own. I agree that brands do want professional service and also want security and piece of mind that the influencer is vetted to ensure a natural and authentic fit.

Loads of words without saying much at all.

You point about authenticity is key to this working, we measure authenticity through our engagement rating with our 25,000+ influencers. The brands that have been using our tool has stated the engagement piece really makes it genuine.

A really good article,

Thanks Lorraine,

It’s also worth mentioning that the value of the engagement is important to understand. We recently did a profiling piece for a client and came across “industry influencers” that had high levels of engagements (shares specifically) and when we had a deeper look into the people engaging with their content, we found most of them were either spam accounts or bots tracking keywords.
At first glance they looked like a perfect fit for the brand, but in the end it turned out their engaged audience was not the right audience despite the influencer being in the right sector.

Using influencers is just another excuse not having to do the difficult job of creating differentiated, authentic and relevant brands. We don’t know how to do that, so we bribe a couple of narcissists (who deceive the industry with fake numbers, bought followers etc) to take selfies with our products. It’s just pathetic, and the losers in all this are the agencies’ clients. Btw, what your highly biased surveys say are completely irrelevant, you need some independent sources if you wish to justify your existence.

Use of ‘Influencers’ is not that different from the age old use of celebrities in advertising.

And about as credible, given that most people are aware that brands pay for them to recommend products.