What makes an influencer? A cheat sheet for brands
The Remarkable's Lorraine Murphy reveals her tips on getting the right influencer to represent your client's brand to maximise reach and profits.
Influence is the ability of a person, brand or organisation to affect the behaviour of an individual.
In the digital world, this influence is created via content created and distributed online. We all have influences in our lives – from our parents to our friends to the workplace we’re in.
Human beings are social animals and our internal representation of the world is built by the people we have contact with every day.
In the past, those influences were made up purely of the people in our physical world; however, technology now allows us to connect with hundreds, even thousands of people online every day – opening up the potential for them to influence us, be it negatively or positively.
So… what makes an influencer?
Authenticity is number one – people are magnetically attracted to someone who knows who they are and what they stand for, and don’t try to be something they’re not.
Relevance is also hugely important – so creating content that is of value to an audience. Thirdly, generating a two-way conversation – having a response from someone they respect transforms someone from a follower into a raving fan, who will advocate for and bring others to that influencer.
The ultimate pitfall for an influencer is letting their audience down – whether that’s by working with a brand that isn’t a good fit for them, misleading them or failing to deliver on something they promised.
We see the relationship between an influencer and their audience like a bank account – influencers who invest in that relationship over time have more trust capital, which enables them to partner with relevant brands and still retain their audience’s support.
Influencer marketing allows brands permission to enter into the special relationship between the influencer and their follower in an authentic way.
We know from a survey of 11,000 of our influencers’ followers that 78% have used a tip or piece of advice shared by the influencer and that the top reason they follow the influencer is that it “feels like catching up with a friend”.
Harnessing the power of that relationship is incredibly powerful for brands.
The influencer marketing space has evolved at lightning speed in recent years – in the past two years especially – and brands have a broad range of influencers to choose from for campaigns.
Add to that the scope of influencers, from TV celebs to Instagrammers, vloggers to authors, and it’s not a straightforward space. There are some factors we recommend brands consider when identifying the right influencer for a campaign.
Stats are a key factor of, course; however it’s not all about the size of the audience. It’s important to look at not just the numbers an influencer is attracting but also how engaged that audience is.
An influencer may have 100,000+ followers on Instagram, but that’s of no value if the number of interactions from their followers is low. Are they commenting, liking, sharing?
We see sharing as the key currency of engagement – if a follower is prepared to go beyond a like or comment and actually tag friends into an influencer’s content, that is the ultimate measure of how engaged they are.
The online world is too fickle – and online communities too judgmental – to risk tagging those we respect into content we’re not prepared to stand by.
Professionalism is critical as well. When brands are investing in influencer marketing, they expect a professional service, so it’s important to vet potential influencers by doing some behind-the-scenes research on what they are like to work with before committing to a spend with them.
The most important consideration above all of these however is the match between the brand and the influencer. It is absolutely vital to get the right fit between the influencer and the brand from day dot; if that fit isn’t there, then the campaign isn’t going anywhere.
Audiences have a finely-honed BS radar and will not hesitate to call an influencer out on wayward brand partnership. The most successful influencer marketing campaigns we’ve seen all have one hallmark in common – the perfect fit for both the brand and the influencer, which sets them up for exponential success.
Lorraine Murphy is the founder of The Remarkables Group. She is running two events on social media and digital influencers at Vivid Ideas 2016.
Wouldn’t an influencee actually purchasing the product or service being spruiked be the ultimate measure of engagement?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Loads of words without saying much at all.
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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.
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A really good article,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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