Influencer Marketing – My blog. My followers. My sponsors.

Influencer Marketing – My blog. My followers. My sponsors.

Berlin, May 3, 2016, by Nicole Blumberg

Since about 2 years Influencer Marketing has been emerging as a fixed component of the marketing mix of our clients. We as digital specialists for online services also work in the area of Blogger Relations and hence our Marketing Manager Nicole Blumberg will take a deeper look into the meaning, development and effective power of the supposed hype.

Front row thanks to Instagram & Snapchat

Front row at the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, personal invitations to film premieres and extra goodie bags for “very influencing people” at the recent German Press Days – Yes, we’re talking about influencers. What is hidden behind that buzzword? Most often young, attractive, sportive, talented … Blogger, Vlogger and Co., who due to their buy recommendations and heavy online presence (like a social media fan base about 10000+ followers) are very interesting for the marketing activities of brands.

Without influencer no competition!

Influencer Marketing is actually nothing new at all! So why is the current hype? Well, new name and new channels! Brands always advertised with testimonials in the ABT-area of their campaigns to bring brands closer to target groups. It was always very important that the advertising face also incorporates the message of the brand. A good example: Giselle Bündchen incorporates femininity and confidence to advertise for the new Channel No 5 fragrance. Brands which are emotionally loaded by popular models and actors now cooperate with Sarah Gottschalk, Sami Slimani or Riccardo Simonetti – V.I.P.s 2.0. Another reason for the hype: Since communication is transferring more and more to the online world, where there is a real information plethora, it gets even more difficult to achieve the desired attention and range. Especially mobile, where the attention of the user is like that of a fly, milliseconds decide whether an article is read or ignored and a product is bought or not. To improve the customer journey online, brands relied more and more on Word of Mouth Marketing, like discounts and coupons for recruited friends or star-rankings at online shops. Since such measures are limited and the authenticity is questionable, the era of influencers has now begun.

Communication at eye-level

Advertisers have to face two challenges in the online world. On the one hand the already mentioned competition online and the consequent information flood and on the other hand a new target group, which has grown up with the Internet and thus seems to be more familiar with it than advertisers. To communicate at eye-level, it is obvious that brands cooperate with bloggers, as they have mostly the same age, use the same social networks and know which messages to post where and how but simultaneously not to seem too artificial or forced. It is now obvious that online advertising like banners don’t offer added value and are rather blocked by ad blockers or penalized by the critical generation y.

Since SEO and SEA arrangements are not enough any longer to be among the first results at the first Google page, Google updates Panda and Penguin taught us that relevance is the key factor. And how do you become relevant? If this question had been generally answered, there would have been no raison d'être for expert agencies at this field anymore. It all goes down to the purpose and aim, to the company and most importantly to the user and their desires. Speaking of it, to mention another buzzword: Content marketing. To attract young target groups marketers need more than just a cool creative slogan. We also made lots of experiences from cooperative work with influencers and learned how an optimized matching of influencers and brands create synergy effects on both sides. Storytelling + Influencer = Conversations? Whether this calculation really works out depends on the individual case. The Social Media Atlas 2015/1016 by Faktenkontor and Toluna claimed that 24% of social media users bought a product which was recommended by an influencer. This assumes that the correct cooperation can definitely be effective and useful. And even if some influencers seem to be at the pre-level to become a celebrity, they still are way more mobile, authentic and closer to the user than most VIP’s.

Venal or not, that is the question?!

The branch has professionalized. Now there are countless agencies which specialized on the matching of influencers with brands. No wonder that there are about 16 million expected influencers in Germany. Recommenders are the opinion leaders of our time. There is barely an event or happening without them anymore. Is it even possible to keep up the authenticity of an influencer with all the hurly-burly around them or do they become more and more blunt with all the cooperation offers they have? Becoming a successful influencer is hard. You don’t get anything for free in the online world. On the contrary, for implausible posts you get easily un-followed. In the early stages of an influencer you often get confronted “doing something proper to make money”. And now exactly that happened in an intensity and professionalism which even influencers couldn’t have dreamed of before. Of course, like in every other branch there are bad apples among influencers, too. Recommenders that take every cooperation offer they get as long as the pay is right. And that can lead to a negative reputation for the brand. The identification of the correct influencer for the right brand consequently gets more difficult. Whether the specialized services like HashtagLove, BuzzBird and reachHero will find the right solutions to such problems remains to be seen.

Fact is that no influencer works for free for a certain brand. They do it full time and expect that their labor, videos, snaps, pictures, articles etc. get paid. On the other hand there are countless imitators who try to profit from the “hype” as they want to become famous by every price. If you don’t take the work as such serious, material motivations obviously play a significant role.

What’s next?

With the overabundance of influencers comes competition. It will come like it does with all other things – efficiency stops and hence the stimulus evaporates. And then a new term comes up which may also just hide a similar model. Or as everything becomes even more “virtual”, maybe avatars are the new opinion leaders?

In any case: Don’t cooperate only because the influencer is popular. Do it because the content fits to the interests and needs of the user, considers channel preferences and still records few scattering losses. The overall aim of any marketer and the agency as such should be to optimize the service or product in a way that paid content transforms to earned content on the long run.