Influencer Marketing: What You Need To Know

Like most marketing activities, influencer marketing can be very beneficial for a brand when done correctly. From helping spread word-of-mouth through a blog or piece of social content to driving an increase of overall awareness for a brand. Influencer marketing enables a company to insert itself authentically through the interests of its target audience.

When talking to my clients, they viewed influencer marketing as something only fit for well-known brands like Nordstrom, Crown Royal, and Target. But that shouldn't scare you, and I'll tell you why. Even more so during COVID-19, as consumers are switching brands at an unprecedented rate.

With 75% of consumers having tried a new shopping behavior, like one the above, this is an opportunity for brands to reach new consumers.

From a brand's perspective, the goal is to partner with influencers who fully embody the brand's personality and essence. And by working with various influencers, brands can reach new customers and increase overall brand awareness.

Real-life Examples

For one of the spirit brands I worked on, our strategic approach was to take advantage of relevant events and pop-culture experiences. In particular, this brand would use influencer marketing to insert itself authentically through its target audience's interests.

To find influencers that were already loyal fans of the brand and embodied its spirit, I recommended taking a two-pronged approach:

1) Leveraging our agency network to identify, research, and vet potential influencers in a 1:1 capacity

2) Partnering with a 3rd party, influencer marketing company to help us do the same as above, but at a larger scale

To set out for this spirit brand, we needed to establish our goals for this influencer campaign:

• Drive awareness and build brand affinity for this particular spirit brand

• Become the social brand with the brand’s consumer base (young adults 21-29) when they go out to the bars

• Assist in driving on-premise sales and an increase in overall consumption

• Inform and educate consumer base about intriguing retail activations (special edition bottles, programs, events) 

During my time leading all things Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Grassroots Cannabis, our goal was similar: 

• Raise awareness and build brand affinity for our cultivator and dispensary brands

• Increase in overall patient registrations across all dispensary locations

• Drive product sell-through to consumers (share of product sold to medical patients and recreational patrons) 

• Inform and educate consumer base on interesting retail activations (new product releases, programs, community events,) 

Identifying Your Target Audience?

Understanding your target audience will enable you to identify the right influencers for your brand. For larger brands or those in unique industries, this often means your target audience can be more complicated.

Within the cannabis industry, we had three unique target audiences;

• Consumers who look to cannabis as medical treatment (think patients with debilitating illnesses)

• Consumers who look to cannabis for wellness (think of the millennial mom who would rather unwind with an edible instead of a glass of red wine)

• Consumers who look to cannabis in a more recreational aspect (this is when you think of your stereotypical ‘stoner’)

We wanted our influencers to appeal to at least 1 of these key target audiences. Digging even deeper into those target audiences, we also had to take into account other key demographics. For example, across the 11 states one of the dispensary brands we operate, our footprint and target consumer varied widely.

Jasyra (@Fit4Arn) shared her influencer content for Herbology Dispensary, becoming one of her most engaged (comments + likes) posts on her page.

In Pennsylvania, the median household income for those near one of our dispensaries was $36,258/yr. Less than a two hour drive at another dispensary we operated, the median household income was $72,948/yr. What this means is that we were challenged to identify influencers in Pennsylvania that would resonate with consumers at each median household income.

Switching gears to the spirit brand I worked on, our target audience was:

• Young, Legal Drinking Age (LDA) – 29, All Genders (heavier initial focus on male), Intellectual & Blue Collar

• Urban & rural – over-indexing in college/university markets

• Consumes alcohol before going out to the bar, house-parties, celebratory occasions, while partaking in outdoor sporting activities, especially in cold weather

To dive deeper into our audience, we set out to understand better which interest verticals would resonate best with them. In the agency world, using the services provided by Mediamark Research and Intelligence (MRI) to identify key interests that index highest with our target audience.

Using MRI, we could then deduce key thematics within each category. As we evaluated potential influencers, we will see which influencers align with the potential verticals listed here.

How To Identify Your Potential Influencers?

We know who our target audience is, and now we need to identify potential influencers whose content would resonate with. What that means is each influencer you partner with has to embody the brand's personality.

These influencers need to reside in and can execute against priority markets. You can identify influencers that fall under specific verticals (e.g. interested in Punk music, Tattoo Enthusiasts, Gamers, Sports Fans) with the help of a 3rd party influencer marketing like Popular Pays or Tagger.

Finding influencers on a site like Popular Pays that have a specific interest, we could then select influencers with specific demographic traits (e.g., African-American, Hispanic, LGBTQ+)

Partnering With A 3rd Party Vendor

Have a small team running your influencer marketing efforts, or are you leading things on your own? Executing on influencer marketing is both labor and time-intensive, and most likely, you're working on multiple brands at once. To help agencies or brands scale their influencer efforts, an ecosystem of influencer marketing companies have sprouted up to do just that.

One of the key players in the space is Popular Pays. Popular Pays has worked with various brands, including Google, Macy's, New Balance, and many more. Including three brands I've personally worked on throughout my career.

Kevin (@turnone) shared his influencer content following a visit to one of the Pennsylvania Herbology locations. This visually-stunning creative was made possible in thanks to Popular Pays.

Working with Popular Pays, our agencies would partner with influencers across multiple verticals to create content for our clients' initiatives. Similar to how an agency operates, Popular Pays works by having agencies or brands create a brief, detailing the brand’s influencer marketing goals and objectives.

After creating a brief, these influencers will be vetted through an application process and shared with Popular Pays 6,000 + content creators. For more information about Popular Pays, you can visit their website by clicking here.

1:1 Partnerships

In conjunction with partnering with a 3rd party like Popular Pays or Taggr, working with an influencer directly, in a 1:1 capacity will help you achieve a brand’s influencer goals. Think of it as catching fish with a large net (Popular Pays) compared to using a fishing line (1:1 relationships). Both are capable of catching fish, but you might end up catching fish you may not be looking for using a large net, however.

So what does 1:1 influencer marketing involve? From start to finish, we’re talking about:

• Identifying Influencers - Similar to how Popular Pays operates, you will need to search across social media to identify potential influencers. These individuals may already be following or tagging said brand in their personal content. As marketers, do some digging and look for other influencers who might not know of said brand yet but would be fans of their product or service. 

• Influencer Outreach - Once those influencers have been identified, there then needs to be some outreach to start a conversation with each influencer. If you genuinely think they're a good fit for the brand, engage (like and comment) with their relevant content. 

• Influencer Negotiation - Once identified and having started a conversation with these influencers, look to set up a meeting so you can get to know each influencers on a personal level better. And at the same time, express to these influencers why partnering with them makes sense for said brand. Look to schedule follow-up meetings to help negotiate contracts.

• Influencer Management & Coordination – This is everything from negotiation contracts, product fulfillment, reviewing the social content they'll create for a brand, and the most crucial part, fulfilling all obligations for compensation.

Influencer content we put together for Oscar Mayer, where we identified food influencers, like HellthyJunkFood who specialized in unique recipes.

A recent report regarding influencer compensation has shined a light on influencer compensation, based on respondents in the Sub-Saharan African influencer industry. The report was put together by PLAQD, and some of the insights can help marketers across the globe regarding influencer compensation:

• Nearly 95% of influencers listed they would rather be compensated for their time (to cover travel costs + expenses) over an all-expenses-paid trip with no cash compensation

• Roughly half (53% ) of influencers surveyed said they would not work with competing brands following a partnership with another brand

• Nearly 70% of brands surveyed reported they manage their influencer campaigns in-house. This figure is up 25% compared to last year, according to a 2019 SocialPubli survey

• 70% of brands reported that they would increase their influencer spend to end the calendar year

TIP: When working with influencers in a 1:1 capacity, many digital marketers adhere to the one cent per follower (or $100 per 10K or $1,000 per 100k followers) rule. Note this is only a starting point and compensation can change due to the size and length of the campaign.

Forms of Collaboration

Now the fun part, how to collaborate with influencers to create unique content and reach a new audience. There are 3 general ways brands can partner with influencers:

Posting Content  - Posting organic content to raise overall awareness is one of the most popular ways to collaborate with influencers. Depending on your goals, this could be a single Instagram post or a series of social posts over an allotted amount of time to promote whatever event or product the brand wants to push. It is an endorsement, but the risk comes when picking the correct influencer to partner with.

Posting content in this manner tends to hold less monetary risk due to the investment level, and is extremely scalable.

Content Takeover - Takeovers can work multiple ways; either by inserting the brand into an influencer's content/blog/live show, becoming a partner. Or by allowing an influencer to take over a brand’s content for an allotted period (mainly around live events or campaign launches). 

Content takeovers are a great way to shake up a brand and what is usually associated with it. They can also be used as a temperature test if a brand wants to go further with a particular influencer. If the influencer’s content takeover is driving more impressions or engagements than other sponsored content, there might have a good fit for the long-term.

Content Series/Digital Endorser - This level of collaboration is the most in-depth as it gives brands a voice outside of their traditional marketing channels. These influencers help with creative direction and content production by being a leader. Becoming the centerpiece within the content, alongside the product. This type of collaboration is typically a much longer relationship compared to the other types of influencer engagement relationships mentioned above.

A content series like this can also includes costs that are on the higher end of the influencer campaign scale, with pay being closer to that of a brand ambassador.    

Mike Malcolm (@mikegdagod) of WeedTravelFood, created sponsored content (in-feed and Story) for Grassroots Cannabis, visiting a Windy City Cannabis dispensary.

What To Monitor For

We've set our goals for an influencer marketing campaign, identified what type of influencers we should be looking for (similar interests to our audience), and we've established how we're going to partner with these individuals (3rd Party partners + 1:1 relationships).

Once an influencer's content goes live, analysis and measurement come into play. Here are a couple of tips you can use when reviewing your influencer's content:

● Look at the conversations from each influencer's following and community to use as inspiration for creative ideation to better target your audience with a brand’s owned content

● Each piece of content created is an opportunity to insert your influencer's content into your brand's feed as organic content. Not only does this help fill out a content calendar but also extends the lifespan of the influencer's creative by exposing it to a brand's audience

● If the brands is a chain or has multiple locations, leverage influencers' local influence to promote a specific locations by creating paid ads with their creative, this can also avoid showing favoritism

Measuring Success

When looking to report on the success of your influencer's content, there are usually 3 leading key-performance indicators (KPIs) that you will track.

● Engagement Rate: That includes all likes, reactions, comments, retweets, shares, video views for each piece of content, compared against the reach garnered

● Brand Sentiment: Using a social listening tool, like Crimson-Hexagon, or even just manually looking at the comments in-feed to see how people talk about your brand in the digital world. The goal is to monitor to see any lift during the timeframe of the campaign

● Reach: This looking at the number of times your influencers' content is viewed in feed

You will most likely have additional KPIs that are specific to your brand or industry. 

During my time at Grassroots Cannabis, the KPIs we established for our dispensary brands included tracking the number of new patient registrations. For our cultivation brand, another KPI was to track product sell-in to the dispensaries we partnered with (share of our product sold to various dispensaries).

As we head into the final months of 2020, it seems as if marketing efforts, specifically around social media and influencer marketing, are increasing. And yet, we've barely scratched the surface when it comes to influencer marketing, and I look forward to sharing more industry insights.

For more ways to improve your social media efforts, check out this blog post to maximize your organic and paid social media efforts.