Four Misconceptions About Influencer Marketing
I hope you're doing well! Over the last few weeks, I've been writing a lot about the ever-changing social media landscape, and other social media trends. But I want to dive a little bit deeper into something that I find exciting as a marketer.
So for today, let's talk about influencer marketing and some misconceptions marketers face. For many marketers and brands, 2021 was a pause or reduction of marketing efforts as belts were tightened, and ROI became even more critical. Based on the conversations I've had with other marketers, one of those programs that were initially paused was influencer marketing.
I've discussed the importance of influencers for brands of all sizes and across all industries in the past, but as we approach the new year, many expect influencer marketing not only to return but grow.
If you're a social media professional looking to amplify or even start your influencer marketing efforts, you've come to the right place. Today I'll dispel five myths about influencer marketing.
Brands are looking to build relationships with their target audience by creating entertaining, educational, or inspiring content. Influencers can start that relationship by leveraging their personality, tone, and voice, introducing consumers to a brand.
As we approach 2022, you'd be pressed to find an advertising professional who hasn't either personally worked with an influencer before.
Let's get into it.
1: Influencer Marketing is Just a Trend.
Before COVID-19, brands were partnering with influencers to create content that would help them reach their target audience at scale. As consumers hunkered down and stayed inside during lockdowns, consumer shopping behavior shifted. Studies earlier this year showed that 75% of consumers reported trying a new shopping behavior like Instagram Shopping, enabling brands to reach consumers.
As a brand, the goal of an influencer campaign is to identify and partner with influencers who fully embody the brand's personality and essence. Brands can reach new customers and increase their overall brand awareness by partnering with influencers who have ancillary interests in said brands.
I feel like a broken record saying this, but influencer marketing isn't a fad or trend. Despite all of the flack Meta has received (and deservedly so), social media continues to be thoroughly ingrained with the everyday consumer. Even if there was a global reduction in social media usage, the existing data and advertising space established on these platforms still exist. Brands will still use whatever existing first-party data is available to segment and target their prospective buyers.
I'm excited to see what's next for influencer marketing in 2022, but I expect to see more sponsored posts in my feed as we get closer to the new year. I look for ways to amplify our efforts by partnering with my colleagues in paid media and email for my programs.
2: Influence Marketing Is Only For The Young
To be honest here, if I asked you to close your eyes and picture an influencer, what would they look like? If you're picturing a younger adult like a Gen Z or millennial, you're not alone. You even see it on commercials as Gen Z is known to have grown up fully immersed in social media and influencers.
While that generation is more familiar with influencers, that doesn't mean that influencers can't partner with brands that have an older target audience. I have been successful with influencers across multiple industries, including the auto, household cleaning, and even adult incontinence industries.
Boomers and younger generations may not have grown up with sponsored posts and their favorite entertainers saying, "This video is brought to you in partnership by...," but they remain active on social media. Their favorite brands that they happen to follow on social media are already working with influencers.
3: Influencer Marketing Is Only Effective With Macro influencers or Celebrities
It's a misconception that brands have to partner with influencers with social followings in the millions to have an effective campaign. The exact opposite is true, and more often than not, micro-influencers provide a better ROI than other influencers.
The most significant trade-off between a micro-influencer and macro-influencers is the quality of the said audience. Micro-influencers will often have a more engaged audience than macro-influencers or other celebrities. As one's celebrity continues to grow, influencers are expanding to new niches more often than not.
For example, Kim Kardashian's social following is split up between different chapters of her life. Some follow her from her days of being Paris Hilton's friend, others from the Keeping Up With The Kardashians days, some follow her for her relationship with Kanye, you get the gist. But if you look at the interests of the individuals who have an affinity to those different "chapters" of Kim's life, there may not be much overlap.
With a micro-influencer, the majority of their followers are there for one thing only. And that's the niche of said micro-influencer. So when brands decide to partner with a micro-influencer over a macro-influencer, they know that most eyeballs on their influencer's post will be people who have a genuine affinity for that influencer's content.
4: Influencer Marketing Is The Wild West
This is an interesting misconception because, in my experience, influencer marketing has often had the most guidelines, internal reviews, and legal oversight compared to other social media efforts I've launched in my career.
Influencer marketing is still in the relative infancy compared to other marketing channels like radio, print, or even podcasts; however, there are no rules or restrictions when communicating on social media.
Even marketing companies like Popular Pays, Linqia, and Tagger help brands launch campaigns at scale and do so in a manner that allows brands to do it safely. For example, in a previous campaign, we used Popular Pay's audience analysis to confirm that the influencers we partnered with for an alcohol brand had most of their followers being of legal drinking age.
Well, those are just four of the more common misconceptions involving influencer marketing, and I can already think of others that need to be addressed. Woe is the life of a social media professional. Are there any trends that you think don't get enough attention? Leave them down in the comments and I’ll share my thoughts on them.
Thanks again for reading my latest blog piece!
The Latest Social Media Trends You Need To Know
The holidays are approaching and I hope everyone reading this makes time to be with those they care about. Now let’s get right into it, with the latest social media trends you need to know. Be sure to check out the latest or visit my blog to see more recaps.
Content Marketing Predictions for 2022
A survey conducted by Studio ID with over 100,000 marketing respondents, providing a look into predictions for content marketing trends in 2022. Here are a couple of my favorite predictions:
A Shift For Content Formats - Marketers expect a continued shift in content formats, specifically podcasts, white papers, and webinars. Survey respondents expect a rise in overall podcasts created by brands, continuing their steady rise in popularity throughout 2022. Nearly 60% of respondents indicated they expect to see more podcasts next year.
Demonstrating ROI - We've talked about attribution data before and how marketers face the challenges of demonstrating ROI through their respective channels. Nearly 30% of survey respondents reported demonstrating ROI as the biggest recurring challenge facing their marketing programs.
Five Strategies For The 2021 Holidays Guide
The holidays are approaching, and marketers continue to prepare for 2022 as well. Listrak has put together a guide featuring five strategies for the holidays and beyond. Strategies worth noting include:
Engagement Ensures Visitors Become Browsers, and Browsers Become Buyers - When possible, look for ways to maintain consistent sends across email, SMS, and social to ensure the traffic sent to a website is well-qualified and warmed up. For example, Listrak recommends using SMS to tout new arrivals, location-based events, flash sales, and other timely items, while reserving email for needs with a longer lead time.
Continue To Nurture the Customer After Every Sale - Between a rise in eCommerce and the pushing of Buy-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store (BOPIS), there's a push for brands to implement a powerful post-purchase strategy to retain new subscribers and buyers acquired during the holidays. Brands are looking to stay in contact with shoppers and keep them informed throughout the entire shopper journey, adding transactional messages to communicate process details and confirming when the order has been delivered or ready for pick-up in our case
8 Graphic Design Trends For 2022
The lists keep coming, this time with eight graphic design trends with an infographic from Venngage. Kudos to the Hot Box team for already implementing a lot of this between House of Brands and Sunnyside, but here are some personal favorites of mine:
"Ads that look like me." - A push for more representation from marginalized groups in marketing visuals. America is a country with people from all walks of life, and a brand's marketing efforts should reflect that in the creative.
Making Data Fun - Social media users are more familiar with seeing complex data displayed through graphs and other visuals. How can our brands continue to use data visualization to keep our audiences engaged?
Branded Memes - Have you ever been scrolling on your phone, and you see a meme, but as you look closer, it's actually from a brand? As brands continue to explore other mediums for their content, marketers are looking at other cultural moments to tap into that stem from social media.
Until next time! Have you come across any relevant news that advertising and marketing professionals need to know? Leave a link in the comments below and let us know.
Social Media Trends Worth Knowing
Welcome back to another week of social media trends and news, relevant to advertising and marketing professionals. If you haven’t caught some of my other recaps, be sure to check them out here, and here.
Okay, So What's Happening With Facebook?
Facebook seems to be in the news every day, but it really feels like that over the last couple of weeks. Most recently, Facebook experienced what might have been the most significant outage in its history on Monday, affecting Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and even employee access to their buildings.
While the outage affected most brands, agencies, and marketers alike, Facebook faced bigger problems following the testimony from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook.
Her testimony prompted Mark Zuckerberg to personally respond to the scandal earlier this week. It's still too early to tell if any changes will come from these events, but the pressure is certainly on.
Tips and Tricks For Instagram Marketing
A Redditor shared their tips and tricks for success on Instagram in a trending Reddit post on r/SocialMedia. Most of these tips are things we're already implementing across all our brands, but here are some tips worth holding on to.
Think about using a CTA and keep it at the end to make it effective. Don't forget that questions can be a CTA as well.
Carousel (Slideshow) posts are a great format for content. They increase reach and engagement due to their ability to keep users on a specific post (e.g., audience retention time).
Engage and respond to users' comments on Instagram. They'll likely engage back, not only increasing the overall number of comments on our posts but also indicating to the algorithm that more users should see our content.
Comparing Social Media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of my favorite Chicago marketers, Andy Crestodina, recently shared an infographic highlighting some differences between Search (SEO) and Social Media. The great news is that we, as marketers, all play in the same sandbox, and our efforts help move patients and customers throughout different parts of the funnel.
Andy shows how brands utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media to get the word out about their marketing initiatives. Andy summed it up but briefly, but both channels are used for inbound marketing. And yet, they operate in different ways.
"In search, you know what they're thinking, but not who they are. In social, you know who they are, but not what they're thinking."
I hope these updates were relevant and provided some value to you! Let me know in the comments what other tips and news are relevant to you.
Social Media Trends You Need To Know
I’ve felt reinvigorated in learning all things social media, recapping some of the latest trends and news affecting brands and marketers alike. And I’m excited to share some more with you today in my latest blog post. We’ll cover Instagram Shopping, Fall insights from Twitter, and four quick tips for creating content as Reels.
Instagram expands the platform’s advertising capabilities by enabling ads within the Shop tab.
Instagram Introduces Ads Within Shop Tab
As Instagram continues to expand its dedicated shopping platform, Instagram Shop, the platform recently introduced ads within the shopping tab.
Instagram Shop enables users to browse, discover and shop for new fashion trends directly within the app. With over 130 million Instagram users tapping on a shopping-related post every month, there is an opportunity for brands to reach new customers through Instagram ads.
From a marketing perspective, Instagram sees this as an opportunity to reach users further down the funnel and are already considering products to purchase.
The seasons are changing and that means marketers are getting ready for major holidays, cultural trends, and more.
We officially said goodbye to summer last weekend, which means much of the United States is preparing for fall. And with that comes the latest trends and conversations on various social media platforms, including Twitter's POV on all things Fall.
In the latest overview of conversations on the platform, Twitter is seeing three key trends, including:
Twitter users are excited for fall, with a considerable increase in "can't wait for fall" tweets (+112% in July 2021 vs. June 2021), indicating a more positive tone than last year.
An increase in back-to-school tweets, with 2.3x more "back-to-school" mentions than the 2020 average. And more parents and kids are feeling more optimistic about it than last year. Compared to the previous year, there's a +76% increase in feelings of joy (YoY). And that "return to normalcy" isn't just for students either, with "back-to-office" tweets up 76% compared to 2020.
Finally, with the 2021-22 NFL season starting tomorrow, football fans let their favorite teams and brands know about their excitement. There was an +80% increase in Tweets (YoY) related to "football anticipation," and more niche topics about football (e.g., Fantasy Football, Hard Knocks) are growing as well.
Gordon Ray, Brand Development of Instagram has some Reels tips for you. Click the link below to see all four in action.
4 Instagram Reels Content Ideas
Last but not least, we wanted to leave you with four content ideas that are great for Instagram Reels. See how they come to life, courtesy of Gordon Ray, Brand Development of Instagram, in the link above:
1) Make a fun product demo and play with speed (Fast or slow)
2) Build trust and community by highlighting team or coworkers, and go behind the scenes
3) Create excitement with an "unboxing" video
4) Let people know where they can buy your products using shopping tabs or links
Social Media Industry News Worth Sharing
If you didn’t catch the previous blog post “4 Social Media Trends Worth Knowing,” then click here before reading any further. This week, we'll be taking a deeper look at how Instagram’s “Search” algorithm works, how brands can tap into nostalgia marketing, and the Instagram has finally removed the swipe-up. Let’s dig in!
Instagram’s Search feature utilizes three primary elements.
In another opportunity to have a peek behind the curtains, Instagram shared how its search algorithms work and how brands can optimize for better discoverability.
Last year, Instagram expanded its search options to show a broader set of relevant keyword matches instead of being limited to profiles, hashtags, and geographic locations. Instagram is now looking to display an even more comprehensive range of results based on your query.
"We're making search results better for exploration. For example, a search for "space" will show you space-related photos and videos, too. This is especially helpful when you don't have an exact username or hashtag in mind when searching for a certain topic."
A critical tip regarding keywords and hashtags from Instagram: "For a post to be found in Search, put keywords and hashtags in the caption, not the comments."
I'd take the above with a grain of salt because having longer captions can cause users to not engage with or view a post, further hampering a post's ability to show up in feed or be discovered through search. Additionally, the cannabis industry overall is hindered on the platform due to platform guidelines, so we may not be able to take advantage of the updated search capabilities in the first place.
Nostalgia marketing has been tapped across multiple industries and business categories.
Our friends over at Sprout Social recently put out a blog post discussing nostalgia marketing and how brands can activate on this social media trend.
Everything from reintroducing older products that fans know and love like Hi-C at Mcdonald's (e.g. Reintroducing favorite strains) or creating new products that fans wouldn't expect, like General Mills' "Monster Mash" cereal that combined old favorites like Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Franken Berry.
Or even an experiential event that touches on nostalgia, like the recent MLB "Field Of Dreams" game inspired by the 1989 Kevin Costner movie, which was the most-watched regular-season baseball game in 16 years.
Nostalgia isn't a new marketing trend, but how can brands tap into it as our target audiences continue to grow older?
Meet the Instagram Link sticker, providing brands and creators a new method to drive web traffic.
This change has been coming for a few months now, but Instagram is officially removing the swipe-up function for a new feature, the link sticker. Apart from the apparent gesture difference, the critical difference between the two features is that viewers can respond to stories with a link sticker but cannot reply to swipe up stories.
While the feedback for this new update has been mixed, to say the least, Instagram believes this will be best in the long run. Vishal Shah, Instagram's former head of product, told The Verge that stickers fit more with the way people currently use the platform. Link stickers give far more flexibility in how and where brands present a link and make it easier to integrate it far more creatively with the art or photography in Stories.
Note that the same restriction as before is in place for who can post links, so users that are not verified or do not have 10,000+ followers can not use the link sticker. Expect this change to affect all brands in the coming days.
4 Social Media Tips & Trends Worth Knowing
Welcome back! It’s been a little bit since my last blog post, but I have more social media insights and trends to share with you.
See below for more info!
Instagram Releases New Shopping Feature “Drops”
Similar to Supreme, Telfar, and many other brands, Instagram enables brands on their platform to create hype around seasonal product releases.
According to Instagram, “Instagram Drops” will help users discover more products, see what’s coming, sign up for reminders and view the newest products and collections that are already available on the app.”
As brands look to expand into merchandising and swag for their most passionate fans, there are opportunities for consumer-packaged goods (CPG) brands to create some engagement and excitement around exclusive gear.
8 Social Media Content Ideas to Incorporate
Buffer provided some thought-starters for brands to create content effectively and incorporate it into a social media strategy. Our teams have already done a few of these things in one shape or another, like making videos, using engagement prompts, and sharing company news.
There is an excellent opportunity for small business owners and social media marketers to implement these things more systematically. Our teams are looking at ways to do so for upcoming content calendars.
How To Grow and Engage an Audience On Instagram
Social Media Examiner shared are some tactical ways we can continue to grow our audience on Instagram. Similar to the above article, these might be things your brand is already doing through social media content. Tactics like encouraging user engagement through social media posts, asking questions, and responding to DMs, Comments, and Mentions.
Instagram Outlines How Its Search Algorithm Works
In another opportunity to have a peek behind the curtains, Social Media Today put some info together on how Instagram’s search algorithms work and how brands can optimize for better discoverability.
Last year, Instagram expanded its search options to show a broader set of relevant keyword matches instead of being limited to profiles, hashtags, and geographic locations. Instagram is now looking to display an even more comprehensive range of results based on your query.
"We're making search results better for exploration. For example, a search for "space" will show you space-related photos and videos, too. This is especially helpful when you don't have an exact username or hashtag in mind when searching for a certain topic."
A critical tip regarding keywords and hashtags from Instagram: "For a post to be found in Search, put keywords and hashtags in the caption, not the comments."
Let me know in the comments if you plan on implementing any of the above or if you have any useful social media tips worth sharing.
