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Two Truths and a Lie Episode #1: Influencer Marketing

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Last Thursday, we launched Two Truths and a Lie, a weekly Facebook Live on marketing and digital media.

Every week, my co-host Gregarious Narain from beforealpha.com and I will dig into a marketing topic through the lens of two truths and a lie, or more accurately, a commonly held myth. We’ll be joined by guests every few weeks for additional perspectives on the hot topics in digital and social media, but always through the lens of 2 truths and a lie.

The show will be broadcast live from my Facebook page, and posted on both my Facebook and here on Marketing Roadmaps for those that would like to watch the full 20 minute show.  The following day, a highlights version will be posted as part of the alphathoughts series on the Before Alpha LinkedIn page. 

In our very first episode, we discussed influencer marketing.

The Truths:

  1. The influencer marketing space is consolidating.
  2. Small audiences can be more effective than big ones.

The Myth:

  • Influencer Marketing is full of fraud.

Check it out:

Customer-Centric Marketing. An idea whose time has FINALLY come?

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Activating the passion that consumers have for the brands they love and turning them into your advocates is the secret sauce to identifying and converting new customers as well as increasing the loyalty of retained customers.

This simple concept, customer-centric marketing, has been the basis of my work for more than 20 years. It’s why I embraced blogs and then social media so wholeheartedly. It’s why I advocate so strongly for transparency, authenticity and disclosure, because they foster trust, the currency of social interaction. Online and off. It’s why I have embraced GDPR and other privacy initiatives for the promise they offer to build strong relationships with customers based on a balanced, informed value exchange for personal data.

Customer-centric marketing is also an idea that is often given lip-service, but not nearly as often embedded in our corporate DNA. We talk a good game about building relationships with customers, incorporating consumer feedback, building products and services that delight them. But when it comes time to implement the marketing plan, we use the language of war. We target audiences. We deploy tactics. We execute plans. We profile the customers into personas who are expected to follow prescribed patterns of behavior.

Which is fine, to a point. It would be foolish not to aim your marketing efforts at the audience most likely to buy. But our language and our tactics both tend to dehumanize our customer, to the point that we forget they are people and not just impressions or clicks or conversions or profiles. Taken to the extreme, and make no mistake modern digital marketing exists on the very edge of this extreme, our marketing isn’t just automated, it’s robotic, and not in a good way.

More human tactics like social marketing, influencer engagement, event marketing and even branded content restore the balance and remind us that customers aren’t simply segmented groups of purchasing behaviors, they are people. Living, breathing people who love our products and services, and are simply waiting to be asked. While these tactics are very often more effective, they are nearly always more expensive than digital advertising which uses programmatic buying and consumer targeting to reach the right audiences cheaply, at scale.

The good news, for advocates of more human centered approaches (like me), is that GDPR promises to reduce that financial gap. The SUPPLY for targeted ads will be diminished when (inevitably) publishers can’t document permission or consumers withdraw permission. It also will be more expensive to deliver an audience targeted PROPERLY with personal data. Both scenarios will increase CPMs for the remaining inventory. More on these and other scenarios in Marketing Week.

Certainly, contextual targeting will pick up the slack for digital advertising. There also will still be a market for premium permission-targeted audiences. Niche publishers in particular have tremendous incentive to develop a strong value proposition, both for their content and in exchange for the use of personal data for targeting. I wrote about this last fall.

As the cost gap closes between digital advertising at scale and more engaging tactics like influencer marketing and branded content, marketers will have incentive to shift budget to customer-centric marketing, where relevance can be proven by our interest and engagement with content and brands, not simply implied by our browsing history or past purchasing behavior.

It’s then up to us as marketers to create the compelling, customer-centric campaigns that engage consumers and convert prospects to buyers.

I’m game!

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Additional Reading on GDPR. Tick Tock. Less than 3 weeks to go. 

Yes, my friends, influencers do have influence. Here’s why we’ve gotten confused.

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Earlier this week, my friend Toby Bloomberg tagged me into a conversation on LinkedIn about evaluating influencers for branded content programs, spurred by a Medium post that argued influencers don’t really have influence.

My comment got too long. What a surprise! Not. So I am posting it on the blog in its entirety. For context:

Influencers have influence. Ultimately, influencers are your customers. They buy (or don’t) your products and services, and they talk to each other. Some influence a few, some influence many. But there is always value in customer -centric marketing.

The issue here is that we collectively have done a few things that contribute to the perception that influencers don’t have influence. I could write a book on this, and perhaps I should, in between trying to re-establish my consulting practice once again after 7 years inside.

First, we talk about one group, influencers, which is misleading. There are really multiple subgroups, each of which has different characteristics, and should be folded into the marketing plan with different strategies and tactics. Microinfluencers are your customers who individually do not have tons of followers, but in aggregate can create a volume of earned media. Mid-tier content creators/bloggers are also your customers, but they have built a larger following on a blog or social platform, and can be tapped into as content producers for both the endorsement value and their distribution channels. Celebrity influencers are much more about their scale, and somewhat less about their role as your actual customer.

Second, we need to activate these different types of influencers in ways that match their reach, influence and status as your customer. The same strategies don’t work across the board. We should start with our business objective, tap into the influencer population that will best help achieve that objective and the define a measurement strategy matched to the program. We also need to communicate those objectives and expectations clearly to the influencers we work with. It is OKAY to ask someone you are compensating to deliver a certain result. Our clients ask it of us. We should ask it of the people we work with. Not necessarily with crowdsourced strategies tapping into hundreds of microinfluencers, but certainly for content programs with mid-tier folks and celebrities. You cannot get mad at non-delivery if you don’t set an expectation.

Third, we need to ground our content programs in relationships with our influencers. After all, they are our customers. There are no shortcuts to relationships. There is no tool, no database, no algorithm that can substitute for the relationship. Use automated tools to get started, to manage content production, to monitor and measure results, to understand the performance of your influencers. But don’t expect that you can define a target audience, search a database for influencers that match the target, or whose audience does, or both, hire them to do something without the due diligence of getting to know them, and then hope for the best. If you know the influencers, you’ll know whether and where they have influence.

Finally, the original article was interesting in that it conflated two related but different marketing strategies, influencer marketing and thought leadership, in an attempt to make the case for thought leadership over influencer marketing. You can certainly tap into a customer (influencer) population as part of a thought leadership strategy, but by and large, thought leadership is about conveying ideas and building an expert reputation for the individuals and their organization, as a conduit to sales. Expertise does matter, and we may reach out to other experts in our field, with greater or lesser degrees of influence, to support and distribute our idea, but it is not the expertise of the customers. It is that of the brand and its representatives that is the focus.

Each strategy, influencer marketing and thought leadership, has its place in the marketing mix, and we don’t have to pick between them.

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Agree with my ideas, but not sure how to get started? I can help with everything from strategy development and content creation to influencer, digital and social marketing, performance audits and presentation decks. Even better, the first hour is free. Email sgetgood@getgood.com to book your free consultation. I’ll give you some thought starters during our conversation, and we can go from there.

Initial report card on my 2018 recommendations and a prediction: the influencer marketing industry will see significant consolidation

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So far, so good.

One of my key recommendations for digital success in 2018 was to diversify your content distribution strategy and focus on building a loyal audience that regularly returns for your content.

January isn’t over yet, and Facebook has demonstrated the critical importance of this. Its pending algorithm changes are forcing publishers to shift their strategies. As reported in Digiday:

“Some are returning to old standbys like search and email; others are putting more resources into different platform products. […] In most cases, the goal is to build sustained engagement with publishers’ content, rather than chasing the flyby traffic that Facebook sometimes drove.”

Another recommendation was the critical importance of your editorial voice. Dan Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of Sharethrough, agrees. Discussing brand safety concerns in an interview with eMarketer, Greenberg said

“brands are shifting back to buying from premium, curated, real publishers that have an editorial voice, instead of just putting a box on the corner of a random webpage.”

I am batting 1000, so figured I’d drop one more on you. The influencer marketing industry will see significant consolidation by the end of 2018. It’s already started, with the acquisition of Whosay by Viacom earlier this month.

Every day, I read at least one, and sometimes two or three, articles announcing that 2018 will be the year of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing as a marketing practice has been around for a decade or so, since the very first blogger relations programs circa 2007/2008. Customer centric marketing, as a buzzword if not in practice, has been around even longer. The idea of using your customer as an evangelist, as an advocate, is not news.

What IS news is that it is now an important element in the marketing plan for many brands. A must-do, not just a nice-to-have.

This trend has been developing over the past couple years. You can almost follow its growth by tracking the growth of influencer marketing agencies, platforms and networks. Ten years ago, it was a handful of companies. Now, there are countless specialized agencies and technology platforms, nearly every consumer publisher has some influencer offering and the integrated agencies, not to be left out, have both practices and products to offer their clients.

As Digiday reported this morning, brands are also increasingly bringing all or part of their influencer marketing in-house, using a combination of internal staff, agencies and technology platforms/tools.

While there is plenty of work to go around, I predict significant consolidation. Here’s why.

You shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s platform. As influencer marketing increases its importance in the marketing plan, it will be critical to protect the investment. That is certainly why Viacom bought Whosay rather than continue to work with it as a vendor. Bonus — acquiring the platform you use removes it as an option for your competitors, another common reason for mergers.

As a result, the most promising small companies will be acquired, by media companies, agencies and larger more established competitors that can extend the platform (and the acquisition costs) across multiple advertisers. Some of the big consumer brands are possibly also in the mix as acquirers, but I think that less likely overall.

All these companies could develop their own solutions from scratch, but honestly, there are so many start-ups in the space, it is a far smarter business decision to buy, not build.

Not every brand that wants to use influencer marketing as part of its strategy will have the means or interest to acquire a platform in-house. There will still be need for independent software companies and agencies that sell various combinations of platform, services and influencer access.

But consolidation will reduce the industry back down to a reasonable number of tech companies, some of which will focus on small and mid-sized business, and others that will operate on the scale, enterprise level. Much like any other SaaS product. It is an inevitable right-sizing. Some firms (see above) will be acquired, some will acquire smaller competitors, and some will close their doors.

The key for brands that choose to use outside platforms will be to protect their data. To retain control over their results and the influencer relationships they nurture. This means making sure that they can capture and keep the data about the influencers they work with, and the results of the campaigns they do. Otherwise, they risk becoming hostage to a technology platform. You want to make absolutely sure that your information is stored to be portable to another platform, and that you are contractually permitted to do so. You need that fail-safe, because, I repeat, you shouldn’t build your business on someone else’s platform.

Who will be the winners? It’s anybody’s guess about the tech platforms (although I have a few,) but no matter what, the customer is a winner. Those that have nurtured their social influence, whether big or small, are getting a piece of the advertising pie. And for all of us, sponsored influencer content is better, more authentic, more engaging advertising.

Facebook changes algorithm, but nothing really changes for brands. It’s a pay for play world.

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Facebook announced last week that it was changing the algorithm to favor posts from friends and family over those from brands. It also recently gave users access to the SEE FIRST button for personal profiles as well as brand pages, allowing users to note whose updates they wanted to see first. This is great news for Facebook users, who have been complaining that the algorithm seemed to deliver posts from the same handful of friends, ignoring many others. “I never see your updates,” the oft-heard refrain.

Cue, immediate uproar from publishers, advertisers and brands that these changes would prevent their fans and followers from seeing THEIR updates.

Tempest in a teapot. The only way for brands to reliably get their content in front of their audience on Facebook at scale is to advertise. Facebook ads, boosted posts, branded content. Now it is simply more obvious.

In the short term, yes, these changes are unfortunate for those brands that have developed models for organic Facebook success. They will have to rethink their models and consider using paid posts to get the sharing started, rather than just relying on their content to drive organic shares. But, as long as the content is good, and worth sharing, does it really matter that you have to invest in a small amount of paid to get the party started? I don’t think so. I have long believed that what matters isn’t whether something is paid, owned or earned. It’s whether someone wants to share it. Previous posts on this topic include Shining a light on the native advertising debate from 2014 and Is earned media an anachronism from 2011.

Net, not much has really changed for brands. Facebook is just loudly fixing something that has hampered its user experience, and basking in the brownie points from billions of users.

By this week, the digital advertising press seemed to agree. Nothing new here, more of the same said both Digiday and Adweek.