The Marketing Economy

Influencer Marketing and Instagram: The peril of quantity over quality – MediaKix’s fake Instagram project

August 15, 2017 by Susan Getgood

Earlier this month, influencer marketing company MediaKix released How Anyone Can Get Paid To Be An Instagram Influencer With $300 (or Less) Overnight, a project it undertook to prove whether was possible to game the system of influencer engagement on Instagram. In short, how easy is it to create fake Instagram profiles, purchase followers and then get offered sponsored content opportunities by the major influencer marketing platforms?

Turns out, pretty easy, at least for the two profiles the firm created – one focused on beauty, and the other on travel, not coincidentally I am certain, two content areas where Instagram is particularly strong, and the demand high for influencers with scale.

This has spawned a great deal of coverage in the industry trades over the past week, including AdWeek, PR giant Edelman and Digiday. All bemoaning the fact that it is possible to game a social network and artificially inflate followers and engagement.

I’m mostly surprised that anyone IS surprised. The demand for volume, for more, more, more – bigger reach, more likes, more clicks — is bound to lead to both fraud and waste. It did in advertising, in search of the almighty click, and it has in social, in search of likes, comments, shares AND clicks.

Let’s take the two problems separately. Fraud is the intent to deceive by artificially inflating numbers, whether buying followers or engagements. Waste is the natural by-product of scale. Not every legitimate viewer/reader of a message is the target, no matter how good our demographic and behavioral targeting. Even today, with the phenomenal matching made possible by programmatic advertising, there will be waste, and targeting on social is a mixed bag. You can do it within a social platform like Facebook, but not across platforms.

In my opinion, the platforms are responsible for posting the first level of defense against fraud in influencer marketing. The social platforms, to police the activity and manage fraudulent accounts effectively. The influencer platforms, to build similar checks and balances into their technology so brands can trust their influencer recommendations.

Managing the impact of waste, however, is part of the influencer marketing strategy. Our best offense is to put scale in its proper place in the strategy. Quantity – followers, likes, comments, shares, clicks – is not the only metric that matters. Quality of engagement is just as important. In the long run, perhaps more important. That means balancing your strategy, and including tactics that lead to deeper engagements with your current and potential customers as well as broader, more volume-centric microinfluencer tactics.

Remember: the influencer who matters is your customer. Always. That’s why influencer marketing works.

ROI and Influencer Marketing

August 10, 2017 by Susan Getgood

Continuing my series about the trends in influencer marketing: The rise of ROI.

In the early days, when blogs and social were new and shiny, return on investment was “squishy.” As influencer marketing matures, so too do the expectations, and the measurement models.

Measurement models are shifting from soft “potential reach” to firmer engagement models, and a better understanding of true awareness (eyeballs, lift) across all platforms, not just the easier-to-measure website ad impressions and content views. The best predictive models look at both awareness and engagement, to provide the necessary context for brands trying to decide which type of content will best deliver to the marketing plan.

How many people see the content across all opportunities – native, social, pageviews. defines REACH or AWARENESS. How many people act on it (clicks, likes, shares) is ENGAGEMENT.

Engagement rates will continue to be important, especially as we are increasingly able to link social actions with purchases through longitudinal studies like Nielsen Catalina, and foot traffic studies that can link a social visitor with a real life visitor, but these are expensive, and more likely to be used by large CPG and retail advertisers with big budgets. Not universal. Yet.

In the meantime, while we wait for the nirvana of proving engagement drove purchase — knowing whether someone who read that blog post last year, purchased it this year, we will rely on brand lift studies from Nielsen, Millward Brown and others, and first party reporting combined with original research. OpenUp is a start-up doing interesting work in the space of linking digital engagement with content to eventual purchase.

Advertisers want to understand the return on branded content, including influencer marketing, in the same way they evaluate their other advertising activities. Cost Per View is emerging as an AWARENESS metric alongside the click-through rate and the effective CPM that advertisers use to evaluate the overall efficiency of a media plan.

Re-visioning Measurement: A model for digital content marketing

When a marketing tactic is new, we tend to be a little forgiving when it comes to measurement. It is simply not possible to be first to market, and also have a case study to evaluate before you make your decision. We operate on gut, on past experiences that are similar, out of a desire to experiment with the new tactic. We monitor and measure, but it is to establish a benchmark, not against a benchmark.

As the tactic evolves and matures, however, a body of work begins to emerge. Successes and failures, near misses and home runs, all combine to give some indication of what works. And what doesn’t. We are at that inflection point with content marketing, and particularly with influencer marketing. Benchmarks are emerging left, right and center.

Problem is — many of these benchmarks are either the very simple pageview and click-through-rate (CTR) we started with or defined by the different technology platforms people are using, thus hard to compare with each other. In some cases, they measure things because they can, not because the measure is useful or relevant, a criticism I have oft levied at Google Analytics.

In addition to CTRs, content program benchmarks tend to rely on views (page, video, slide) to show reach, and comments and earned social to demonstrate engagement. At publishers that scale content through native, native CTRs get added to the mix. This is a good start, but volume based measurements don’t allow you to compare tactics with different budgets. More budget nearly always delivers more volume.

Adding to the complexity, Facebook and the other social platforms report in the context of their platform – likes, comments, shares – and are more than a little opaque unless you are the account owner. This makes it challenging for advertisers trying to understand their earned media. We can count it, we just have a harder time understanding the person who shared it.

Plus things change. Not every day but it feels like it.

We need to simplify to make the data we collect useful to marketers. Capture key points that let us understand the success of a particular campaign and the component tactics AND compare the campaign to other campaigns, the tactics to other tactics.

Simplify. Standardize.

Every marketing tactic we use has an awareness and an engagement component. We want you to pay attention and then do something. Isolate those and look at them separately to understand the performance of each tactic against its goals. You can also aggregate each measure to understand how the overall campaign performed.

Views — Awareness
While reach will always be important as a general gauge for awareness — the potential or available audience for a message — we need to move past who MIGHT see something, and evaluate our campaigns based on who actually did. To standardize across all platforms, we use views and actions as proxies to estimate the engaged audience of digital content.

Actions — Engagement
Absolute numbers are great to understand the VOLUME of your social engagement, but if you want to compare tactics, you need to use rates. This corrects for size. Our old friend the Click-Through-Rate is still strong here, and lets us compare all our tactics against a single measure. But, it isn’t the only useful RATE we can calculate.

We can also look at an overall engagement rate for a campaign, defined as Total Engagements/Total Reach.

For content, look at the content engagement rate. Of the people who read something, how many shared it with others? Or simply commented.

Content Engagement Rate = Actions/Views

For video, the video completion rate (completed views/total views) remains an important measure, but it underestimates the success of the content. Looking at the ratio of viewers who watched at least 25% of the video (or more than 10 seconds on Facebook) gives a more accurate measure of the video success. You can also look at content engagement rates for video.

Social is a bit more squirrely when it comes to standardized measurements across platforms. We have reach and engagements, but we don’t always have access to actual viewers of a social action due to platform and cost barriers. If we own the channel, we have better data, but influencer data depends on whether the platform allows third-party access, and if so, how much it costs to get and use it.

Right now, I am intrigued by content and sentiment analysis as the path to understanding message penetration on social. Because both paths — audience and content analysis — are on the pricey side, we collectively tend to rely on engagement metrics to understand results on social. We have the data, and we can efficiently compare across platforms.

I recommend looking at two measurements here:

Engagements:Followers
The ratio of earned:paid.

SUMMARY TABLE: CONTENT MARKETING BENCHMARKS

Cost Per View: Quantifying Awareness
Finally, even though we don’t have visibility into every view of our messages on social due to the walled gardens created by the social platforms, we can get to a very conservative estimate of how many people saw our message, and calculate a Cost Per View.

Cost Per View = Budget/Views

What’s a view? What goes into that side of the equation?

Pageviews, slide views, video views
Viewable native ad impressions. Regardless of clicks.
Viewable content amplification ad impressions. Regardless of clicks.
Earned social engagements. This is a PROXY for viewers that we can apply across all social platforms. If someone shared or liked or commented, we know they saw it. This will undercount, but it is a start.

Important: Evaluate Cost Per View against your overall content marketing campaign: Native Ads plus Content Amplification Ads plus Branded Content plus Influencer Content plus Social Promotion. Some tactics are more efficient at views than others, while others are stronger down funnel. Content creation will always be more expensive than promotion, but you need the content to promote. And so on.

Where do we go from here?
No single metric is the silver bullet. A tactic with a high cost per view can generate amazing engagement or be the perfect content base for a scale promotion. Or both. We also need to look at these measurements side by side with third party research that measures brand lift or foot traffic or message penetration, and layer in our actual sales results to get the full picture. But the important first step is to begin standardizing our metrics so we can compare campaign performance month to month, year to year, and isolate the tactics that are both efficient and effective.

More of what works, less of what doesn’t.

Influencer Marketing Landscape 2017

April 18, 2017 by Susan Getgood

Let’s take a look at influencer marketing landscape for 2017. What exactly are all these marketers investing in? To say sponsored content is to oversimplify the social ecosystem of influence.

First and foremost, influence is not simply writing a blog post or sharing an item on a social platform. While 68% of Americans use Facebook (Source: Pew), the most ubiquitous of the social platforms, we wouldn’t consider them all to be influencers. For our purposes, influence requires both intent and action; the person endorsing (or disparaging) a product intends for others to be influenced by their comments, and those others are actually (and preferably provably) impacted by the opinion. Influence is that moment where endorsement sparks action.

Trust is the currency of this social ecosystem. We trust influencers — people like us — more than any other digital source when it comes to purchase decisions. Influencers are trusted more than brands, industry leaders, publishers and celebrities, and 68% of women social media users report making a purchase as a result of an influencer recommendation (Source: In the Company of Friends, SheKnows/Research Narrative Influencer Marketing Study, October 1, 2015, PDF).

Who are these influencers? In 2017, most influencer marketing strategies will tap into three types of influencer: the mid-tier content creator, celebrity influencers and microinfluencers.

Let’s start with the most familiar – the mid-tier content creator. For the past few years, the most prolific influencers have been the mid-tier content creators, often referred to as the “magic middle.” Most are active, daily users of Facebook and at least one or two additional platforms. She posts on her blog 2-3 times per week, with somewhere between 100,000-300,000 average monthly page views (MPVs). She loves creating authentic sponsored content for the brands she loves, but her primary motivation is to entertain and inform her readers. (Source: In the Company of Friends, PDF)

Most importantly, she is both the customer and a conduit to other customers who are highly likely to engage with her content, by sharing, liking, commenting, and yes, trying and buying products. In my opinion, she is the most productive candidate for long-term brand ambassador programs because other consumers will trust and follow her personal product journey.

However, no single mid-tier influencer will personally reach millions of consumers. To achieve this sort of scale, marketers turn to, at one end of the spectrum, microinfluencers, and at the other, the celebrity influencers.

A microinfluencer is a consumer who actively uses her social channels to support brand marketing objectives. Anyone can write an Amazon Review or share a product experience on Twitter or Facebook, but it’s a bit like the tree falling in the woods when no one is present. With only a few followers or an occasional reader, the endorsement has little impact. Scale, and measurable results, are achieved when we aggregate the small actions of many influencers, organized around a single message.

Who is the microinfluencer? She is, quite literally, all of us; consumers with as few as 100 followers who love brands and love sharing them with others. We harness their power by working with hundreds, thousands of them at once, all sharing a similar and simple message to their friends. In the past, these sort of promotions have been limited to product sampling and couponing. With improvements in influencer marketing technology that allow brands to loosely script the social shares (so the message doesn’t get lost in the transmission by so many individuals), and to process micropayments to these individuals in the $1-2 per social share range, we have already seen an increase in more sophisticated scale social promotions. 2017 will bring more.

At the other end of the spectrum is the celebrity influencer. This is a blogger or social influencer with millions of readers and followers. She isn’t a celebrity in the traditional sense — actor, politician, heir/heiress, music superstar etc. — but like those famous people, she is just as likely to be engaging with brands on behalf of her audience than she is to be an actual customer of your product. Her endorsement is thus very similar to a celebrity endorsement; to the degree she is a trusted tastemaker, it will drive awareness, but the celebrity influencer often has a much lower engagement rate than her mid-tier counterpart. Of course her overall audience is that much larger, so she still may be reaching more consumers. When comparing the celebrity with the mid-tier influencer, keep that in mind. The sheer number of people the celebrity influencer reaches is not to be ignored or dismissed.

Who is the celebrity influencer? In our experience, she is a blogger with a unique story and strong audience and social following, a great video personality with a large YouTube following or an Instagram star. Like real-life celebrities, her endorsement is costly. When using celebrity influencers, it is important to have a very clear vision of the return on the investment.

Success with influencer marketing in 2017 starts with identifying the right type of influencer for the story you want to tell and understanding your performance objective — awareness, engagement, product trial, purchase.

Critical though is to set up your measurement models to match your objective, both for understanding the end result and optimizing performance during the campaign. I’ll cover that in my next post.

The evolution of consumer-to-consumer marketing

April 13, 2017 by Susan Getgood

Next weekend, I am speaking at the BConnected Conference in Toronto on The Future of Influencer Marketing. Prepping for this session made me realize that I had really pretty much abandoned my blogs, including this one, even though I have been creating a lot of new content about influencer marketing, branded content and performance measurement.

So I thought I’d start by sharing the article versions of the BConnected session, starting with this piece, The evolution of consumer-to-consumer marketing (Part 1 of 4).

—

Influencer marketing is a top trend in 2017. So much so that according to industry research shop eMarketer, nearly half of US marketers intend to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2017.

But, as the song goes, “How did we get here?”

Let’s take a look at the evolution of consumer marketing — from the earliest village square to the mass markets of 20th century advertising back to an albeit much larger consumer-driven marketplace, in which customers have quite possibly the strongest voice in the marketing mix.

Medieval Marketplace — *Public Domain Image. Source: Wikipedia*

Consumers have been sharing their opinions with each other for as long as we have had marketplaces. Whether Ancient Greece, Medieval Europe or Imperial China, the opinion of your neighbor likely mattered, and some, by virtue of birth or achievement, assumed the mantle of tastemakers and had wider influencer beyond their own personal sphere.

Modern advertising, largely a product of the industrial revolution and the rise of mass communication, grew out of the effort to scale endorsement when personal contact was no longer feasible. But endorsement never went out of style. Harnessing the recommendation of “someone like me” has long been the holy grail of modern advertising. Celebrities became stand-ins for the tastemakers, and in consumer product advertising, actors are cast as proxies for real people so those real people — the target audience — identify with the endorsment. The copywriter who wrote “mmm mmm good” was not a cherubic small child nor her mother, and while Mikey may have liked it , he certainly didn’t write the line.

The computer age breathed new life into consumer-to-consumer marketing, from the very earliest of days, when forums on Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, and Usenet newsgroups gave consumers a place to share experiences and recommend products and services to each other, in private non-commercial spaces. And then the early 90s brought a commercialized World Wide Web and the birth of digital advertising.

Digital changed literally everything. No longer did we have to guess at reach or exposure. Or wait for circulation audits. Impressions, clicks, page views, bounce rate, everything there to be counted. It also lowered the barrier to entry. Anyone could be a web publisher with a minimal investment in tech and a smattering of HTML. With the rise of review sites like Yelp and others, every consumer could be a consumer reporter.

By the turn of the century, the stage was set for a significant shift in the role of the consumer endorsement in modern marketing — the blogger. Over the same period that the “citizen journalist” was turning traditional news media on its head, this consumer marketer rose to prominence — a consumer who understood her role as both customer and conduit to other consumers through her blog, and later with the advent of Twitter and Facebook, her social channels.

Circa 2005-2006, the very earliest stages, we called it “blogger relations,” and often used a public relations-based model of unpaid outreach, but for many reasons beyond the scope of this post, it morphed very quickly into a compensated model, and a more inclusive nomenclature — influencer marketing.

Today, blogs are still a central component in most influencer strategies, but social platforms also play a prominent role, especially Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Regardless of distribution platform, video is increasingly important as brands see proof that influencer videos get more traction than brand-produced ones. For example, according to Internet video firm Pixability, 86 percent of the most-viewed beauty videos on YouTube were made by influencers, compared to 14 percent by beauty brands themselves.

Regardless of where she publishes, the social influencer acts as customer, publisher and consumer marketer, and has become a necessary part of the marketing strategy, whether a brand is actively engaging or not.

—

Part 2 covers the changing shape of influence and Part 3, ROI and measurement. Part 4 concludes the series with my updated advice to influencers who want to work with brands.