You, like many other marketers, are likely using the trainwreck known as “2020” to reevaluate your philosophies, past and pending investments, the efficacy of certain tactics, and, last but not least, visionary opportunities to create seismic growth for your brand. Beyond mask-wearing and hand-washing, this is a safe and healthy practice for marketers in this climate.
As you analyze the broad spectrum of marketing tools to which you have access, you’ll likely notice you have labeled different vehicles according to the widely-accepted interpretation of their primary purpose — consumer promotions drive trial, TV and digital display create awareness, influencers inspire, email drives loyalty and so on. This isn’t pigeonholing for pigeonholing’s sake; instead, it’s your method of creating a classification system that specifies your go-to tactics for achieving any variety of objectives.
But as you move between planning seasons and copy/paste your list of available tactics, you often miss some of the advancements made in these industries and undervalue their newfound preparedness to solve a wider array of challenges. Influencer Marketing, for example, is a routinely misunderstood industry because of the rate at which it evolves. Each year there are new channels, new measurement capabilities, new concerns and new creators bursting onto the scene, yet, because your attention is constantly pulled in no less than seven-hundred directions, it’s difficult for you (and even for many of the industry’s providers) to keep pace.
Typically grouped with other top-funnel tactics, Influencer is classified by most as an effective tool for creating brand and product intrigue as an early step in the consumer journey. For many years that’s exactly what it was. We all thought, intuitively as consumers ourselves, that it probably impacted purchase decisions in some way, but there was no definitive evidence to prove it and marketers valuing attribution over instinct largely steered clear. Today, though, it’s possible (and, by all means, advisable) to fight beyond the fluff and evaluate these spends in ways once considered unrealistic.
These are some of the new fundamentals of Influencer Marketing, each allowing you to measure its impact more accurately and, in some cases, merge fragments of the consumer journey into a single touchpoint.
Influencer “Assist Rate”
As a disciplined marketer you’re well-versed in the art and science of multi-touch attribution, and part of Influencer Marketing’s evolution has been recognizing its rightful place (and criticality) among those “touches.” Clarifying the difference between influencing a sale — compelling a consumer in the direction of your brand over others — and enabling a sale — simply facilitating a transaction — is an important distinction you must make when building and evaluating these models.
In a recent webinar where Inmar Intelligence’s Leah Logan presented alongside Austin Ratner, Affiliate and Digital Partnerships Manager at HP, we learned about their strategy for isolating various stages in purchase journeys for consumer electronics items. HP has determined that, though influencer-created content may not be the first or last touchpoint, it is an important piece in eliciting sales for their brand that may not have otherwise occurred. Using calculations modeled specifically for their business and its categories they understand that influencers “assist” in 40 percent of purchases occurring through various eCommerce channels, versus a 14 percent average assist rate for other tactics.
Developing similar methodologies to understand how, when and where positive actions for your business are influenced can more accurately guide your investments. Your business may be wildly different from HP’s — for example, consumers don’t behave the same when searching for meat marinades as they do when searching for a new laptop — but it’s critical to understand which spends are wasteful and which are directly or indirectly responsible for turning demand into purchases.
Replicating Familiar Experiences, and Making Them Shoppable
We could all have a quick gripe sesh about the lack of visibility into walled garden performance, and the need to play directly with platforms (and dish out a significant share of your budget to them) in order to gain valuable attribution data or properly tag placements for your own analysis. We completely understand why they’re guarded with this information and altogether hate it at the same time. It just is what it is, that’s that, and [insert third cliche here].
It’s possible, however, to create “extensions” of walled garden ecosystems that look, feel and function similarly, but with added features that enable seamless shopping and, in some cases, include promotional offer integration. Creating experiences similar to those provided by walled gardens — such as microsites showcasing sponsored content and use cases in a feed-style format — is not a new concept, but is one that elicits user behaviors comparable to those witnessed on popular social platforms and creates a higher likelihood of purchase follow-through.
Combining commerce features with doppelganger extensions of native environments gives you a way to merge touchpoints and bring intuitive shopping mechanisms into the content discovery experience for viewers. Shoppers will continue to shop at their own pace and with their own, unique variety of touchpoints, but solutions exist to help them simplify the process.
Smarter (and Distanced) Events and Experiences
Odds are the event plans and engaging shopper experiences you had scheduled for this year were spoiled, but the lack of physical gatherings and encounters with retail associates doesn’t eliminate the possibility of personalizing unique interactions with your customers.
The new age of Influencer Marketing was already slated to include expanded roles for everyday creators as brand spokespeople, and the pandemic has only accelerated that plan. Across various industries influencers are playing the part of virtual store associates, creating social broadcasts (both one-to-one and one-to-many) for brands and bringing trusting audiences into the experience. They’re creating new looks for apparel companies via at-home try-ons, online “masterclass” tutorials for beauty brands, and hosting nightly or weekly events where they share new recipes, all streamed live on social platforms or via one-to-one channels like video calling.
These interactions between online personalities and audiences large and small bring an unparalleled amount of personalization and democratization to your marketing toolkit, as you allow real people (armed with necessary guidelines and guardrails, and often joined by moderators) to share their actual use cases in an informal setting. Even better, new technologies enable many of these sessions to be shoppable and attributable by facilitating ways for viewers to seamlessly purchase the item(s) showcased with a single click.
As you’re navigating this new world and doing so under heightened scrutiny surrounding each dollar spent on advertising, it’s important to refresh what may have become outdated observations of growing industries. Influencer Marketing has matured beyond its nascent stages and is ready to become a powerful and relied-upon tool in your arsenal, just as it has become an irreplaceable step in consumers’ complex paths to purchase.
Article top image credit: Getty Images
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