Influencer Marketing a Blueprint for Maximizing Impact
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November 2019 The CMO Guide Influencer Marketing A Blueprint for Maximizing Impact www.regalix.com Introduction In recent years, large corporations have begun changing the way they advertise on digital. It was reported last year that Procter & Gamble reduced its digital advertising spend by $200 million.1 As did Unilever who cut back on their digital ad-spend by a significant margin. Lack of transparency, murky practices, and a vocal customer base have had a negative impact on the industry. In addition, it was reported in 2018 that over 30%2 of the world’s devices had an ad blocker installed. This increasingly popular trend has posed to be a challenge for programmatic ad buying and the digital advertising industry as a whole, because even if businesses invested substantially in digital ads, their ads were either not being seen at all or they were not reaching the right customers. With rising advertising costs and falling returns, businesses have been looking for more innovative ways to attract customers. Influencer marketing is one such way that companies like Airbnb have struck gold. The company signed big-name celebrities—Lady Gaga, Drake, Martin Garrix, Wiz Khalifa, and Stefanie Giesinger, to name a few—to promote their properties, especially during high profile events such as Coachella. The company’s celebrity influencer program started in 2015 when Mariah Carey, Airbnb’s first celebrity customer, booked a luxurious Airbnb mansion in Malibu. Obviously, the company rolled out the red carpet and asked her to promote their property during her stay there. What began inadvertently as a one-off social media post is now the company’s standard influencer program. In two years, Airbnb has racked up 37 sponsored posts by top celebrities, which has given the company 18 million likes, 510,000 comments, and an overall engagement rate of 4%. The total combined reach of its Instagram initiatives for those two years was 966 million. 3 Early success with campaigns such as Airbnb’s ensured that influencer mark eting remains a constant fixture in the modern marketer’s arsenal of tools. Influence r marketing ad-spend is expected to reach $8 billion to $10 billion by 2022. This represents a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38%.4 According to a report by Linqia, 39% of brands plan to increase their influencer mar keting budget this year. 93% of marketers in the study also said that they would be spending more than $10,000 on their campaigns.5 Influencer marketing enables marketers to widen their reach and deepen their engagement. The average influencer engagement rate across industry verticals is 5.7%. In comparison, the average engagement rate for brands on Instagram fluctuated between2% only and 3% in 2018.6 It is not just B2C marketers who are jumping aboard the influencer marketin g bandwagon. B2B marketers are doing the same. In fact, influencer marketing is slated to be one of the top four tactics that B2B marketers will use in 2019 (See ima ge 1). The adoption of influencer marketing in B2B is expected to grow to 48% by the end of 2019, up from 31% in 2018. 7 Yet, marketers struggle to identify the right influencers to work with, engage them in a manner that leads to success and measure ROI. 2 The CMO Guide to Influencer Marketing - A blueprint for maximizing impact Figure-1 B2B tech marketers’ planned adoption of trends in 2019 Video marketing 68% ABM strategy 64% On-demand content strategy 55% Influencer marketing strategy 48% Purchase-intent targeting 44% Advertising on emerging social channels (e.g.Snapshot, Instagram stories) 44% Programmatic ad buying 43% Mobile marketing 41% AI-powered data analytics 36% Generational campaigns 30% Chatbot-powered marketing 30% VR-or AR-based customer experiences 14% Published on MarketingCharts.com in December 2018 | Data Source: Spiceworks Based on a survey of B2B tech marketers across organizations in North America and Europe. Figures show % planning to adopt each trend by the end of 2019 Source: MarketingCharts8 The CMO Guide to Influencer Marketing - A blueprint for maximizing impact 3 Accelerating the impact of influencer marketing Influencer marketing is no longer about influencers merely posting a video or picture on social media. While traditionally such strategies worked well, they don’t work as well anymore, especially in a B2B context, because purchase decisions in the B2B world have become intricately complex, the buying cycles are multilayered and are therefore longer, and involve, at a minimum, six to eight decision mak ers. At the same time, the practice has matured over the years, and fatigue has set in, causing marketers to look for newer ways to get the results they want . While best practicesdiffer based on market, industry, and budget, here are our recommendat ions that work across the board. Add value Customers are looking for businesses that add value to their lives or their work. Take the beauty industry. In the past, influencers merely posted Instagram pictures of new products, and that was enough to generate a buzz. Today, these same influencers are creating tutorials on how to use the product, reviewing the p roduct in great detail, and conducting 24-hour wear tests to reflect a typical da y in the life of a regular customer. B2B marketers have experimented with guest bloggi ng, podcasts, video interviews, ebooks, and more, with tremendous success. To succeed in today’s mature influencer market, businesses need to go beyond showboating and deliver value for their customers. Without it, campaigns come across as being simple marketing and sales gimmicks, and will be viewed with suspicion. 17% of organizations have over half their marketing budgets allocated to influencers.9 4 The CMO Guide to Influencer Marketing - A blueprint for maximizing impact Source: Divvy’s ‘Back to the Future’ microsite11 Picture this: DivvyHQ is an award-winning content planning and marketing software company that wanted to elevate its reputation and engage more actively with potential buyers. The company conducted a survey to distill the top challenges and insights around content planning and marketing. This led to a series of five campaigns that included 30 marketing influencers addressing key challenges that companies highlighted during the survey. The outputs included a research report, a strategy ebook, a series of video interviews, and more. Each campaign was supported by blog posts, organic social content, influencer promotion, and some paid social. The final campaign repurposed the “best of content” from the first 4 campaigns into an interactive microsite using a ‘Back to the Future’ theme. The campaigns were an instant success. There was value delivered in every interaction, and customers gained something from engaging with the content created. Each campaign exceeded goals that included 300% more downloads of the research report, hitting KPI goals within a week of publishing, thousands of video views, and new relationships forged with top marketing industry influencers. 12 The CMO Guide to Influencer Marketing - A blueprint for maximizing impact 5 Source: SAP’s Path to Digital Innovation website13 Picture this: SAP chose to relaunch its Leonardo platform as a “digital innovation system” at the 2017 Sapphire conference in Orlando. The relaunch needed to attract as much attention as possible, because it marked a strategic shift for a solution that was once considered an IoT platform. At a conference that typically attracts over 20,000 attendees, it was easy for the launch to be lost in all the noise. So SAP created an interactive experience called ‘The Path to Digital Innovation,’ where it showcased SAP’s own CEO, Bill McDermott, and 32 top industry influencers, as they shared insights across transformative technologies including IoT, machine learning, AI, blockchain, analytics, big data, and cloud. Every single participating influencer shared the Leonardo Path to Digital Innovation content, many of them multiple times. Reach was unprecedented, with over 21 million views of the interactive experience. 6 The CMO Guide to Influencer Marketing - A blueprint for maximizing impact Get the influencer selection right One of the key challenges of influencer marketing is finding the right influencer who aligns with the company’s values and can speak with authority on the subject at hand. The Influencer Marketing Manifesto, published by TapInfluence and Altimeter14 revealed that 68% of marketers find it difficult to source relevant influencers, while 30% have issues when negotiating terms with these content creators. Figure-2 A hilarious take on the state of influencer selection Source: marketoonist.com ROI on influencer marketing is equivalent to, if not better than other marketing channels, say 89% of marketers.15 The CMO Guide to Influencer Marketing - A blueprint for maximizing impact 7 Brands have been burnt by influencers who weren’t the right fit for their andbr and their values. In 2017, one of YouTube’s biggest stars, PewDiePie, who has over 53 million subscribers, was outed for recording a series of anti-Semitic videos. Brands that had signed him on as an influencer, including Disney and Google, were forced to cut their ties with him before they were buried in the ensuing firestorm. Relevance, authenticity and trust are some of the key elements that make an influencer influential (Image 5). Figure-3 Source: Elements to look for in an influencer16 Influencer marketing offers businesses a high ROI. According to reports, for verye dollar invested in an influencer marketing campaign, companies received an average return of $7.65.17 As a result, the practice has garnered a lot of interest and dollar spends, attracting both genuine and fake influencers. The lack of regulation has resulted in some people gaming the system rather than organically growing an audience. The Social Chain Group has reported that 25% of influencers that they studied used false engagement methods, including buying automated followers, or bots.