Brilliant Noise introduce their new book focused on how to cut through hype about influencer marketing and make it easier for everyone to work with this powerful discipline.
There’s no such thing as an influencer.
That’s the first thing you need to know about influencer marketing. None of the talent worth working with would be happy to wear that label. To their management agencies, their fans, their collaborators, they are creators. As marketers we need to see them as the people who create content and nurture a community that we want to access. When we work with them, we aren’t buying *influence*. Rather the opportunity to work with a deeply talented creative partner, the proof of which is an engaged and loyal audience.
Reset your attitude in this way and it will have an immediate impact on your campaign planning. You’ll create content that will delight your audience and delve deeper into other networks and communities. Reach, we used to call it.
The creative output from working with online creators can be dazzlingly good. I’ll never forget watching one of the first campaigns we did with the marketing director who commissioned it. The simple story we told with the creators wasn’t just authentic, it was deeply affecting. “There was no way”, the client said, “that the best creative team could have created the scene we’d just watched with a script and actors.” It would have been at best cheesy and at worst, cliched and patronising. But it wasn’t.
Think of creative as sparking a moment of bright energy called “attention”. It’s not enough to just create the flash of brilliance, there needs to be a process to take the energy and channel into an onward journey. Ways for people to find out more about the product, ways for them to register interest and, you know, actually buy something.
There’s a lot of bad practise out there, and disappointing results. So, we wrote our book to cut through hype about influencer marketing and make it easier for everyone to work with this powerful discipline. And get it right. Enjoy, and let us know your thoughts.
1. Respect. The. Talent: And make sure everyone else does. The nature of online creator audiences is that they are niche. Someone who is massively important and influential with your target market could be someone you or your client has never heard of.
2. Co-create, don’t dictate: Accept that the digital talent you’re working with understands the audience better than you. Write a brief of course, but let your collaborators know their creative input is wanted and needed. Remember, when it comes to creating compelling branded content, you have to have a common purpose with the audience. And even with all the data about your audience in the world, digital talent will still have valid insight.
3. Start with the end in mind: Part of respecting the brilliant creative is building an integrated plan and customer journey around it, which will encourage an audience to become customers. If you plan it and build it, you can measure that journey and there will be no mystery about ROI.
4. No ROI data is a failure of planning: Return on investment is so often cited as an issue by clients who have tried influencer marketing but not continued. Almost always the root cause is that all the energy went into exciting creative without a thought to the onward customer journey.
5. Don’t let it happen in a silo: Integrated Influencer Marketing is all about ensuring you have data-led insights that fuel the creative and planning processes. Paid media, SEO expertise and solid audience data must unite. And then during the execution stage strong e-commerce and CRO support will turn the attention into sales.
Visit Brilliant Noise’s profile to read and download the full report
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