Influencer Marketing: Influencers Are Essential to any Marketing Strategy & Here’s Why

1. Introduction: Hi, guys. I'm Chelsea Matthews. I am the founder of Matt Black, were a brand marketing and creative agency based in Los Angeles, and we do a lot of things within the marketing wheel, and influencers is one of them. It's something that we've been very actively doing for brands for, um, more than eight years, honestly, when it was really just bloggers, and then it became instagrammers and Pinterest, influencers, new tubers and all this stuff that is really incredible, but also really challenging for brands to wrap their heads around from time to time. 2. Why Is It Necessary: I wanted Teoh talk about this course. But why? Influencer marketing is an integral piece of any grand strategy today because I get this question a lot from people like, What do you think is really the value of influencer marketing today? And if it's not driving sales, why am I doing it? And how should we be aligning with influencers? What makes sense for the brand? It feels like everything sponsored, which are all totally valid points. And so I think we've kind of hit this, you know, cycle of almost five years of Let's just look at Instagram alone, um, of kind of this new realm of influence and now audiences air really kind of seeing through authentic branded content and then advertising. Several years ago, it was something much more, uh, new and seemingly holistic, even if some these influences were getting paid for what they were doing. But as any consumer audience gets severe and severe with what they see happening around them, they also become less and less responsive. Teoh, you know, advertising or branded content in that format. Eso Because of that, there is this big conversation right now around like, is it really valuable. Is it still a smart kind of are a wire investment for your brand? Um, right alongside that, you'll still find, you know, fast company articles. Aziz Early is like months ago saying that influence for sure, the biggest part of brand strategy, the biggest financial investment that brands are making in today's marketing landscape. So it's still very much alive and well, let's just say, but especially for smaller brands, I think it's a lot of kind of figuring out How do influencers fit into their marketing strategy? How do they understand what kind of financial investment that's gonna look like? And how do you leverage influencers in the right way for your brand? So that is what we're going to cover in today's class. Um, so the first thing I want to do is just kind of, you know, look at like, what is a marketing strategy comprised of as a whole? And this is gonna be very, very generalized and more so kind of from the lens that we look things through. But if you think about a brands, marketing or companies marketing, you're thinking about the positioning. You're thinking about the voice you're thinking about campaigns. You're thinking about email marketing or thinking about advertising. Um, you're thinking about partnerships like all of these great things that surround the the reason for brands to continue to tell great stories to their consumers. Um, and influencers is a huge piece of that because they help you talk to new audiences in any kind of marketing strategy. You have your owned audiences that might be your email subscribers, your website visitors, your customers, these things air things that you own. You've won that trust. Um, then you always have to look at outside ways of garnering new customers, and that's gonna come through advertising and influencer programs and acquisition based strategies. So that is incredibly important. Every brand, every company anyone's marketing strategy is going to be thinking about. How do we get new eyeballs? How do we bring new people over to our site? Our event, whatever it might be a new influencers are inherently a piece of that 3. Types Of Influencers: so if you kind of start by talking about, you know, the types of influencers in general, Um, we have really three categories of influencers. You have the super influencers. They are the ones that have audiences in the million's Onda. Lot of times, you'll find them on instagram or YouTube. Sometimes you find it on Pinterest. Um, but really, I mean, they're they're, like, the mega mega mega. Um, then you come into the macro influencers. Macro influencers are usually anyone from 60,000 or 70,000 plus up to that kind of super level. Um, and then you have your micro influencers, which were typically 60,000 or less. Sometimes all the way is love. Some people even say, like 10,000. Um, I think that that's a little bit on the low side. We we work a lot with micro influencers. It's really an exciting space right now in the ability to, um, really get high return. They're highly engaged group of people. It's less diluted in places, but again, it really depends on what your goals are and what your strategy is. You know, if you're really focused on kind of, um garnering a lot of impressions and awareness. Then you know, maybe those numbers in the millions air what you're really looking to capture because that's that big, impressive number that you're gonna want. Um, but if it's really maybe more about engagement or conversion, micro is a great place to start. But ultimately, that's kind of your your three categories mega, macro and micro. 4. Types Of Influencer Strategies: so the next day I want to talk about is the types of influencer campaigns that you might consider for your strategy. And a lot of times this is going to come down. Teoh Resource is whether it's financial resource is or how much product you have to kind of disseminate, but also it's gonna come down to your goals and what you're looking to achieve. So, you know, if you're looking to just get like as much awareness is possible and impressions is a big number for you, you might just really focused on like, Yeah, I just want to work with these kind of macro influencers the mega sorry, the mega influencers and just hit that like in the Millions. I want lots of like sexy numbers for impressions. But if you're really kind of just thinking about how you can get your product and as many hands as possible, programs like seeding campaigns are a great place to start. So that's kind of like the low hanging fruit of influencer programs. Um, seeding is what it sounds like. It's mailing your product to influencers, either in hopes that they will love it and talk about it in hopes that they will share the beautiful kit and package that you sent to them or guarantee it by actually paying them to post something once they receive it. So this is a great way like if you don't have big budgets, seating campaigns are an amazing way to just get your product in the right hands. Eso that's that's one place to start the next would be ambassador campaigns. So this is definitely something that requires either Ah, high value proposition or a big ish budget. Um, Ambassador program is typically something that you are going Teoh onboard a set of influencers or even maybe just a single in blue influencer for a longer duration of time. To be a true ambassador for your brand or your product or event, um, and really kind of embed them into the values of your company into multiple different campaigns. There's a huge set of deliverables. It's a really different way of kind of thinking about how you're going to align. Um, I think with ambassador campaigns. This is really something that comes once you really understand what kind of influencers work for you and your brand on, and I think by doing smaller programs and testing like maybe it's, you know, the millennial mom category. Or maybe it's the teen category or fashion lifestyle girls like Maybe that's you kind of need to dance with all those different groups to understand who's actually going to give you the highest return. So I always stressed to do more of that before you identify the one person that you think could be the right like face of your brand. Um, and then you have kind of like social media and content focused Campaign sees Things could be really focused on, um, you know, a specific kind of launch or an event, or like something that's a short term duration that needs a real big push, where it could just be kind of, you know, general momentum and ongoing needs that need to be supported by the brand. So I kinda want to talk about those across the three different channels that you primarily will activate influencer programs on which is Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. I'm so instagram campaigns we find are really successful for content development for brand awareness, and then for leveraging Instagram's stories for swipe up campaigns. We'll talk about each of those a little bit Contin development is something that every brand meets. I don't think that anybody feels like they have enough content to pull from to keep their social feeds a plenty or, you know, assets for email and all of the things that you need to constantly be marketing your brand and so influencers air. Great way to help supplement that. Naturally, you're probably going to go to influencers that you feel have a good taste level who, well aligned with your brand, who take great images, who you feel like, well, best portray your brand on their own channel and goody for you. You also get to use his content that content on your feet, and most time those influencers will actually share those images with you for use in whatever kind of usage rights that you align with. So that's awesome. That's valuable. Um, the next thing is brand awareness, so it really is that kind of impressions thing. Looking at their engagement is super important. Followers are great, but engagement is critical. You really want to make sure that any influencers you're aligning with are at least getting 4% engagement on their content and hopefully it's upwards closer to 10. Um, that's a really small number in the grand scheme of things, but we all know that algorithms are a little cuckoo, and so you're kind of fighting against a number of different things. But that is something you really want to think about and think about the potential awareness and impressions based on the engagement and not necessarily the followers on and then leveraging Instagram's stories. I think you know, most of us have seen stories. Is a really active kind of riel raw space in the instagram community and influencers or using it very heavily. I'm even to propose promote like the static post in their feet because again, instagram algorithm, it kind of rewards people who are using stories more actively and will push their, you know, static feed content to more people. If they're being kind of fully using the instagram portal, I guess, um, but this is a great place for revenue focused initiatives. So if you're saying OK, I really want to make sure that you know, if I'm paying this influence or $1000 to do a post and share a story, I want to ensure that they're going to do swipe up and buy into that. Um, anyone who has over 10,000 followers on instagram has the ability Teoh swipe up to a link whenever they're posting in stories. And so what this means is that they potentially are going Teoh, talk about your brand and then drive that traffic to your site. Once they drive traffic to your site, there's no guarantee that you're actually gonna get sales. Hopefully, you dio um but at the very least, you should be able to capture that data. Um, ultimately, you wanna have ABRI targeting turned on and actives that you can capture any new visitors that come to your site in this in case they hop off, don't buy something, but then you kind of are able to follow him around the Internet. So those are some ways of great ways of kind of activating Instagram as a channel with influencers. Um, Pinterest is kind of a slightly declining space for influence or programs, at least in in what we're seeing, but it is still very viable for driving traffic based programs. Um, Pinterest, in a lot of ways, has become much more of an s E O platform than it has been like this big fall or platform. But a lot of influencers early on did cultivate really great relationships and and audience sizes on that platform, and they're still really able to leverage that. And so, you know, it's really great for, you know, maybe a certain product launch or a series of product launches, and you want to make sure that they're pinning products from your site that are gonna essentially get in front of their large audiences and then drive that traffic out to the site. So really good for that kind of campaign. Instantly any kind of traffic driving campaign. So if you're looking to just pick up Web traffic, if you're doing ad retargeting again, Pinterest could be a really smart strategy for how you uptick that kind of new visitor account and leverage those influencers to help you reach those goals. Um, and then with YouTube, it's kind of its own little animal, but really, really awesome. Um, you kind of get a mix of both. So, um, where I feel like YouTube, sometimes lax and content in terms of highly curated content, and that kind of like beautiful, you know, Flat lay that instagram is kind of known for, um, you do garner video and everyone knows that video is cumbersome and it's it could be quite costly. And it can be an incredible way to capture some great content from these influencers, whether it's an unboxing or them doing a tutorial or maybe something more kind of editorial than that them being able to provide that video content for you because it's something that's naturally integrated into the way that they create is a huge asset, and you can use those videos on your channels to build out your YouTube content. Teoh use for ads that all is going to depend on the usage rights that you agree to with the influencer. But video is super important in today's landscape, and that's a great way to get some content. In addition, Teoh aligning with an influencer, um, similarly to the other programs great for website traffic or CEO. Um, it is a Google platform, so YouTube does have ah, good kind of weight when it comes to boosting your S E O. For a site, you are really able to leverage link trafficking. So are tracking. Sorry. So if a youtuber is doing like a beauty tutorial using your product, they have the ability to be talking to their audience and telling them, Oh, check out this site bubble blower. Love this brand. But they can also out all of that in their caption for the YouTube video. And they can actually link out on We see time and time again, how viable that can be for the clients that we work with in terms of really seeing high uptick in traffic from those kind of campaigns and really seeing sales. I think that YouTube consistently in certain categories, beauty, being a big one of them, has a huge influence on revenue above probably any of the other channels that we talk about . Um, so that's kind of like a way of kind of thinking about it by a channel and then to kind of hot back to just general kind of influencer campaigns again. Other ways that you could be thinking about working with influencers as a whole is really through also talent and content. Um, so we talked about like, kind of leaning on instagrammers, maybe to be creating content for you that you can use on your channel. Consider, sometimes even, maybe not asking them to post it on their feed on dust, purely providing that content to you. That is a huge value on and is probably going to be a lot less than you may be producing your own shoot, Um, and also think about, you know, if you are brand that's actively producing content, consider bringing influencers in his talent in those chutes. That is a really awesome way. Teoh Integrate them in. On a deeper level, it's also value to them. It's a very rare that you will mean influencer who does not like to get photos taken of themselves or to be featured in videos. And if they really love your brand, they're probably going to Cheryl that content, whether or not you paid them to post on their channels. Um, but if you do great and you can integrate it into the whole thing, so you know it's a guarantee. But really just think about how you can kind of leverage it from from that standpoint, to it does add a human element. They have consumer audiences that connect with them because of their look or their style and so being kind of strategic and using them, you know, in a deeper layer is a really good move. 5. Determining Goals: So with all those campaign types in mind, in order to figure out which ones right for you, you also need to determine the goals that you want to get out of any campaign. So those goals can be. You can assign multiple goals to your campaign, or you could just identify one. Um, typical goals for influencer programs are social growth or engagement increases. So if you're really focused on, you know, boost staying your followers on instagram, um, then you might focus on influenced or driven campaigns that will do so. The next will be brand awareness. So really kind of thinking about your program in terms of just getting your product or your event or whatever it is in front of as many people as possible. So with that kind of goal, you're really gonna be focused on what were the impressions garnered from the campaign, which is based on their followers size on their engagement, and really thinking about it more in the lines of, you know, maybe how you would approach getting a, uh, you know, an article published in a magazine. There's not necessarily an expectation for sales or for traffic to your site. there's a hope for it, but really, your main goal is just getting as many eyeballs on something as possible, Um, the next to sales or revenue. So as we kind of talked about things like swipe up campaigns or maybe Pinterest programs, YouTube linking with those programs, you're gonna be highly focused on what kind of sales can I garner through testing and through running various programs, the different influencers? You will come to some good conclusions in terms of the type of influencers who are actually gonna convert for you and also start to understand what kind of return you'll see on financial investment from what kind of campaigns. Um, and there really is no formula to this, really. It comes down to so many different factors, and it's gonna be really something that's like, true to your brand and figure it out through various testing. Um, the next is Contin development, as we talked about. If you're in a position where you know you're not producing shoots all the time and you feel like it's really hard to get enough content to populate your instagram feed, then you might purely just look at your influence or campaigns is something that is highly focused around getting a bunch of great assets from them that you can use throughout your own marketing needs in addition to them publishing on their own feeds or sometimes even not . So it might be a low barrier investment on, and you can kind of look at it in multiple ways, as opposed to just being around traffic conversion, sales growth, things like that, Um, and the last is really, you know, tied to sales and revenue. But is that kind of traffic and ad retargeting elements? So, um, if you are launching any product, you will, you know, probably focus on how you can drive us much traffic to your site as possible. Your new company need traffic. Um, you need to be able to get some insight. So those would be really focused on those kind of swipe up programs and Pinterest programs again. Um, and ad retargeting is a great way to capture new visitor data as well. So, you know, working with third party platforms that basically own real estate around the Internet that are able Teoh, um, follow new visitors who jumped to your site around based on the products that they looked at or maybe left in their cart. So this is a really good way of creating some conversion between you know, let's say you do an instagram campaign with swipe up ah functionality and you get a bunch of new visitors to your site. Nobody really buys anything cause they're just getting familiar with the brand. Or maybe, you know, there's, um, ux things you need to change on your site. But ultimately, once that data is captured from the ad retargeting side, they're able to follow those people around the Internet, potentially impact their purchase decision to maybe come back and by the product later, just kind of keep your brand top of mind. So those were some kind of goals that should help you define which of the campaigns will make the most sense for both your financial investment and also your brand as a whole. 6. Case Studies: So I want to just quickly talk through a successful influencer campaign that we ran a few years back. It was for Pete's coffee, which is a, um, primarily West Coast based, I believe coffee brand with a lot of locations. They were launching a new product called the Geneva, which was kind of an ice blended type drink. Ah, and they really wanted to focus around just visibility of this product launch in core markets. So for them they were doing ah, pre release of the new menu item in San Francisco in Los Angeles. So we're really focused on Geo targeting influencers in those two markets. Um, and they really wanted Teoh get a bunch of content. So for them, it was really an awareness campaign. There's really no way that they could correlate. You know, Joe Viva sales in the store from influencer Post, but they could certainly potentially garner some traffic uptick that they could equate to it. But top top focus for them was awareness, visibility and really great content from really great influencers. So what we did was we aligned with 13 bloggers in those two markets. Some of them had audience sizes as high as 850,000 and then the lowest was around 50. Thousands were kind of looking at different um, kind of key anchor influencers like Jamie. Try again. Lo Bosworth, who had those large numbers but then focused on the more niche, kind of like food and coffee culture influencers to really produce, like, really beautiful content and be really thoughtful and targeted in terms of that specific kind of conversation. Um, in the end, we garnered over to 12 million impressions for the brand for the launch. It was highly highly successful. It ran across Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. Pinterest actually ended up being a really viable platform for it, based on, um, working with some Pinterest influencers who also had instagram audience. It was kind of like a dual approach. Um, and they were able to garner almost 40 really strong images that they could use throughout digital usage for promotion of the product. And they were again really beautiful, beautiful photos of the product either in store in home. So it's a really successful campaign for for the brand based on, you know what their goals were and what they were looking to achieve 7. Project: so to kind of wrap up this course I want toe task. You with a little project Just so you could be thinking about this is you, as you approach your instagram strategy for your brand or project. Um, what I want you to do is scan Instagram and I want you to identify the following, and this could be totally assumption. Granted, you're not going to know for sure, but just helps you put the lens on to kind of find the right people. Um, I want you to scan them, and I want you to find a seating campaign. Um, a clue, like would be someone who posts a box, a photo of like, a box of something. You might see this moron stories than you would on static feed, or it might be like an unboxing on YouTube. But look for something that is a seeding campaign, And then I also want you to keep an eye out for something that is clearly a traffic driving or revenue based campaign. So it might be that you see influencer who are pushing swipe up to a brand's site. Um, or it might be something different up to you. I just want you to keep an eye for its. You can start to see how the output of those kind of campaigns could potentially look for your brand to identify what's most important for you. 8. Conclusion: and that's kind of a wrap on how and why influencers are an integral part of your marketing strategy. As you can see, there are several ways that you can approach it, but ultimately they're going to be a really viable asset in terms of driving new audience, bringing new eyeballs onto your website or your social feeds, and also to be a really great pillar of resource for content development. Be sure to check out my other videos on skill share, and if you want to learn a little bit more about what we do, just head over to we are matte black dot com. Thanks.