Next Phase of Influencer Marketing: Peer-to-Peer Influence

It has been 12 years since “Nothing Sells Like Celebrity” –The New York Times published this article in 2008. After 12 years, celebrity endorsements don’t have the same effect on the marketplace. Although it is undeniable that celebrities are trendsetting, they can’t persuade people that they like the products that they endorse. That’s why celebrities’ ads are being replaced by content creators, or as they say, influencers. At this point, the new slogan pop up – Influencers are new celebrities. But there is a little catch here as well. In some cases, influencers can’t improve personal connections with brands like a friend or family member. In such circumstances, forward-thinking brands use Peer-To-Peer Influencer Marketing strategy.
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Regardless of which strategy is used, Influencer Marketing is about relationships, not just buying media. That is why marketers try unique strategies that don’t feel like sales tactics. Peer-to-Peer influence is one of the great examples of these strategies. P2P is a component of Word of Mouth. So, firstly let’s look at what is a word of mouth marketing or WOM marketing.

 

Peer-to-Peer Marketing Is A Big Component Of WOM

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The importance of word of mouth marketing in the post-advertising era is irreplaceable.  It is a term for what happens when satisfied customers promote a brand. So? It means you should roll up your sleeves and try to gain loyal customers who will recommend you to their friends.  Higher engaged customers buy more often and recommend their friends more often.  And peer-to-peer is the new age of word of mouth marketing.

 

Peer-to-Peer As An Example Of Authenticity

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Now you know that peer-to-peer marketing is a technique that involves customers engaging other customers through recommendations. People who aren’t paid wouldn’t recommend products or services for a company if they didn’t believe in it. That is why P2P doesn’t feel like a sales tactic. The trick is getting customers to share their voices with their networks. P2P method provides authenticity that literally can’t be bought with money.

 

P2P is an organic way of spreading information. It helps boost the company’s emotional marketing efforts and creates more robust relationships with the audience.

 

 

What Are The Benefits Of Peer-to-Peer Influencer Marketing

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Nowadays, people care more about what others say about a brand, they trust people like them. According to Nielsen, 92% of people around the world said they trust recommendations from friends and family (earned media) above all other forms of advertising. 

 

Beyond friends and family, 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.

 

These researches are obvious proof of how p2p marketing strategies are vital and authentic  for companies.No one has a script to recommend a product to a friend. It’s just a normal conversation. Influencers who actually use the product in their daily life can integrate to their content bring credibility to both influencers and brands

 

Brands can gain more by spending less with P2P influencer marketing. Converting customers into an influencer is less expensive than a TV advertisement or celebrity endorsement.

 

Targeting brand loyalists leads to targeting the audience and nothing works better than Peer-To-Peer Influence.

 

 

4 Steps Of Building Strong Peer-to-Peer Influencer Marketing

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To get started with powerful P2P influencer marketing, the first thing needed to do is identify the target audience, I mean understanding who the potential customers are. When the target audience is determined, it’s time to find the right people to deliver the message.

 

Choosing the right influencers for being a partner is an important requirement for P2P marketing. If companies find the right influencer for their business, they will bring so much success to it. But the challenge here is to pick an effective influencer who makes a good fit for your brand. One simple way to find influencers is to use the Keepface tools. Keepface offers AI-powered influencer tools that will help brands to find the right influencers, and pursue their campaigns in the best way. This tool demonstrates influencers, their social media profiles, performance data, audience analysis, etc. 

 

Creating an online space to engage and interact for your customers will help with customer retention, lead generation as well as effective sales. With it, companies will manage to create active discussions, increase brand awareness, and create a positive image for their brands. It gives your customers a platform to share valuable insights on everything right from product development to product marketing.

 

In the next phase, you need to keep your community members engaged and active. Peers who create content in your community can have an important role in your business success. The more they are involved in, the more active discussions you will get. For that companies can introduce reward programs. It keeps the motivation and excitement alive.

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All About Affiliate Marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing

 

Affiliate marketing is like owning a supermarket. Supermarket owners don’t need to produce any product, on the contrary, these products came from various companies. Supermarkets promote those products on the shelves and resell them. Customers buy them at a higher price than the supermarket owner paid to companies. It’s the same principle.

 

The difference is affiliates don’t have to buy the products, they just promote them instantly. And also in affiliate marketing, affiliates promote products for commissions and the final price of the product remains the same. The companies sacrifice a percentage of the profit, but they manage to sell more products without paying for advertising costs.

 

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting another company’s product and service as well. It allows brands to partner with individuals or companies to do some work instead of them. These individuals or companies are known as affiliates. 

 

An affiliate marketer sells products on behalf of clients and gets to keep an agreed percentage of the profits. Affiliates introduce products to the audience from other companies. In return, they get a commission from any purchases people from the audience make. 

 

It is a kind of revenue sharing. People who have products, but not an audience, can increase their market by working with people who have an audience, but not a product. 

The idea behind it is that you promote other people’s products, often through an affiliate network and earning a commission. In affiliate marketing, promotion of products and services set in on the Internet.

 

Affiliate Marketing Looks Like A Triangle

The company – who wants to advertise its products/services  via the affiliate marketing model.

The affiliate –  who promote the products in on the Internet.

The affiliate network – is an intermediary between a company and an affiliate. These networks usually offer a wide variety of products from companies and there are thousands of affiliates who can promote these products.  

In the network, there are affiliate managers who are a bridge between brands and affiliates, usually responsible for recruiting affiliates to increase conversions for brands and to help affiliates on their promotions.

 

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

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The company has to pay affiliates only for customers who will visit their website and take action, and this is a very profitable deal. If potential customers visit the company’s website or purchase its products, then the company pays affiliates the agreed percentage of profits.

 

It means that the company is sacrificing a small percentage of its profits but it is still advantageous than traditional advertising and its promotional costs. In this way, the company pays only when a sale or other action is taken, in other words, when the company reaches the desired result. (the desired result is not always selling products or services). 

 

Affiliates place special links on their social media profiles or websites and blogs. When someone clicks those links they get redirected to a company’s website. By the use of a special cookie when a visitor clicks an affiliate link, it tells the company that the visitor comes through this special link. 

 

Customer service, delivery, or support does not concern affiliates. The only concern might be cookie expiration. For instance, Amazon uses 24-hour cookies. It means that they will pay their affiliates commissions during those 24 hours.

 

Advantages Of Affiliate Marketing

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As you understand, this system has tremendous benefits for all sides – for the companies, for affiliates, for affiliate networks.

The company pays in cases of final sales and does not sell without any tangible results. The result is absolutely measurable. With this system, affiliates promote products without the company being forced to pay in advance. This leads to affiliates doing their job more responsible.

For affiliates, the system is overly flexible and lucrative. Affiliates find a product, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make even if you sleep. They also manage to promote dozens of different products from multiple companies without being in their workplace in a very short space of time. They can make money from a single campaign for years. 

On the other hand, affiliate networks undertake campaign management, offer affiliates, and management tools for monitoring promotions for companies.

 

Affiliate Marketing VS Influencer Marketing

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With the integration of social media into our lives, affiliate and influencer marketing have become a major campaign of marketing plans. While these concepts are pretty similar, they also vary when you deep down.

 

Let’s check out the differences which help marketers to discover which option is best for campaigns.

 

Marketers can get good results using both forms of marketing. The biggest feature of influencer marketing is delivering a message across to a relevant target audience. However, affiliate marketing ensures a risk-free investment, it means that marketers only pay for actual results.

 

Influencer marketing is mostly used to increase brand awareness while affiliate marketing for driving sales. 

 

Also one of the main differences is the payment. Influencers usually paid beforehand, but affiliates’ payments based on commission.

 

Influencer and affiliate marketing have different ways to measure success. Influencer marketing mostly focuses on new followers gained, number of shares, and engagement. Affiliate marketing takes a more tangible approach to ROI calculations through sales, orders, conversion rates, new customers.

Selecting the right influencer is the most important step in influencer marketing. But this does not apply to affiliates. Companies can share a unique discount code or coupon code with affiliates, which they can include in their posts.

 

Understand The Power Of Affiliate Marketing With Keepface

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Keepface helps brands who want to use the power of affiliate influencer marketing and affiliates who want to promote the brand’s products or services by providing technical support, consulting services, monitoring the quality of affiliates’ work, and offering analytical and other tools.

The conditions of brands vary depending on the product they offer, their marketing strategy, and budget.

Keepface learns all the conditions of brands, find right influencers/affiliates who have a similar culture to brands campaigns. Discuss all the terms with affiliates, such as what they will do, which product they will advertise on which platform, what the content consists of, and, of course, the earning of affiliates.

So, sign in now to take advantage and get the most out of your affiliate marketing.

 

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YouTube Marketer’s Guide to Influencer Marketing

As a marketer if influencer marketing on YouTube seems to be difficult like a journey to the end of the galaxy, then our tips will be a Hitchhiker’s Guide for your campaigns.

 

Social media use has increased rapidly over the past decade and a half. Making money is one of the most crucial features of social media for brands and influencers. Brands use social media to present their products or to reach new audiences. 

 

As social media grows and the platforms diversify, more and more users are joining it, and these users are starting to create their own content. Thereby the influencers who influence the behavior of consumers were born and opened new doors in business and marketing.

There is an undeniable fact that influencer marketing has flourished since joining Instagram to the social media platforms. But there are other players in the market. According to a survey, Youtube is the second important social media channel for influencer marketing with 70 percent.

 

Moreover, YouTube videos are the third most used format coming after Instagram stories and Instagram videos.

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YouTube is rapidly becoming one of the most popular influencer marketing channels. It is an actual platform for people to watch and edit their video, while you will find videos on most social networks now. 

 

Instagram has even created a long-form video platform IGTV for competing purposes. It is clear that IGTV won’t replace YouTube, but it could only complement it. 

If Google is the Queen, then YouTube is the Princess

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We know that Google is the most used search engine. Youtube comes in next as the second largest search engine when you consider users, searches, and minutes spent on a site, which is owned by Google.

 

When you search for information, YouTube videos appear on Google’s search results as well. Therefore, Google considers videos are as important as text-only pages and it is no secret that searchers click on the first 10 organic results. 

Is It Worthy to Use Influencer Marketing on YouTube?

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Video content is now an integral part of most people’s online experiences with recent improvements in internet speeds. The increase in the use of video also encourages influencers to use this method. YouTube is an extraordinary place for expanding the potential of influencers and influencer marketing.

 

Creating complementary videos as part of your marketing strategy on YouTube is a great advantage for brands who want to boost their business. The following factors prove the role of YouTube in influencer marketing and will motivate marketers.

How to Use YouTube for Influencer Marketing?

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With the right strategy and influencers, you can make the most out of your YouTube influencer marketing for your brand. There are different ways you can use YouTube, which booms influencer marketing. 

 

Depending on brand goals, customer needs, good marketers can create different types of campaigns. Unboxing videos, giveaway & contests, ads & promotions, product launches are some of the foremost ways you can use YouTube influencers.

 

You can also add hashtags and locations to go even deeper with your influencer marketing. Influencers can be test subjects for marketers.

Step-by-Step YouTube Influencer Marketing Guide

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Step 1. Understand your target audience

 

The most vital step in influencer marketing is to analyze and understand the target audience and predict their desire. Understanding the target audience helps to build trust and deliver your brand message.

 

Step 2. Set Clear Goals

 

Brands must be evident with influencers on their campaign purposes. 

As a part of the collaboration, the goals have a profound influence on every YouTube video. The tone of influencer content can change from your campaign purpose. Let’s say, for a sales directed campaign influencer may create a whole video on your new product line. 

Step 3. Identify the Right YouTube Influencers

 

Choose the right influencers who will help you to achieve your goals. The number of followers should not be the most critical priority when choosing influencers.  On the contrary, brands should choose influencers who have a similar culture to their campaign. This is where it makes sense to use Keepface in finding the right influencers for your brand. 

Your budget will also affect your influencer choice. Accordingly, focusing on YouTubers who make videos for the target audience within the budget will be more effective.

 

Step 4. Analyze Creator’s Content Quality

 

When working with YouTube influencers, you should analyze the influencers’ content, their channels’ aesthetics. There must be harmony between your brand, target audience, and influencers. For instance, if you want to promote your family-friendly brand, you should collaborate with YouTube influencers whose content aligns with family values and your brand values,

Step 5. Work with Influencer Marketing Experts

 

Influencer marketing can be complicated and hard to control, especially for large scale YouTube partnerships. That’s where Keepface stepped in. Keepface is an automated platform for brands to reach the most relevant influencers, communicate with them, and manage campaigns using real-time analytics.

 

Working with Keepface brands are handed on every step of the influencer marketing process, including influencer discovery, influencer management, content creation, and analyzing and reporting a campaign’s progress.

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The Lord of the Influencer Marketing: Artificial Intelligence

I have watched a lot of science-fiction movies about artificial intelligence, and many of them introduced artificial intelligence as a villain, like Hal 9000 in the 2001 Space Odyssey. For influencer marketing, artificial intelligence is not a negative figure, but rather a hero. If you are curious, I invite you to read the full article about AI’s role in influencer marketing.  

Beyond the AI hype

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In the first place, if you ask what artificial intelligence is, then Wikipedia will answer you that AI is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. Plus, there is a lot of hype around AI, and most discussions about artificial intelligence concluded with hysteria. 

 

People assume that AI  even replaces human in specific processes as AI can accelerate procedures. Moreover, it is crystal clear for everybody that AI can process data at a level impossible for human capabilities. Nevertheless, in Influencer marketing, human interaction is an essential part of the work, because it is a human-to-human process, while AI alone cannot provide that.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Be Transformed Into Influencer Marketing?

 

In the Search of Right Influencer

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Digital marketing is extremely noisy, therefore, brands need content that will resonate in the digital world. One of the biggest obstacles to this is finding the right influencers and it is not expected from marketers to be Sherlock Holmes in the searching process. The number of followers should not be the most important priority when choosing influencers, it is not possible to identify an influencer’s potential only based on their follower count. 

 

Marketers need to consider other factors such as the engagement level. Additionally, collaborating with an influencer who has a similar culture to the brands is likewise important. Here AI comes to our aid.

Let’s look at how

 

AI can analyze various data from an influencer’s social media profile. This goes into the scope of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Natural language processing is a form of AI that’s focused on analyzing, understanding, and using written or spoken human languages. 

 

Conveying messages is tremendously important for Influencer Marketing, and of course, creating messages needed words. So, NLP has a powerful role in analyzing. NLP has the capacity to deal with unstructured data on social media. It analyses the content of influencer posts and generates interests, industries, demographics, and brand associations from them. Influencer platforms use these classifications in discovery search engines. 

 

With that, Brand marketers can identify who the key influencers are in growth areas and can gain better insights about influencers. Likewise, marketers can determine what types of content will resonate with social media followers.

Catch Fraudulent Influencers If You Can

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Brands pay influencers who have significant followers on top social media platforms to promote their products and reach a relevant audience. Using social media bots for increasing followers count and creating fake engagement metrics makes it difficult to determine the credibility of influencers. Influencers can buy fake followers and pay for bots to like or comment on their posts that can mislead brands. 

 

According to a report from Cheq, fraudulent activity is costing advertisers $1.3 billion in 2019. Fraud figures not only prevent the product from reaching the target audience but also causes brands to spend money without getting any tangible results. AI can help brands analyze and identify computer-generated influencers, social media bots, which is a real threat for brands.

The Creation of Content

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ML (Machine Learning) technologies can analyze millions of online images and videos within a few seconds. ML algorithms collect more intricate data according to the automatic identification of images and videos. Moreover, ML/AI technologies can analyze comment sentiment. It allows identifying whether the expressed opinion is positive or negative and deciding which posts have a positive attitude, positive feedback, and which one vice versa. It helps the brand to identify which type of content is most likely to get positive responses by the target audience. 

Predicting ROI

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AI allows marketers to closely observe an influencer’s performance and assists track and analyze every piece of content, various engagement metrics. Therefore, it can calculate the ROI of the campaigns and understand whether it has had an impact on your revenue. Where an influencer’s success is irregular, calculating the ROI of an influencer marketing campaign and forecasting results are vital. 

 

Analyzing influencers is difficult without AI because every creator is different. If marketers want to get top-level insights in the data dump, only a machine/AI can deal with the mass amounts of big data.

Eternal Sunshine of the Keepface AI Tool

 

Brands cannot resist the power of AI on running successful influencer marketing. As I mentioned above, AI can support brands from various aspects. Keepface, which implements the latest innovations in its tool, certainly could not neglect AI technology. Keepface offers AI-powered influencer tools that will help brands to pursue their campaigns in the best way.

 

With the image recognition tool, Keepface analyzes accounts, for example, especially suspicious accounts, which can deceive companies causing a huge amount of damage to their business. It is tough for brands to recognize fraudulent figures by themselves without the help of pros.  

Moreover, by using image recognition Keepface can easily classify influencers’ contents. It turns images into readable data. Of course, the only image recognizing is not enough for this process. Keepface ML/AI tools can analyze written data too. At the end of this process, Keepface helps the companies to choose the right influencers which have similar culture with their brands and can deliver content to the target audience.

 

So, sign in now to take advantage of AI technology and get the most out of your influencer marketing.

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