As one of the foremost human tragedies, Coronavirus is affecting the lives of the world population, endangering the health of hundreds of thousands of people, bereaving social freedom. It has also dramatic effects on the businesses in public and private sectors. It is difficult to define the true financial cost of the virus on the economy as the outbreak spreads day-by-day to new regions. 

Beginning in China and following in the world, leading technology, apparel, automobile companies have been compelled to shut down their factories, close sales stores, and lay off employees. The downturn put pressure on logistics, supply chain management, and shipment services. 

Businesses are canceled 

Lockdown due to the Coronavirus negatively affects the B2B market too. Major tech conferences, sports, art events are canceled causing billions of losses to the whole world economy. According to the US B2B marketers, in-person communication and tradeshows are the most effective channels for driving conversion and lead generation. Expected cost of cancellation of the biggest tech conferences is $1B loss. 

What does this mean for marketers?

It is vital to keep relations with customers in the first wave of the crises. Discounts, special offers are a good way to engage with current customers. 

However, not to exploit the fear people are experiencing, platforms like Google and Facebook are blocking any ad that might be abusing the situation. From the beginning of the outbreak, Facebook started to ban ads for goods like hand sanitizers and face masks. It also prohibited the sharing of misinformation causing panic, or about the cure of the virus.  

Some brands renovate delivering services 

Due to the increased online shopping Amazon focuses on the stocking and delivery of the essential products following the situation. The company prioritizes the delivery of household staples, healthcare supplies, personal care, grocery and baby products. Sales outside these categories are suspended up to 5 April, which can be extended.

Cut down in marketing budgets

According to the Econsultancy and Marketing Week’s survey, product and service launches are delayed to uncertain times. 55% in the UK and 56% in US marketers said that their marketing campaigns are under review or delayed. 

Besides the travel and hospitality, FMCG, restaurants, entertainment industries seriously stumbled in the first quarter and expected to continue in the second quarter, as well. Reduced ad spend on these sectors also cause fall off in the budgets of Google and Facebook. Considering the fact that in 2019, travel ads accounted for 10% of Google’s ads revenue.  Marketers anticipate a 30% to 45% drop in Facebook’s revenue because of hits on travel, consumer packaged goods, retailer and entertainment in the first quarter. 

Social responsibility

It is the best time to build public trust that will always be remembered. Through corporate social responsibility programs, companies take initiatives for the benefit of their employees and society. The different range actions include covering sick leaves of workers, helping the government to fight against the disease, producing face masks or hand sanitizers, giving food support away and etc. The American fashion brand Ralph Lauren donates $10M for the relief of the virus. The donation will go to the WHO fund, the corporation’s employees and cancer institutions. 

Several brands run different social campaigns to invite people to stay at home. The global franchise chane McDonald’s separated its golden arch M to support self isolation. The change in the logo is only made in the social platforms. Nike, which closed all stores in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US, launched Play inside, play for the world campaign. To prevent the spread of novel Coronavirus, Starbucks stops the use of reusable cups in its stores. Plus, it offers a 10% discount to customers who bring their reusable cups or ask to use the brand’s cups. 

 

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Despite its diminishing ad revenues, Facebook offers $100 million grants as cash and ad credits to 30 000 small businesses in 30 countries that it operates. Along with donating 10M masks to the citizens in the US and Europe, Apple launched a website and an iOS app that allow users to screen themselves for the Coronavirus. Another tech giant Google gave $800M mainly in the ad form to support the fight against the virus, including $20M in  Google Cloud for academic institutions and researchers, $200M for NGO and financial institutions, $340M for small and medium enterprises. 

Difficulties create opportunities 

With all complexity and obstacles, the virus challenges all markets to redirect their marketing and sales plans and utilize them to the current conditions. 

Time spent on social media has enormously been rising as more people stay-at-home to minimize the risk of the virus. Now people have “unlimited time” to produce and consume more content than ever. 

According to a report by Izea, 66% of the correspondents predict their social media usage will increase. Internet users believe that YouTube usage will increase by 64% while Facebook will increase 63%, followed by Instagram by 43% and Twitter by 34%. 

Remote working is a new era now

Several business events shifted online such as Google Cloud Next, IBM’s developers conference. The loss of face-to-face communication and the cancellation of social events creates a huge demand for online conferencing platforms such as SLAC, webinars. Slack said there is almost a 40% increase in the numbers of paid customers. Daily active users of Microsoft Teams more than doubled from November to March. It also added new features to the platform for telehemedice. 

The growing need for telehealth and teleconferencing accelerates the implication of 5G technology. 

According to the Appsflyer’s report, there is a 15% increase in organic non-gaming app installs starting from mid-February. The non-gaming app categories mainly include communication, finance, health & fitness, news, a utility which means people turn their social habits to online presence.

Spike in online gaming industry 

Social distancing makes people gather and entertain on online games. Video gaming companies either extend or introduce new promotions. In China, total game downloads in Apple’s app stores made a 27.5% increase that is a 12.1% rise in revenue. According to Douyu’s streaming index, games like “Honor of Kings”, “League of Legends” and “Playerunknown’s Battleground” now are twice as popular compared to 2019. “Honor of Kings” reached 63 million views during the New Year holiday.

In the US there is 75% upswing in the number of online game players. The largely damaged Italy sees a 70% increase in internet traffic which is mainly contributed by the gaming industry like “Fortnite”, “Call of Duty: Warzone”. Steam reached 22.5 million all-time user peaks during last week.

What is happening to influencer marketing in the meantime? 

It is important to engage with the audience during this hard time. Social distancing is largely overwhelming fashion, lifestyle, travel influencers whose content is mainly based on outside activities. 

Due to economic stagnation and slacking consumer behavior in different fields, lots of clothing, entertainment brands are constrained to withdraw or delay their partnerships. But, this will not cause the influencer marketing to go away.

We all know it is not the right time to pose in the perfect looking outfits at social events, holiday travels. At the same time, we see an increased number of social media usage, and engagements rise up. It is an opportunity to create useful and educational content and rebuild trust with the followers. As authorities who influence our lives, they can call people to understand the situation and follow the guidelines, spread positivity, advise on activities to effectively spend our time at home.

The different types of content such as streaming daily vlogs to show how they use their time well in these hard times, adding movie and book recommendations, distant learning programs, and home recipes. It will also help to reform the market in a more authentic and communication-based nature. 

Gaming, fitness, yoga and wellbeing influencers are the most followed categories in the stay-at-home period. Psychology experts are the next category people feel the need in self-isolation period. Changing living habits, fear of health issues, and financial uncertainty in many traditional works make people seek to keep physical and mental balance in a sedentary lifestyle.

Challenges with uncertainty 

It is early to voice the precise amount of economic loss. Continued uncertainty hinders to define needed actions to be taken. Drop-in the main spheres of the economy makes brands alter their marketing, sales strategies, and set new budgets. 

Although negative consequences of the Coronavirus virus is expected to continue in the upcoming months, a positive lesson that we learned in these days is global lockdown opened a new and ongoing stay-at-home economy. The vast majority of businesses more or less can perform the same results as in the in-person working. Now it is possible to serve food, grocery, health care kits to millions of people at the same time. Purchasing habits of people will not be the same as the pre-break period. 

Although influencer marketing is a relatively young industry, 89% of marketers find it more profitable. Plus to its benefits, influencer marketing has challenges, as well. Lack of regulation in influencer marketing creates new challenges for marketers and brands who seek to use it on their marketing strategies. 

What are the challenges in influencer marketing?

According to the study conducted by Mediakix, one of the biggest challenges of the marketing industry is spotting fake followers and inauthentic engagement. This is followed by social algorithm changes that make content less visible and building an always-on strategy instead of one-off campaigns. Let’s look through those main challenges of the influencer marketing industry and what brands can do about them.

Fake influencer activities

The number one thread in influencer marketing is the growing number of inauthentic influencers with fake followers that increase brands’ concerns about finding the right influencers to work with. Fake bot followers are made to inflate follower numbers and engagement. The aim here is to deceive brands and followers as a trusty channel. Pretty much all social platforms are victims of these fake followers. 

Unfortunately, influencer fraud costs millions of dollars to brands. According to the 2018 report by Points North Group, of the $744 million that brands spent on influencer marketing, $102 million was wasted on fake followers, including Unilever’s brand Dove. Yet no brand was as seriously affected as Raw Sugar Living. The same report showed that 46% of the brand’s influencer marketing budget was eaten into bots and paid followers.

Fake followers are not only a challenge in the influencer marketing industry, but many marketing agencies also suffer from the same fraudulent activities with their digital ads such as fake impressions. 

Luckily, as we already mentioned in our previous blog, there are several methods to spot fake followers like checking influencer growth rate, reading post comments, communication between influencer and followers, and using influencer analytics tools to analyze influencers’ profiles.

Rising influencer marketing costs

The next challenge ahead of brands is the rising cost of influencers. As the demand and industry grow it gets more complicated, more efforts and tools are required to leverage.

How much does the influencer marketing cost? It is a partnership fee that you pay, comprising the type of the content, the influencers’ creativity, campaign duration, influencer engagement, or agency fee. Rising influencer cost is also associated with the bot followers which are used for pretending big influencer profiles in brands’ minds. But does paying more to influencers raise your ROI? Brands need to effectively measure relevant metrics and ROI. 

What to do?

Seemingly low-cost marketing channel in influencer marketing is micro-influencers. Individuals with a small but very active number of followers have more engagement rates and trusty profiles. Micro-influencers are approachable, credible, and generate more engagement rate, 22.2 times higher conversions than the other influencer types.

Changing algorithms

Algorithm is pretty much how the social media platforms operate. First of all, changing algorithms might change engagement rates and your posts’ visibility. From the positive side platforms change algorithms for supporting quality content, and users who post authentically and frequently.

Facebook’s new algorithm for example, amplifies personal accounts’ posts rather than business accounts. So, it allows brands to leverage influencer marketing easily on Facebook or think of Instagram’s no like change. The new model helps brands not to be deceived by bot likes, to work with authentic influencers, and to support paid posts on Instagram. 

Brands have to set their marketing plans based on the existing algorithms. As these algorithms change regularly, brands should adopt new marketing strategies and optimize them according to the changes. These changes put influencers forward who are authentic and have higher engagements, so that brands can easily work with credible influencers. 

In-house team, agency or influencer marketing platform? 

The following challenge to overcome is deciding on in-house team or agency to run influencer campaigns. Considering third party costs on one side, and time spent on influencer search and campaign management on the other side. 

After working on influencer market brands move their influencer marketing management to the internal team. Getting accustomed to the market aspect motivates brands to work solely instead of partnering with influencer marketing agencies or platforms. Despite specialized agencies, database tools, the high budget, and needed experience, marketers committed to run influencer campaigns with an in-house team. 

Influencer marketing agencies work on the campaigns from the influencer finding to the campaign management. They built reputation and trust in brands and influencers’ eyes have expertise. By maintaining relations with influencers and brands, agencies get to know the market well. 

Influencer marketing platforms give brands influencer accounts with relevant metrics and post statistics. On influencer marketing platforms, companies can easily register their brands, filter influencers by different categories, create campaigns and get reports at the end. Along with influencer marketing software, employee advocacy, and influencer analytics tools, Keepface offers influencer lists on different niches. AI-powered products have influencer profiles, performance data, audience analytics, and different other features.

Following trends

As long as brands expand their influencer marketing they should go along with changing trends and reshape their strategies. Here includes responding to on-going trends in a creative way, the emergence of new influencers, allowing UGC, building long-term relations with influencers.

Employee advocacy

While influencers act as trusted agents on behalf of your brand, your employees are even more credible party to promote your brand. Employee advocacy is a smart way of promoting your brand without spending extra money and time. The practical knowledge of these people helps to increase trust and deliver your message even more clearly. The issue with employee advocacy is empowering low-reach people to spread your brand awareness. But if effectively run, employee advocacy can turn followers into real customers. 

Keepface’s Employee Advocacy Tool is designed to amplify your social voice. The tool will help to enhance internal and external communication, keep control over brand voice on social media and report on which platform you perform best. All you need is to set up an employee advocacy campaign and manage it in a single place.

Enhancing content marketing

Content marketing is a modest way of presenting your brand on social media. The important part of building trust is expressing who you are with the help of quality content. However, creating quality content is the rising challenge of content marketing alone. Consistently writing content can lead to neglect quality. Highly experienced brands, pages with a relatively large number of publications sometimes can fail to deliver their messages, cause misunderstanding or just not get enough attention after all. 

What about combining content marketing with influencer marketing? 

Instead of writing long content to publicize your brand, prepare short texts that are plausible for the influencers you picked up. You cannot expect a high reputation from influencers without quality content. 

Simply, you can create content for giveaway campaigns, video, podcast or social media takeovers, branded posts and ask influencers to optimize it in their style or provide influencers with all the text to prevent extra efforts and misleading by influencers.

Increasing video content 

In a world where mobile phones are used as cameras, video content sharing became even more popular. As videos are eye-catching and they generate more engagement. Not surprisingly, algorithms in social platforms also support video content. According to the report, 72% of customers prefer to learn about products and services from videos. Preparing video content requires more time, efforts and in-depth information to share. 

Editing is an important part of video sharing. A clear, polished video is more likely to attract more viewers and brands. We have seen lots of influencers quit YouTube due to the long hours needed for making and editing videos. Also, for brands sponsoring video content is pricier in comparison to photo or story posts. 

Approaching video content as a challenge ahead, brands can sponsor video tutorials or invite influencers for product promotion videos. Preparing video content allows influencers to signify their creativity, share emotions and spur their audience for communicating.

Competition in existing social media platforms

Saturation of the influencer market leads marketers to look for new places. As the number of influencers increases, content becomes repetitive in existing platforms. Moving to new channels is challenging for marketers, in terms of brand compatibility with app features, finding the relevant influencers, getting accustomed to the app usage. The good thing is social platforms support easy communication, creativity, and attract the young generation.  

The increased number of users drives the marketability of platforms. Take the example of TikTok, from clothing to the gaming industry, global brands either enter solely or collaborate with influencers.

Another new channel to leverage influencer marketing is podcast. Authentic influencers with a dedicated audience allow running a cost-effective influencer marketing strategy. The rising popularity of the podcasts opens new doors for brands who are strong-minded on influencer marketing. 

Eventually, all these challenges are connected like a chain. Marketers need to clearly define the goals of influencer marketing strategies and apply them to overcome these.challenges. 

According to the study, 65% of brands plan to increase their budget on influencer marketing in 2020. As more brands start to use influencer marketing, the need for a data-driven approach is increasing. The aim of data-driven influencer marketing strategy is to measure the performance of influencers and how the campaign is going. Thus, data is driven by influencer profiles and used to grow the effectiveness of your investment and estimate the ROI later. In simple words, data-driven influencer marketing is estimating ROI based on the relevant statistics and data taken from the influencer discovery until the end of the project.

Data-driven marketing is for covering all the insecurities brands see and in turn, offer better solutions. Data-driven influencer marketing takes several steps such as influencers discovery, building relations, campaign management, and reporting. Before partnering with influencers, it is important to scan influencers’ profiles, analyze their demographics and branded posts.

Define your goals

All strategies start with defining your goals. Do you want to drive awareness or brand loyalty via influencer marketing? 

Identify what you want to achieve with this campaign and how you plan to manage it. Depending on your goals you decide on platforms, influencers, and content. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you do not focus on the sales part but the brand mentions, product reviews. But if you want to generate more sales paying influencers is not enough, you need to give coupon codes, special discounts for influencers’ followers. 

Find influencers

After deciding on your goals, the next step is finding influencers. As the number of influencers increasing day by day this phase will take your time. You need the ones who are already in your target audience and have that audience. Successful influencers in your niche have more fame and more sponsored partnerships. At the beginning of influencer marketing, macro-influencers referred to as the best channel for high ROI while now micro-influencers with less than 50K generate more engagement rate and ROI.

Fake influencer activity is another reason to leverage data for advanced influencer search. To deceive a large audience and high engagements influencers do not avoid buying bot followers and likes. This is why finding the right influencers takes beyond demographics, industry, and quality content of influencers. Marketers suggest working with the market experts, agencies and audience analytics tools like Keepface to reduce the time spent and money. 

Decide on the right platform 

Well investigated research allows picking the right platform in terms of content, project goals, region, and etc. Instagram is the number one platform for the number of sponsored posts and the most impactful channel among social media platforms. Keeping in mind that ⅔ of marketers will spend on Instagram for influencer marketing, it can direct brands to optimize their projects for Instagram. However, the saturation of existing markets helps brands to appear in the new platforms with new ideas. TikTok is the second most downloaded non-gaming app in 2019 after Facebook.

Drive data for the on-going projects

Now that you found the right influencers and released the campaign on the right platform, your goal is to reach the target customers at the highest possible rate. To optimize your marketing campaign, you can divide the project into parts and periodically evaluate the relevant metrics. AIDA – sales funnel model is a great way to measure performance. AIDA is an acronym that stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. In essence, the AIDA model proposes that in order to move the consumer through a series of important steps from brand awareness through to action marketing messages need to accomplish a number of tasks. Let’s see what are these tasks and how they can be applied for influencer campaigns.

Awareness

The awareness part is about introducing the product, grabbing your customers’ attention. The simple way to evaluate the project in this round is to check the campaign post, read comments, consider negative and positive views, and analyze how influencers are interacting with followers. This is the only time you can impact the campaign results, expand the reach.

Look at different metrics, like Engagement, Cost per Engagement, Cost per Impression. As the aim of data-driven influencer marketing is to create engagement, focus on authentic posts to reach maximum potential. Higher engagement lowers the cost per engagement. The low cost per engagement implies your every dollar spent smartly. Higher engagement also generates higher impression which in turn, means low Cost per Impression. 

Interest

In the Interest funnel, to keep track of the project add links to the posts to direct customers to your landing page or website and give URLs to influencers to know the best performers. Look at Click-Through Rate. again, higher the CTR means you are working with the right influencers. Following CTR, estimate cost per clicks.

Desire

Now that you the average number of people are eager to buy, increase the visibility of your product, and provide more information. Successful management of this part will lead to getting more customers to find your product a good fit for their desire or to see the solution for a specific problem they are experiencing.

Action

Following all the steps,  check the conversion rate to see which proportion of the visitors made a purchase from the campaign. A higher rate of conversion shows your influencer worked well to direct your potential customers to real buyers. Further, estimate cost per acquisition to see how much each customer action costs. In the end, all these metrics are considered to evaluate ROI. 

Keepface solution 

Because of the time and volume of data marketers recommend third party help. Marketing agencies and influencer marketing platforms know the touchpoints of the market and have the required expertise. Keepface has different tools such as Influencer Analytics, Influencer Marketing Software that provide a full-service influencer database to brands. The tool gives all the metrics and data about influencer and project performance, helps to monitor and optimize all active campaigns, and give reports at the end of all campaigns.

Storytelling is a proven method of transforming information into distinctive knowledge. Storytelling through videos is an even more powerful method to deliver your message, go viral and create social buzz. As more marketers move to video storytelling, the level of competition and the quality of content are rising. The reason why we prefer videos over articles is videos are explanatory and more persuasive to know a product. Video marketing helps to increase user understanding, web traffic, and leads. Including video links to email also increases the CTR rate.

Lock audience to the video

It is demanding to capture your audience’s attention in a competitive environment. Whether you start video marketing to tell your story or it’s part of your regular marketing strategy, your video content should stick people to your brand. How? 

For a compelling video start with an eye-catching beginning. For example, you can start by asking a question to make your audience focus on the central point and look for the answer through the video. Or, provide your real case examples during the interviews or how-to videos.

Optimize videos for the platforms 

After creating content, readjusting your video for the relevant platforms is the next important step. Video concepts include tutorials, product videos, behind-the-scenes, interviews, and many more. Depending on the needs you can focus on different types of video posts, such as stories, live streams, and IG TV.

Create an Instagram account 

Whether you are a fashion brand or a financial institute, Instagram will ease communication with your audience and drive awareness. Instagram story is a nice way to daily interact with your audience. Story content can be introducing your brand, releasing teasers of your new products, highlighting the FAQs, reposting from your customers and employees’ posts.

The following video type is an Instagram feed video that lasts up to 59 seconds. To grab the audience’s attention, you need to make more glassy feed videos. It can be quick tutorials of your products, explaining some key terms, teasers of your YouTube videos, behind-the-scenes,  maybe introducing your employees or sharing your New Year office party. 

Do not forget Live Steaming

The live streaming can be used for Q&As, expert interviews, broadcasting your conferences. It is good to see your engaged audience in real-time. According to Google ad research, longer videos create more emotional ties between people. Long videos allow delivering your message in more in-depth ways. 

Create special videos for IGTV

You can use IGTV for a variety of purposes such as posting interviews with your brand experts covering most requested questions, social ads, create fun content such as showing a day in your office, video tutorial of your products or testing of new products. It is not recommended to create long videos at the beginning. Keep in mind, your IGTV video should differ from your feed videos or stories. 

Videos reflect your company values

Similar to the other platforms, you need to define your goals for YouTube marketing. Besides creating a better understanding of your brand, videos are also to share your values. Good advertising videos always have an emotional touch to viewers.

The global brand Coco-Cola launched an emotional campaign for Christmas called Coco-Cola: The Last Customer. The campaign aimed at gifting people who work at Christmas season overtime at restaurants, shopping malls, markets and do not have enough time to spend the holiday with their families. The last customers were the employees the stores, restaurants and who rewarded with the presents for their hard work. The brand’s commitment was to show their courtesy to their customers and give love in the season of love. 

Design is important 

Once you created content and made a video, the next comes presenting your video to the people. For compelling video let’s look at some of the key steps.

• Pick a title that is relevant to your topic and keep it simple. 
• The quality thumbnail is another required step for a convincing channel.
• Write in the description box about a quick intro or overview of the topic and link your website, social media accounts or email address and relevant hashtags to ease reaching out to you.
• As we already know, SEO is an inseparable part of digital marketing. 
• Use the required tools to boost your videos. 

See your rivals 

Besides, updating your content and channel, always keep your eyes on your competitors’ video marketing practice. Watch their videos, analyze marketing techniques, the messages they are giving and read comments to see what customers expect from them

Can TikTok be your marketing channel?

Once you have set up your channels in old platforms do not be afraid to go to new apps. With over 500 million monthly active users TikTok is one of the most used social platforms. If you are thinking about using TikTok as your next marketing tool just consider your target audience, their demographics, age, and interest. Content that is fun, challenging and sharable will capture your audience’s attention. Brands can create challenges with the relevant hashtags for holding their audience. Either by launch a hashtag or search for the hashtags and generate shareable and funny content. For being professional, place your brand hashtags on the discovery page.

You can also work with TikTok influencers to show your presence on different social channels. As the young generation is a huge part of TikTok users and video gamers, video gaming company EA Sports made the influencer marketing campaign with Brent Rivera. The comedy influencer posted the video of him playing the game Apex Legends. The other video was partnered with Gil Croes where he was playing Plants vs. Zombies and got over 500K likes. Apart from working with big influencers, EA Sports marketing strategy covers influencers from different backgrounds and audience size. The brand collaborated with freestyler Indi Cowie. The footballer was shooting her freestyling in public for FIFA 2020. 

As influencer marketing is the direct way of authentically reaching out to possible customers it is still the epicenter of brands’ digital marketing strategies. Influencers have an inevitable impact on consumer purchases. That’s why, brands focus their strategies on influencer marketing. 

The problem here is fraudulent activities by influencers. Conventionally, brands were in search of influencers with a large audience to partner with. However, trust and authenticity issues punched the influencer marketing in the last years. Unsuccessful influencer campaigns made brands understand the importance of engagement rate over the number of unreal followers. Fake social media accounts, bot followers, pods are ways of decisive activity that cause influencers to inflate their fees. Influencer fraud damages the whole market by dead-loss investments and diminishing ROI.

Reason behind influencer fraud is the lack of transparency

There are different types of fraud activities on Instagram such as bots, pods, and fake accounts. Let’s see what all these mean. 

Bots are unreal profiles with no followers. 

Pods are instead like a group of people who agree to like and comment on each other’s posts to artificially raise engagement. Fake social activities take place in almost all social platforms in different forms. 

In May 2018, Facebook alone deleted 583 million fake accounts. YouTube announced the fake video views susceptibility by influencers to blow up their views counts and all these fraudulent views will be removed as new evidence comes to light. As Instagram is the number one platform for sponsored posts, influencer frauds mostly occur on this platform. 

According to the CHEQ report, fake influencer activity cost brands 1.3 billion in 2019 and expected to reach 1.5 billion this year. Plus to monetary costs, influencer fraud has indirect costs causing the loss of trust by consumers. It has a lot more sizeable impact on the industry that can change consumer behavior.

How to spot fake activity?

Engagement rate

Engagement is the first factor to define if the account has fraudulent activities or not. If the engagement rate of influencers highly deviates from the average platform engagement rate it is the most probably because of influencer fraud. However, bot accounts do play with likes and comments to pretend trusty influencer images. Thankfully, bot comments also can be revealed by human involvement. If the influencer gets a huge number of the same positive comments or emojis it is probably by the bot accounts.

Follower growth rate

Influencer growth rates can tell a lot about the soundness of the influencers’ profiles. If influencer gets sudden hikes or falls in the number of followers that is because of buying bots or due to deletion of fake followers by the platforms. Trusty influencers show steady growth over time as they built their followers authentically.

The demonstrative way to find out if the influencer has done any fraud or not is checking out post captions. If an influencer tends to write small captions or emojis all the time it implies that influencer does not care about the aesthetics of their profile. Authentic influencers write long and meaningful captions, usually asking questions at the end. Quality captions also depict how influencers are interested in building relations with followers. 

Influencer fraud can also be defined by going into followers’ accounts. Too much presence of profiles with no image and also, no followers manifests the fraudulent activity by influencers.

Do not forget to check the comments

Scroll down and read the comments. If influencer gets single-word comments like “Great!”, “Awesome!”, only emojis and repetitive lines in most of their posts and if they do not match with the content of the posts that is the sign of influencer fraud. Community building is the key to successful influencer activity. Real influencers engage with the followers by liking and replying to the comments.

How to guard your brand against influencer fraud?

So, influencer marketing fraud is one of the biggest challenges that most marketers and brands are facing today. The best way to protect your brand against influencer fraud is an in-depth investigation of influencers you want to partner with. Find out where their success comes from, their content or simply Google their names to see the campaigns they worked before.

Micro and nano influencers may not have partnerships with big brands to be mentioned; however, you can view their stories or posts and check the comment sections to see the quality of their job. As you can say, it is a long-running process to clearly decide on the right influencers. Influencer marketing platforms can help to reduce time spent on influencer reach and also providing reliable influencers based on their wide experience.

Influencer Analytics Tools

AI-Powered Keepface Influencer Analytics designed to assist brands in finding the right people. The tool helps you to find related influencer by giving insights about influencer profiles including performance metrics, influencer ranking, demographics, audience analysis, and special insights such as influencer media value, analysis of comment, fake influencer detection, similar influencers by content and audience.

Influencer marketing conferences are to meet likeminded people in the industry and to acquire the latest marketing technics and trends in digital marketing. These conferences help to learn by professionals and set new challenges ahead. Check out the list of upcoming Influencer Marketing Conferences not to miss any opportunity!

Pubcon

Where: Austin, Texas

When: 6 February 2020

Bloggers, podcasters, SEOs, content marketers, social media marketers and, etc can attend this event. The conference will cover large scale industry topics such as linking, keyword research, in-house, agency, Adwords, conversion, tracking, demo & psychographic targeting, social media platforms, email, content marketing and, etc. goals of the conference are to educate, network and fun.

Podcast Movement: Evolutions

Where: Loss Angeles, USA

When: 12-15 February 2020

The aim of the Podcast Movement is to reach progressive podcasters and grow the podcast community. Three track events will simultaneously feature the different podcaster groups (creator podcasters, professional podcasters, industry professionals) to maximize the value for each group.  The Evolutions is to deeply analyze the latest trends and change the industry ecosystem.

SMX West

Where: San Jose, California

When: 19-20 February 2020

Available for SEOs, SEMs, marketing analytics. SMS West hopes to support its attendees to leverage their services by learning from experts.on topics site speed, pros and cons of automation, in-house digital commerce, SEO for e-commerce, managing and optimizing B2B, LinkedIn ads, Google analytics, link building and many more.

Influencer Marketing Strategies Summit

Where: Chicago, Illinois

When: 28-30 April 2020

Available for marketers, brands, agencies, creative people, social media users. The conference will be lead by professionals and speakers. The conference is dedicated to social media marketing and ways to help marketers to launch, scale and measure their influencer marketing. The summit aims to teach how the industry performs and the ways to achieve future goals to reach the potential.

Youth Marketing Strategy

Where: London, UK

When: 29-30 April 2020

 Marketing strategies for younger customers differ from your marketing strategies to adults. Traditional marketing channels such as banners, TV commercial is not trust-worthy enough for Gen Z. They trust one another and they trust influencers who promise products or services or brands can and will make their lives easier. This event is best place, full of freshest ideas and invaluable networking opportunities that will drive your Gen Z marketing strategy forward.

Online B2B Conference

Where: Munich, Germany

When: 23-24 June 2020

The conference is aimed to deliver the strategies for successful B2B marketing. Participants will have industry insights such as community building, content marketing, and influencer relations. The conference offers information exchange between participants and speakers. Experts will provide industry performance measures and the ways to implement it to B2B marketing.

Inbound 2020

Where: Boston, USA

When: 18-21 August 2020

Every year Inbound delivers inbound marketing and sales strategies to the dedicated marketing community. The forum teaches the ways to build a personal brand and new partnerships. Apart from actionable education, you will have a chance to meet and connect to industry stars and entertainment.

Content Marketing World Conference and Expo

Where: Cleveland, Ohio USA

When: 13-14 October 2020

The conference will be held by global content education and training company Content Marketing Institute. The conference is available for marketers, social media managers, sales experts. Content Marketing Institute has been providing training, consulting services for more than nine years. You will be able to advance your storytelling as your powerfull digital marketing strategy.l Some of the global brands like Loreal, Nestle Microsoft, Dell, Chevron, Wallmart and, etc. are expected to share their success stories et the event.

Digital Marketing World Forum

Whens & Places: 18-19 February in Singapore; 28-29 May in London; 16-17 September in New York; 25-26 November in the Netherlands.

The conference dedicated to exploring the latest trends in digital marketing, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, e-commerce, content marketing, influencer marketing, and etc. representatives. DMWF will take place on 18-19 February in Singapore, 28-29 May in London, 16-17 September in New York and 25-26 November 2020 in the Netherlands. Speakers from leading tech, finance, beauty, marketing companies will share case studies and examples on the field of digital marketing. DMWF has four tracks including influencer and social media marketing, content and digital brand strategy, digital experience and e-commerce, and data and disruptive tech strategies. The conference topics are social analytics and metrics, personalization and CX, customer loyalty and retention, blockchain and marketing, brand voice strategy, the impact of digital convergence on customers, and etc.

Global Influencer Day 2020

Date & Place will be announced soon

Holding second in its history, Keepface Influencer Marketing Platform organizes Global Influencer Day will bring together brands, marketing specialists and of course influencers. Brand representatives, sparkling influencers, marketing, and PR pros will discuss the insights of influencer marketing and its growing trends. Technology company representatives will talk about the philosophy of influencer marketing from social media perspectives. Further, at the events, brand representatives will share their successful influencer marketing experiences and their achievements. And of course, after-party in the end.

Brands centralize their marketing strategy on influencer marketing to reach the target customers in the fastest way. The success of your campaign heavily depends on the quality of content that generates engaging and genuine results. For an organic partnership with influencers, brands tend to seek long-term relations with their favorite influencers. The obvious benefit of long-term collaborations is that it builds trust for both influencers and brands. It generates more engagement, increased brand awareness, and higher ROI. Let’s dive deeper into how to build long-term relations with influencers, even post-campaign.

Why long-term relations are important?

One-off projects usually do not create strong results as long-living ones. The quality of posts and content also differs significantly. Influencers put a lot of effort for long-term campaigns. Working together for a long time allows influencers to better understand the values, requirements of brands and create more desired content with their creative touch.  When influencers post constantly about a specific brand, it shows their devotion to the brand which then leads to follower loyalty.

From the brand side, brands’ attitude to long-term relations also indicates how they prioritize the audience of influencers. Even in one-off projects influencers that generate higher results are a good source for your next one-off projects. The more you work together better you understand each other. Working with the same influencers reduces the time spent on influencer outreach and briefing.

Ways to run successful long-term influencer campaigns

An in-depth search of the influencer market 

The first step is to find the best influencer for your campaign. Before starting a campaign investigate a good search on the influencer market. While audience size, industry, demographics of followers are initial factors you have to check, there are other crucial things to pay attention to. Follow influencers’ social media activity, read their captions, blogs, watch their videos. Just like a true friendship, building long-term relations with influencers also takes a long time. The social issues that influencers show care and support are other measures that should be appropriate to your values. Third-parties such as agency or influencer marketing platforms are a smart and fast way for reaching out to the best ones.

Relevance of influencers

For successful long-term partnerships and genuine results, pick only relevant influencers. The relevance of influencers implies the relevance of the audience which will buy your products at the end.

Creativity is key

Often in long-term relations brands allow influencers to prove their creativity within the framework of projects. Repeating the content word-by-word sounds like the usual advertising on TV. Yes, it is important to set a campaign agenda, and rules. At the same time, influencers have to feel free to give their ideas and reveal their creativity.

Decent payment

Payment reflects how brands values influencers in real. Payment affects how they are motivated to work as your employees. Companies usually tend to send free and sample size products. The payment should be defined according to the influencer’s number of audience, location, product, the purpose, and project duration. Unequal payments also affect the length of projects.

Do not forget to thank 

Always say your sincere thanks to the influencers at the end of the campaign. You can send a hand-written letter indicating how you are pleased by working with them, some sweet gifts.

Post-campaign relations

Now, the tricky part, how to keep relations even you do not have ongoing projects? Just let them know that you do not forget about them. Send your wishes for special days of influencers, mention them in your posts or stories, invite them to your events, periodically like even comment on their social media posts. Show your support for their success and hard work. Treat them as industry experts. You can discuss what consumers need and expect from, what is missing by the brands and ask their opinion for resolution. 

Keeping all facts in mind, your goal is to gain and sustain your customers around you. Do not forget your customers while focusing too much on the influencer side.

The reasons for people to join social media groups differ from their interests, backgrounds, needs. These groups usually managed by admins who have experience or particular knowledge on the subject of theme. Alongside communicating people around the same interest, improving knowledge, skills, social discussions, social media groups are powerful marketing techniques in terms of customer outreach and increased brand awareness.

Being the hub of engaged customers, social media groups are an easy way of building a customer community where you can directly communicate with your community, make Q&As, take feedbacks. Social media groups are part of social media marketing strategies. A difference between your social media page and group is that your first goal has to give value to people not promoting your brand. Create content that considers the audience’s needs and suggestions. While the number of group members is significant, but for higher engagement, you need to keep eye on the quality of your posts for turning your potential customers to real ones. 

The content you create also depends on the administration of the groups. If people join your group they want to hear from you and about your services without over advertising. When you are a member of an industry group you need to instruct people, give information, discuss the topics rather than pushing your brand. 

Where to find the largest groups in the digital world?

Social media groups are a goldmine allowing start-up founders and entrepreneurs to act as influencers, market their brands, find partners, raise awareness, get professional feedback, etc. But where to find them? 

Facebook Groups

Since Facebook is the largest social platform by user size, it is definitely crucial to take a look at Facebook groups as part of your marketing journey. Despite its reduced engagements and changing algorithm, Facebook supports groups that frequently posted and have active users.  Posting at the best times is another key point for increasing post engagement that needs to keep in mind.

LinkedIn Groups

Here the group ecosystem is different than Facebook. LinkedIn groups are perfect for influencer marketing to professionals, business people. These groups help to build long-term relations, take further steps for partnership. Once you join relative groups the next step is to find popular posts, the most contributors, and contacts. A plus side of LinkedIn is emailing directly to group members reduces the time spent on communication. You can also feature your own and favorite groups.

Tips to Grow your loyal community with social media groups

For a loyal community through social media, we advise you a few things to do:

• Before creating a group, you need to define the goals of the group. You can start by writing an overview of your business and the aim of the group. Pin that post at top of your timeline to let the audience know you. 
• For engaged community and a better understanding of your audience ask qualifying questions for pending membership. 
• Trust-building is a very key step for building a loyal community. Communication is necessary for long-term relations. Constantly posting on your groups, asking questions for your future plans, taking feedbacks helps to keep engagements high and add members.
• Live chats are a more interactive way to talk to your community especially for instructive content and Q&A. Always prepare your content before the videos, be ready for the unpredicted questions.
• Replying to comments and messages show how you care about your community. Reply to both positive and negative comments. Show your appreciation for positive comments, you can use emojis or stickers. Coming to negative comments, ask the reasons behind and always look for resolutions. 

• Write clearly and briefly. We all have skipped long and formal looking posts. It may increase the number of inactive members which will eventually turn down engagements.
• Link your articles, news, and latest updates to your groups, share infographics, instructive videos that manifest your customer policy. Ones you share articles do not just link them instead, give an overview of the topic, ask questions such as “How to estimate the profitability of ROI?”, and mention hashtags. 
• Apart from creating your own group join other groups in your niche and your customer-related niches. Instead of joining these groups with your company page leverage your marketing team. Assign those workers that have a well-set profile with all the necessary information. As long as your team posts quality content, people will be interested in your products and link to your business profile. Let’s say you are an advertising company and your designers share their works with related groups. In addition to employee advocacy, it will rise the interests of potential customers for your services. Usually, these groups do not allow their members to aggressively promote brands. Based on your industry, the scale you can contact the admins for organic reach and engagement. 

You can position your brand in different social media groups depending on your niche, customer base, and marketing objectives. What is important after creating or joining groups is to keep track of your customer relations management, compare the profitability of your business, keep your marketing and administrative management under control.