Humor In Content Marketing: How To Add Humor To Your Business Blog

Everyone enjoys being entertained, which is why humor in content marketing is a powerful tool. Brands are increasingly incorporating humor into their marketing strategies. Why? Because humor sells. It can help to boost your brand’s identity and grow your audience, which is ideal for growing your business. So, how can you add humor to your business blog?

Know Your Audience

We all like to laugh, but what each person finds funny is vary variable. In order to make humor work for your blog posts, you need to know who is reading them. 

You can use analytics to help you get a sense of the demographics of your readers. This can then help you to focus your humor more successfully. After all, humor is subjective. You probably won’t please everyone, but you stand a better chance of writing something most people will find genuinely funny if you fully understand who your audience is. 

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You want to write humorous content that will be engaging and help increase your audience. What is funny to someone in their 50s might be boring for a teenager and vice-versa. You want to avoid writing content that will be perceived as overly offensive or distasteful. Similarly, you want to write humor which is authentic and in-keeping with the identity of your brand.

So, create content that is specifically designed for your audience to show that you understand them. Humor will also help to make boring or dull topics seem more interesting, as well as help to put your audience in a good mood, making it more likely that they will come back again.

Use Visuals

Images, GIFs, and memes go a long way in expressing a simple idea in a funny and direct way. It’s well known that the use of visuals on blog posts helps to entice and engage readers. Luckily, visuals can also help to bring in some humor.

 

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“Memes add a bit of expression to your humor and are simple to make,” says Andrew Summers, a marketing blogger at Gumessays.com and Researchpapersuk.com “You can either create your own images or use one which is freely available in the public domain. Just make sure they are free from copyright. Then just use Photoshop, or even just Paint, to create your own memes. Or you can meme generators online, such as Meme Generator – Imgflip. GIFs are another great addition. There are millions to explore freely on sites such as Tenor or Giphy. GIFs and memes are more successful than using stock photography because of the way they interact with the text. Or you can use cartoons, illustrations or even comic strips. They work particularly well to add some humor to serious or heavy topics. “

Remember that whilst visuals can add to your blog post, if overused, they can actually distract readers. Use them sparingly to really achieve the desired impact.

Write Fun Blog Posts

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The content or copy of your blog post in itself should be fun and engaging to read. Whilst visuals are a simple and effective way to inject some humor into your posts, don’t neglect the power of words. Remember to keep it simple and to the point.

“One of the easiest ways to add some natural humor into your blog post is to get yourself into a fun, light-hearted mood when you start to write,” says Mark King, a business writer at Luckyassignments.com and Writinity.com.  “Don’t get too serious about the topic you’re writing about, even if it is serious. Write fun content. You can joke around and tell some stories. Use metaphors and similes to inject some light-hearted humor into your writing. Readers really enjoy it when you share some of your personality through your posts. 

Don’t be afraid to include funny anecdotes or even embarrassing or awkward encounters you’ve had. What you want to avoid is making jokes or snide remarks about individuals. But there’s no reason not to mock yourself, and to share the wisdom you learned during some of the mistakes you’ve made.”

It’s Over To You

Humor is a potentially very powerful content marketing tool if you take the right approach. Remember to tailor your humor to your audience and to the content you are creating. Not only will humor help you to connect with your audience, but it can also help to boost your brand’s reputation. 

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How to build long-term relations with influencers, even post-campaign

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

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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

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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.

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Social media groups as influencers: How to grow a loyal community through social media groups

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?

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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

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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. 
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  • 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.

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The Rise of Influencer Entrepreneurs and Their Impact on Brands

The increasing number of social media influencers is leading to the emergence of influencers entrepreneurs. Representing different industries, entrepreneurs use social media to boost their business and online presence. Startup founders small business owners use social media to raise brand awareness, grow their customer base, add market value to their brands and personal brands, as well.

 

Instead of using celebrities, or niche related influencers, young entrepreneurs choose to promote their products via their own social media accounts. They act like influencers in the business world. These influencers do not need to create content as usual influencers. Contents they share are generally about business news, updates of their works, entrepreneurs the future of hot topics of business and many more. These people often participate in main events, take the stage in major forums, sometimes, promote and support the other industry brands. You can come across with success and fail stories of the intrepreneur influencers on their profiles, their public speeches. 

 

Let’s look at a few of influencer entrepreneurs that are well-known for their promoting their business.

Neil Patel

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Global marketing expert and entrepreneur Neil Patel. He is the founder of marketing platforms Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, Hello Bar, Neil Patel Digital which serve as fast decision making, project management, website analytics, SEO, and social media tools for businesses. He also ranked as a top entrepreneur by the Wall Street Journal, Top 10 Marketer by Forbes, Top 100 Entrepreneur under 35 by Obama, and New York bestselling author. Neil uses his social media accounts to share his experience and knowledge about the essentials of digital marketing and to boost his businesses, as well. 

Saygin Yalchin

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German entrepreneur of Turkish descent Saygin Yalchin is the founder of SellAnyCar.com. He is referred to as the online business guru of the Middle East region. His YouTube channel and Instagram account is the balance of entrepreneur and real social media influencer. Saygin uses social media in a smart way which he shares his daily life, entertainments, travels while not avoiding his work life, events he attends, charity works, etc. In one of his interviews, Saygin mentioned that people do not follow brands, they follow people that lead those brands. To him, people shape the face of companies. Business people have to focus on influencer marketing rather than traditional PR campaigns. Social platforms like Instagram is applicable for fast-growing and YouTube is better for real audience and more engagement.

Mari Smith

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Also known as “Queen of Facebook” is Forbes #4 Social Media Influencer, deliver social media and thought-leadership consulting, training on using Facebook as a marketing technique.  She usually makes video tutorials about Facebook updates, optimizing Facebook for small business and Messenger for Business. Mari involved with Facebook from its beta test times. She recommends small business organic traction before paid ads, prioritizing audience engagement.  

Mark Zuckerberg

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Facebook’s founder and CEO often Mark Zuckerberg is always on stages about informing the latest updates of Facebook, changing algorithms. What makes him cool on social media is that he also points out the moral benefits of Facebook, its role in society. Apart from sharing news about Facebook, Zuckerberg often attends different events about his path to success and gives advises to young entrepreneurs.

Satya Nadella

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Satya Nadella has been working for Microsoft for more than twenty years in different positions. He was the first person who saw the acquisition of Nokia, LinkedIn, Web site. His LinkedIn profile allows us to call him the human face of Microsoft on social media. Together with Microsoft news, he discusses different topics including the new application areas of technologies, the impact of Microsoft partnerships such as their recent with a strategic alliance with KPMG on cloud technology, AI, SAP on cloud technology, Humana. Also, Satya pays special attention to empowering women entrepreneurs and creative innovators in parts of the world.

Impact on brands

Influencer marketing starts with brand storytelling. It is important to set values that your brand lays, its goals, and convey them to the relevant audience. Either by business influencers or directly by their founder’s brands need to be spoken online and offline.

Influencer entrepreneurs are the best fit for the B2B environment. Feedback of impressive people in the corporate world means larger-scale sales in comparison to the B2C. A clever way of promoting your brand in influencer marketing is by using your customers as an influencer. Leveraging your existing customers can generate more conversion and sales. A different range of customers also opens doors to a variety of markets.

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Gen Z influencers: Who inspires todays Gen Z

Born between 1995 and 2010, Generation Z is changing the habits of social media usage. Born up to the digital era, Gen Z also called Digital Natives, Net Gen, GenWii, Tech Gen. Tech generation gets information mainly from social platforms, makes friends without seeing each other in real life, open to sharing their life on social media spend most of their time online. They are characterized by their unique style. Their purchasing decision heavily depends on celebrities or social media influencers which make brands shift their marketing strategies. They do not prefer traditional educational systems, instead, they choose to invest in their skills, take relevant courses. According to IBM statistics, 26% of Gen Z work online, while 16% work for themselves. Making money online is more attractive than nine-to-five jobs. 

 

Although statistics show Gen Z spends most of their time online, they do not only surf on social networks but make a difference where they go. Instead of blending in society, Gen Z is enthusiastic about standing up for their beliefs. This generation is political activists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and peacemakers. Despite their age, they take big steps to fight for human rights, equality, avoid plastics, are in support of the environment, are earth savers. These kids do not clearly identify their categories instead enjoy the diversities of their world.

Want to know an inspirational Gen Z?

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Azerbaijani student Reyhan Jamalova invented the “rain energy” which designed to harvest rainwater as a source of energy in her 15. Forbes 30 under 30 was the youngest attendee at the 8th Global Entrepreneurship Summit in 2017 and got an estimable mention in Ivanka Trump’s speech. 

 

You probably heard about 16 years old Swedish Greta Thunberg. Environmental activist skipped school for her unbroken beliefs. Starting in 2018, she demanded the Swedish government to decrease emissions by 15%. Thunberg was awarded as Time’s Person of the Year 2019.

 

Former Disney princess Zendeya continues her stage carrier as a singer, dancer, and actress. She also made clothing collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger, is a global ambassador for Lancome. The popularity of the rising star is not only for her talents but also for her activism in different social issues such as gender equality, body positivity, or bullying.

Gen Z reshapes Influencer Marketing

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The consumption power of this group changes brands’ marketing and communication channels. They require brands to be creative, credible and authentic. It is difficult to influence Gen Z with chic promotions. As their older generation, Gen Z is also less likely to be influenced by traditional advertising, what they do in turn, they get information by the people they trust. What works for this group is a blend of traditional and modern marketing technics. 

 

Brands need to set a sophisticated approach. Focus on leveraging influencers for delivering messages instead of selling products. Brand story-telling is via different channels creates more authentic and engaging backlinks rather than stating fancy missions on your website. Cooler way of self-promotion is endorsing Gen Z influencers over your brand story-telling. Tech natives use Instagram for brand discovery, search for product features on YouTube.

 

Value creation is among the core issues Gen Z pays attention to. With 2.6 million followers on Instagram and  6.9 million YouTube subscribers, Orkun Ishitmak is one of the biggest influencers in Turkey. He creates a different range of creative content such as travel vlogs, testing, reaction, informative videos on his social media accounts. Plus to his successful influencer background, every New Year year Orkun organizes charity projects where he buys gifts to homeless and needy people. It is not surprising that global and local brands keen on collaborating with him for their commerce and charity works.

 

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Partnering with real people creates credible feedback for this group. This is why nano and micro-influencers are an alternative way of marketing. They are the best medium for raising awareness of small brands or campaigns. Micro and nano influencers generate greater engagements thus have a high ROI. Long-term partnerships also create authentic and high-selling projects, making Gen Z loyal to brands. When working with Gen Z influencers allow them to create User Generated Content, to present their style, freedom.

 

It is better to collaborate with influencers for online and offline partnerships. Creativity is one of the key ways of reaching out to this group. Go beyond social media platforms. Take Levi’s and Google’s partnership. Brands together launched new lines of “smart denim jackets” which warns wearers if they forget to take their mobile phones. 

 

Although Gen Z has unlike social media habits the rest of the population, however, have different preferences about social media platforms, different interests, say, platforms like TikTok, Twitch, Live.ly are mainly popular among teens, while the older Gen Z favors Instagram and Twitter. 

 

Whether brands have successful Gen Z experience or not, It is important to keep track of the latest trends, improve the quality of their products and promotions, as well. 

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How to humanize your brand with the help of Employee Advocacy

Despite the technological revolution in shopping experiences, purchases still take through human-to-human interaction. Whether your goal is to sell a product, build an audience for your blog, provide service, the first important point is to build trust. To achieve that level of trust you should humanize your brand. To quote founder at Convince & Convert, Jay Baer:

 

“Consumers are disappointed by brands. Trust in brands is lower than ever and the flipside of that is just as important, that people are trusted more. The reason people are trusted more than advertising is that there is no financial stake in the outcome.“

 

The key to success here is to spread the company’s message organically and build trust in customers.

Brands should steer away from the robotic marketing tactics, instead focus on being interesting, relatable, and human. Apart from sharing engaging content, a great way to ensure that your brand has an accurate voice is having the right people to speak about your brand. 

 

In this case, don’t overlook your internal influencers – your own employees. They are the new authentic marketing channel for your company. For those who may have not heard about Employee Advocacy, it is the promotion of the company by their employees. They share the company’s latest statements, news, product launches or services on their social media accounts. Employee advocacy is aimed to inform and engage with employees as the company’s internal influencers or employee advocates.

 

According to LinkedIn, in total, employees have 10 times the social following than the brands they work for, which leads to generate twice more clicks on the content shared by an employee than content shared by business.

Humanizing brands is the top motivation for starting Employee Advocacy

For those who may have not heard about Employee Advocacy, it is the promotion of the company by their employees. In a nutshell, the company distributes its latest statements, news, product launches or services on their social media accounts while increasing awareness around its business. Employee Advocacy is aimed to inform and engage with employees as the company’s internal influencers or employee advocates.

 

Advocacy can be anything from sending internal company newsletters, to fully formalized programs with KPI’s, and particular Employee Advocacy software. 

 

EA programs build a shared sense of purpose in employees as they believe in the company’s mission so they want to promote their jobs. Engaged employees share a genuine representation of the organization, one which customers can relate to.

Let’s get started humanizing your brand with employee advocates

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Identify your key employee advocates

 

First things first, decide who is going to take part in the Employee Advocacy program. You may start with a small group, beta testers of your EA program, then scale to the whole staff. Compile a strategy that resonates with the company culture, organizational structure, and size. Make your company culture a priority, educate your employees to become brand ambassadors. They want their jobs to have a meaningful societal impact and expect the employer to offer interesting and fulfilling work. So, activate your workforce to strengthen the team cohesion in your company and increase awareness around your brand.

Set goals and KPIs

 

Define what you want to achieve with the EA program, so you’ll be able to identify which tactics to use and how to measure the success. The common goals and results to expect are: 

 

  • Increase brand awareness and engagement on social networks, social reach, clicks, impressions
  • Conversion of qualified leads and increase sales
  • Recruitment, career search rates, and applicants

Incentivize employee social sharing

 

When the brand content is shared by employees, it gets twice more clicks. Broadcast your content via employees, and you’ll get more engagement and awareness. Provide your employees with: 

  • Great work culture,
  • Gamification like leaderboards,
  • Incentives – gift cards, gifts, or intangible equivalents like trophies, praise, recognition.

The better would be to run an internal contest or challenge to encourage employees. Make sure that they understand their industry benefits. Set a reward for more engagement and interactions such as likes, comments, etc. within a specific deadline. These interactions will give your brand lots of “human” bonus points!

Curate internal and external content distribution channels

 

Content curation consists of finding material relevant to your audience from a variety of sources and sharing it strategically through your communication channels. You might have them to share company news, product launches, blogs, promotional offers, behind-the-scene photos, success stories, even memes, it does not necessarily have to be industry related. Obviously, sharing useful content is a key part of your EA program.

Use the Employee Advocacy Platform

 

Employee Advocacy platforms allow you to oversee the content distribution process flawlessly and measure the results easily. As a result, you can identify the best performers. EA platform can replace mass internal emails and message boards and make it easier for employees to find the content in one place. EA platforms simplify and speed up the content sharing process, also combines features like a list of most engaged employees, analytics and reporting. 

 

For a brand’s representation, nothing works better than the recommendation of someone who works there. But building a whole process is not something that will happen on its own, it requires lots of planning, time and effort.

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Influencer Marketing Platform vs. Agency

Influencers are immensely valuable tools for businesses of almost any description. If your company has some sort of online presence, it almost certainly does, then an influencer can help your marketing massively. Influencers are individuals who are able to use their own private fame and following (usually through social media) to ‘influence’ on behalf of a brand. The most famous instances of influencers are the Instagram models who tout diet supplements or work out gear. But, in truth, there are influencers of all different sorts, on all different media platforms. Speaking of platforms, this opens up a question about how you go about sourcing and interacting with influencers. The central two possibilities are going through an influencer marketing platform or an influencer marketing agency. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages that are worth exploring before you commit.

But First: What Do They Both Mean?

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An influencer marketing agency, is a formal agency, much like a film and television agency or a literary agency that has a list of talent on their roster, organized by fields and by specific areas of influence. “An agency can be looked at a bit like a middle man, putting together brands with brand representatives and making matches that will best suit a certain campaign, explains Deepak Singh, marketer at PaperFellows and EssayRoo. The agency will take a cut, naturally, of the marketing fee that your company provides.

An influencer marketing platform is a digital solution to the issue of putting together brands and influencers. The platform is optimized as a method for trying to show brands all of the most ‘influential’ influencers that are contactable and can be collaborated with to help elevate the brand. In some ways it’s like an electronic form of an agency, acting as a less intrusive middle man that can be paid for by a company when they set about trying to hire an influencer.

Convenience

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Influencer platforms intrinsically take this battle, since they’re usually entirely comprised of very slickly designed electronic interfaces, not clunky human interaction. The software can be downloaded in minutes and your search for the right influencers for your brand can begin and end in a few hours. Naturally, when you go through an agency, it’s a lot more complex, with lots of discussions and billing requirements to deal with.

Flexibility

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Swinging back in the other direction, influencer agencies offer that tailored approach that no amount of search filters will ever get you. “When you’re searching for influencers it can be hard to explain exactly the sort of person you’re looking for or strategy you have. This is especially true when you’re trying to tell a computer, not a human”, says Gloria Radcliffe, tech writer at AustralianHelp and Essay Writer. Filtering results in an influencer platform is nothing like as flexible and fit-for-purpose as going to an agency, where agents can talk with nuance about what they offer and what their clients will achieve. It’s a bespoke service that should feel much more made-to-fit.

Price

Sadly, all of that polish and flexibility comes at a price that simply can’t match the inexpensive software package that a platform will give you. There might be a few devs releasing the occasional updates but that will be nothing compared to the office full of paid employees that the agency has to support. If you want cheap, you should go with the platform.

Opportunity

With the program, your opportunities for connecting to influencers that could improve your marketing is very limited. Whatever influencers are connected to such a program are there to be used, but any larger scale, more exclusive influencers will be very difficult to reach. An agency, by contrast, will have access to anyone you want to reach, even if they’re not signed explicitly. Influencer agents have a much bigger network to take advantage of.

Conclusion

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So, it’s a tough decision on balance. You have the program that offers you a limited but fast and inexpensive service standing opposite the agency approach that is clunky but can bring in some really valuable targets that perfectly suit your branding tactics. Whichever seems to suit you best should be your avenue.

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The selling power of Chinese KOLs: Chinese Influencer Market in 2019

Chinese influencer market has different varieties form Western markets such as low CPC, more engaged audience, word of mouth marketing, and of course very distinct social media ecosystem. We already mentioned Chinese KOL Beck Li’s Mini Cooper fortune where she made 100 Mini Copper sold out in just four minutes through her social media account. This is enough to show how powerful are the influencers in the Chinese market. It is not surprising that western luxury brands are fancy for collaborating with KOLs. The Chinese influencer market is more than a place to raise awareness of your brand but a strategy to launch new products. 

What makes the Chinese market realistically powerful?

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Trust building: If you ask big KOLs probably all of them will mention that trust is the biggest reason behind their success. According to the research, 49% of customer choice depends on KOLs’ opinion. 

 

Dedicated audience: The distinct feature is that Chinese followers are real and their choice heavily depends on influencers. 

 

Long-term partnerships: Whether it’s a collection or just a partnership long-term relations with influencers create more authentic content, more selling projects and accepted as more trustier by their audience. 

 

Customized products: It’s easy to find the usual product in the stores, the aim is to add influencer’s value, their uniqueness. 

 

Considering the feedbacks of the target audience: Influencers ask followers’ opinions during the production and designing process. 

 

Social media ecosystem: Chinese social media platforms are created to push e-commerce, thus, it has online shops where influencers and brands store their products upon the posts. The most popular ones, WeChat and Weibo are the platforms that made sold-out sales within few minutes. 

Let’s see a few examples of the selling power of Chinese KOLs.

 

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Mr. Bags

 

Tao Liang is known for his passion for capsule luxury bags. He made collections with different Western brands such as Givenchy, Montblanc, Longchamp. He sold 3.24 million RNM Tod’s handbags within six minutes. 

Yang Mi

 

Actress, high-fashion influencer Yang Mi collaborated with Michael Kors for Valentine’s Day. A limited-edition Whitney Shoulder Bags designed with heart and star studs. Red and black colored bags aimed to depict a confident, charming woman.

M.A.C. Cosmetics

 

Can you expect a makeup line to be inspired by anime characters? M.A.C cosmetics together with Tencent mobile game “Honor of Kings” launched lipstick collection. Limited-edition lipsticks came in five shades associating five of “Honor of Kings” heroines. To raise awareness, five reality show stars attended in the campaign posts. The campaign was sold out in 24 hours of its launch. 

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The value of the influencer marketing industry in China is predicted to be 20 billion in 2020. Although China has bright influencers it is still fuzzy for western brands to enter in. In light of this, we’ve listed a few tips for running successful campaigns in this multi-billion market:

 

Use relevant influencers 

 

It’s better to invite micro-influencers to your small scale campaigns for raising awareness. Instead, collaborate with macro or celebrity influencers for Influencer X campaigns. Especially, luxury brands are a perfect match for this kind of collaboration. 

 

Relevant content for each platform

 

Chinese platforms are divided into three groups; blogging, short videos, and live-streaming. Suggesting YouTube or Instagram style formats doesn’t apply to China’s social media platforms. Brands should understand the different characteristics of platforms. For example, Weibo and Wechat are mainly blog sharing platforms and allows user-generated-content. Short video platforms like Xiaohongshu are effective channels for raising awareness. Live-streaming is the best way for detailed information about Influencer-X-Brand collaboration.  

 

Allow User-Generated Content

 

User-generated-content campaigns boost the exposure and increase the virality of content. Besides, UGC requires minimal effort and is visually-oriented, encouraging customers share their experience via an image with a short text. 

 

Here we have a creative approach by one of the luxury US shoe brands. Stuart Weitzman invited fashion influencer Zola Zhang to design outfits of the models for their show. In the end, Zola shared the detailed behind-the-scenes of the designing which created high engagements.

 

Focus on Millennials and Gen Z

 

Purchasing habits of Z-lennials are different in the West and East. Unlike Western Z-lennials who surf on different social platforms, shopping websites, the Chinese prefer to buy massively from Taobao. Micro-influencers have a more in-touch connection with their followers and more authentic content. Their growing capacity promises successful long-term partnerships for newcomer brands. 

Last but not least tip is budgeting

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There’s one influential factor to start a campaign in the Chinese influencer market is budgeting. Without enough budget allocation, brands that intend entering China every campaign is “predestined” to fail. 

 

Brands falsely tent to believe that the costs in the Chinese market will be comparatively low and rewards will be high. This is commonly made mistake by businesses as they apply western KPIs and standards to the China market. But, China market is more competitive and expensive than that of the West. The obvious solution here is to increase the marketing spendings in order to get the expected results and grab the market share. As the above-shown report by Newrank, describes the rough amount spent on KOL campaigns during the first quarter of 2018 and 2019. 

 

While far from being a definitive guide to elaborating the power of Chinese key opinion leaders, brands can think around it and set more realistic expectations for Chinese influencer marketing campaigns.

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Influencer Marketing: Agencies vs In-house

Influencer marketing is a hot topic in digital marketing. Consumer-driven nature shapes strong relations with a target audience. It is not surprising that companies shift their marketing strategies to more connected and authentic influencer marketing. Predictably, the estimated spending on influencer marketing for 2020 is 10 billion dollars. 

 

 Plus to its benefits, influencer marketing has risks as well such as: 

 

  • Picking influencers with an unsuited audience,
  • Miss-management of relations with influencers. 

 

While influencer marketing is expanding to different industries important question is whether to develop an in-house team or work with an agency? 

 

Brands either assign a team of influencer marketers or they co-operate with specialized agencies. The matter is you know your customer better and the agency knows the market better. A lot of brands don’t have an assigned influencer team. If you have relative experience and dedicated team you can definitely leverage an internal team. Let’s have a quick look at insights into an in-house team and influencer marketing agency before deciding.

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In-house

 

No matter you work with an agency or platform your internal team will engage in influencer marketing, review contents, check proposals and report. In-house programs allow you to directly connect to influencers and evaluate their approach. 

 

Pros 

 

Transparency with influencers. Control over the project, brands follow the process from milestones to the end. 

 

It’s more affordable as you don’t outsource a team of experts for a small budget project but use your professionals to find the best matching influencers. 

 

Solely working will bring practice and strategic management to influencer marketing. A huge number of projects will make you list the best influencers for you. 

 

The in-house team creates direct relations with influencers, allowing long-term relations with them such as brand advocacy. Long-term collaboration is also more authentic and influential and it’s accepted more organic by your target audience. 

 

It has long-term monetary and non-monetary benefits. Investing your employees and resources will improve your intangible assets and save your money for the long-run.  

Cons

 

It takes a long time to be prominent in influencer marketing. You may have unsuccessful partnerships or pick irrelevant influencers. Even if you choose the right influencers you may omit basic factors such as not creating hashtags, focusing on the influencers audience instead of quality content. 

 

Working only with in-house team may limit your access to new influencers, new channels as agencies are totally engaged with influencers.

 

Having a digital marketing expert is not enough for running an influencer program. If you plan for continuously running influencer marketing campaigns you need to hire a team of influencer marketers or train your employees which are additional costs. Your marketing team needs to follow trends, fully engage in the influencer market, rival brands’ campaigns and many more. And you as a company need to keep track of the team’s performance. 

 

Another thread here is entering the global market alone. Because brands aren’t familiar with foreign influencers, the local audience they need influencer strategies or campaign managers. 

influencer-agencies

Agency

 

An influencer marketing agency is a specialized agency that has tools, expertise in building, and managing influencer programs. Influencer marketing agencies or platforms are needed to reach the full potential of a campaign. 

 

Pros

 

They speed up the process of finding the most convenient influencers as they have a set of data of influencers in specific industries. Therefore, agencies ease the process of searching, reaching out to influencers, and creating organic content. 

 

Let’s say you are a new brand and you want a very famous celebrity to promote your product. Obviously, the celebrity manager will call for a recommended third party before coming to an agreement. 

 

Agency reputation plays an important role in the influencers’ decision. Plus, specialized agencies provide necessary metrics and give project reports. 

 

Their expertise allows to scale up your project through the right strategy on the right platform. 

 

The coin has two sides. Besides their benefits and expertise, agencies have lagging sides.

Cons

 

For a limited budget, agencies are additional costs. 

 

Lack of transparency. Not having a direct relationship with influencers may prolong the duration of projects 

 

Before reaching out to influencers you need to find the right agency, make them know your brand, what you expect from the project, which takes additional time. 

Considering all factors in mind you can make a decision whether agency or in-house. But, these two are not the only options available. There is one prominent option that you shouldn’t ignore – it’s influencer marketing platforms, like Keepface. It’s an all-in-one automated tool where your team can easily plan influencer campaigns, find relevant influencers through a huge database via smart filters, and most importantly have full transparency throughout the whole campaigns and get the full report of accomplished projects. It’s more like a free self-service influencer marketing that is also budget-friendly. 

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Conclusion

 

To sum up, if you are new to influencer marketing or you may need influencer marketing specialists at first. For one-off projects, agencies will support you from the time and cost-saving side. If you plan for ongoing projects with influencers, it’s worth investing your internal workforce, training employees, or hiring experienced ones.

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A quick guide to Influencer marketing for your eCommerce business

For any kind of businesses including eCommerce to stay relevant in their market, having a strong social media presence is essential. But considering the ad blockers and different ways of blocking paid ads on browsers and on social networks influencer marketing is a smart move. In this guide, we’ll show you an implementable and actionable strategy of how to leverage influencer marketing for your eCommerce business.

 

The history of eCommerce begins with a man who sold a CD of “Sting” to his friend via his website, which is considered the first American retail platform. Since then eCommerce evolved to make products easier to discover and purchase. 

 

Although e-business refers to all kinds of online business, eCommerce refers specifically to the transaction of goods and services, from retail to digital products. 

If you’re running an eCommerce business a working marketing strategy for generating new leads is very important to run your business successfully. And if influencers aren’t a part of that strategy, you could be missing out on opportunities to get in front of your target customers.

Influencer Marketing in a nutshell

influencer-marketing-in-a-nutshell

Influencer marketing is about leveraging the power of word-of-mouth by getting influential social media users to talk about your brand. Influencer marketing is about a collaboration between brands and influencers, social media users who have expertise in a particular industry or niche with huge numbers of followers. What makes them influential on social media is their expertise and broad audiences. Therefore they have the power to affect the purchase decisions of their audiences. 

 

Unlike celebrities they can be anyone, they are industry experts, gurus, artists, even your math professor. 

 

The reason why influencer marketing is effective is that the engaging nature of social media. Today’s consumers want to interact, to be informed and entertained by brands. Besides, there is the fact that influencers already built up a high amount of trust with their audience, and recommendations from them serve as a form of social proof to your brand’s potential customers. 

 

It’s no surprise that the influencer marketing industry is set to reach $10 billion in worth by 2020. The survey conducted by Mediakix found that 89% of marketers said influencer marketing was better than other digital marketing strategies. 

 

By having influencers to mention your brand or product is a marketing campaign by itself. The beauty of influencer marketing is that unlike traditional advertising it’s more organic and audience-specific. 

 

All things considered, influencers’ posts forge trust with customers. Indirectly, brands enjoy valuable endorsement that cannot be replicated with standard ads. 

 

To take it a step further, influencer marketing is an eCommerce strategy that focuses on using these social media influencers. They drive your brand’s message to a larger market instead of marketing directly to them yourself.

How influencers and social media are changing eCommerce

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The product discovery on social media is growing continuously. More than 80% of consumers discover products they like on social media. Instagram, specifically holds the largest share among other platforms as 48% of consumers discover products on Instagram. For comparison, this number was 18% in 2017. The other platforms like Facebook and Pinterest are growing with 70% and 22% respectively.

 

As you can see from the results social media plays an important role in driving consideration introducing people to things. 

 

Gaining online trust equals sales. Influencer marketing is a tool to build trust around your brand. By aligning your e-business with influencers you’re not only gathering influencers’ audiences but also the audience that trusts them. It’s one of the most effective ways to attract customers as they hear about your ads through someone they trust. 

 

So you’ll need a strong eCommerce strategy that will generate trust in your brand. A powerful eCommerce strategy will help you to plan a process to achieve your online store’s goals and increase its position in the market. Before starting a promotion campaign be sure to have a proper checklist. 

How to Build Your Influencer Strategy

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  • Identify Goals and KPI

 

 

First thing first, set clear goals. Many young brands often falter on the goal-setting stage. Influencer marketing can serve to build and increase brand awareness, reach new audiences, and drive customer acquisition. Every campaign should target one business goal. When you focus on too many objectives at once, it will not help either. 

 

 

  • Choose the target audience

 

 

If you want to maximize sales and get the most out of your marketing budget, you need to define the right target audience. Knowing who is buying your products will help you to know whether you’re working with the right influencers and save you from spending all your marketing budget. So, how to identify your audience? 

 

It’s a good start to begin with a larger group that would be interested in your brand then get more specific by considering demographics like location, gender, age and so on. You can use these metrics to narrow the audience even more. 

 

 

  • Establish social media channels

 

 

On top of finding the right audience, you’ll want to find the right social media platform for eCommerce business. The platform you pick will depend on where you want to reach your audience and what kind of influencer content you want to create. 

Instagram

 

Instagram already reached 1 billion active users in 2018 and the number is steadily growing since then. It means that the chances of your potential consumers being on the platform are high. The average age demographics are no older than 35 years old, with the majority of users being female. 

 

As Instagram’s built around sharing photos, it’s the best platform for any retailer who wants to show off their products. Instagram stories have more than 250 million daily active users. This feature allows posting videos and photos, creating simple polls to gather customer data. 

 

Besides, Instagram’s Shopping Tags feature allows eCommerce marketers to tag specific products in their images so they are shoppable on the platform.

 

If your goals are reaching new audiences and building awareness, creative Instagram campaigns should be part of your influencer strategy.

 

Facebook

 

Facebook with 1.62 billion active daily users is the most popular social media platform in the world. This makes it a logical starting point for an eCommerce retailer. 

 

Facebook marketing is a great way to blend into the experience users enjoy most about the platform. The posts that users find more informative and entertaining always get higher engagement. That’s why it’s essential to know and understand your target audience very well. In fact, most users find the brand’s Facebook page more interesting that the company website.

 

Keep in mind that, there is a high competition for News Feed. Businesses have to pay to boost their posts to stay competitive. Depending on your goals the platform offers various marketing tools to get the most out of your efforts. Businesses can target their audiences by using advertising filters such as their interests, income, behaviors, etc. Just like Instagram. Facebook’s algorithm is also good at personalizing paid content by users. So your boosted content will find the right people to engage with it. The key here is not to forget to engage with your users, as well.  

 

YouTube

 

As the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words. It’s a powerful visual social network with nearly 2 billion monthly active users. The audience is diverse with the age demographics between 25 to 44. 

 

The platform offers highly engaging content, regular and live videos. YouTube users enjoy a total of 1 billion hours of video content daily. 

 

The platform is a good way to go viral. Try to create posts that solve the customers’ problems or address common questions related to your industry. For an eCommerce business, there is no better way than to move into the area of viral videos. 

 

What makes YouTube unique is its ability to demonstrate your products in use. The platform also allows adding a direct link in the video’s description to the relevant product page to connect it to your site. 

 

These were big brothers of social networks, now, time to talk about a new breed of social media platforms: Twitter, Snapchat and Tik-Tok. 

 

While Twitter has a character limit that may seem a barrier to convey your message, it’s an effective platform in terms of influencer marketing. There is a 5.2 times increase in purchase intent when users see tweets from both influencers and brands. 

 

Snapchat caters only for the youngest audience. With over 188 million daily active users, the platform has more engagement than any other social media platform. It also allows for ads and customized filters by location. Snapchat recently released an in-app eCommerce platform for products. This means that brands can actually sell their products within the app. 

 

To some, TikTok seems like a digital fad. To others, it’s the next wave of social media. Just like Snapchat, the majority of users are youngsters who love funny videos. Users can add music, face filters, emoji stickers, and other free editing tools to make videos more creative. The key feature of Tik-Tok is live streaming. Because of its immediacy and real-time engagement opportunity people love live streams.  

  • Find influencers in your niche/industry

The next step is finding and selecting the relevant influencers for the eCommerce business. You can find valuable influencers on every social channel around the web depending on what type of content you want to create. The right influencer for eCommerce business is the one that matches your brand’s style, tone, and mission as well as might depend on your budget and business objectives. Before collaborating with influencers review the key metrics and decide which are important for your strategy. There are four types of influencers: 

 

 

While celebrity influencers might work well for years, influencer marketing grew out of it. Besides, they usually charge enormous sums and most consumers don’t trust them these days. Considering that your audience is online, this one is not a good option to go for.

 

As people started to trust traditional advertising and celebrities less and fewer,  micro-influencers took a more central position. 

 

Here important things you should know before starting micro-influencer marketing:

 

  • More authentic: They are much like their followers. 
  • Engaged with the audience: Micro-influencers tend to have a highly-engaged niche audience that values the influencer’s recommendations as a peer. They also have good communication with their followers. 
  • Niche-focused: They are experts in their industry. As a result of their expertise, they are highly likely to affect the purchasing decisions of their audience. So, micro-influencers drive most traffic into conversions. 
  • Finally, there’re many of them on social media who ready often to collaborate. 

 

 Where to find influencers 

 

Influencer marketing platforms like Keepface is the right place to start. All you need is to sign up as a brand and find relevant influencers just filtering by audiences, demographics, location or industry. In addition to just helping to find the influencers, the platform automates the whole influencer campaign for you. 

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  • Create meaningful content

Creating meaningful content is key to get people to trust your brand and make a purchase.

Unlike paid ads, influencers are exceptional at generating meaningful and organic content. Organic influencer content has a higher engagement rate, brands also can benefit when an influencer shares or mentions their content.

 

Keep in mind that you should strive to only partner with influencers who align with your brand. 

 

Make sure the content that influencers are creating is relevant to your eCommerce brand and products and represents your brand’s beliefs, values, and mission. 

How to collaborate with influencers

There are many collaboration ways with influencers. Here are the most popular types of campaigns that are best for the eCommerce business. 

 

1. Discount codes and affiliate marketing 

Provide influencers with promo codes. Incentives such as discounts associated with promo codes are a great way to promote your products. Who doesn’t love discounts?

 

2. Competitions and giveaways

What is better than discounts is winning free products. Holding giveaways to followers is a great tactic to quickly drive followers to the brand’s social media channels. 

 

3. Instagram storytelling

Instagram’s amazing feature allows for posting more content without cluttering the followers’ feed. You can also attach direct links to your products, so influencers can easily draw their followers to your website.

 

4. Product reviews 

Product review is one of the most common but also most efficient influencer campaigns. This type of campaign works so well because they are similar to reviews from peers. The idea is simple, people always check reviews first before buying something. 

 

Finally, the last step is to measure the true ROI of the influencer marketing campaign. Which metrics are important to measure.  

 

  • Reach and views 
  • Engagement 
  • CTRs to an eCommerce page
  • Increased search traffic
  • Shares and referrals
  • Tracking tags 
  • Coupons and promotional campaigns

 

Let’s take a look at some successful influencer campaigns done by eCommerce brands.

eBay’s “Fill your cart with color” campaign

 

World’s growing eCommerce company eBay started an influencer marketing campaign to combat the global domination of its competitor, Amazon

 

eBay worked with fashion and lifestyle influencer @kerifay, to market itself as a lifestyle brand – a place of limitless imagination, color, and style that you can use to mix and match and create a new look. The campaign, called #fillyourcartwithcolor, saw record-setting results, with nearly 350K engaged followers. 

 

The reason behind eBay’s success is its right strategy. As you know, eBay is neither a fashion brand nor a clothing company, not even a lifestyle brand. But, Instagram is very much a lifestyle-based social media platform that is in love with fashion. eBay used the influencer campaign to rebrand the company for the Instagram audience. By the time the campaign was over, eBay became to known as a lifestyle market where millennials could create their own unique look.

Gwynnie Bee’s influencer campaign

 

Gwynnie Bee, a rental clothing e-retailer for plus-size women, always puts influencers at the center of their social media strategy. Rather than looking specifically for individuals who often worked with other fashion companies, considered those whose audience overlapped with their own. This means looking for micro-influencers on YouTube who create content related to topics such as lifestyle, accessories, food and more. Just like @plusjones, Youtuber and co-owner of PLUS Model Magazine. 

 

Together with influencers, GB created more authentic and non-scripted but that also aligns with BG’s overall marketing goals, as well. The goal was YouTubers to spread Gwynnie Bee’s messaging in a meaningful way. 

 

Besides, the company also created a “closet” on the brand’s website to showcase the specific items that loved most. As a result, the campaign saw CTR of 5.85%, which is about 3x the average. 

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