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. 

In an era of social media, having knowledge about how to find the right influencers who can help you to introduce your products to your ideal audience is the best way for generating sales. It is very rewarding to put your time in building a bond with high-quality influencers and getting their help in building your community. 

If you can’t keep up with this latest trend in digital marketing, you sure are going to lose some shares in the market against your competitors. Therefore, you should be agile to find the best influencer for your brand before your competitors do. There are multiple tips and tools to find the most relevant influencers. Some of them can be very time consuming and ineffective. So, here are some most useful tips and tools for you which you will need for audience building, increase your social following and getting more shares in the market.

Social media

Be aware that there are already some people who talk about your product or products that are complements or substitutes for your product. Posts or social media mentions about those products can lead you to these people.

Thanks to social media monitoring or listening tools, you can easily find who is a fan of your product or similar products. Mention and Google Alerts can be a great example of these tools, where you can easily track mentions of your brand or product. Once you find those influencers, take your time to get more knowledge about their engagement rate, demographics or reach. If they are suitable in every way, then contact them in the most proper way in order to get their attention.

Hashtags

Hashtags are great because they make the content very obtainable. Almost every social media have hashtags to make the content very achievable for everyone. Also, people, really like to use hashtags in their post which make them even more obtainable. 

You can either search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand or you can search for hashtags like #ad #influencer #sponsored in order to see who is already interested in promoting products. If you are going to search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand, try to be specific, so you can get better results and save your time.

Once you liked someone’s content, do not jump into connecting with them. Review particular metrics that are important to you – check if their audience is ideal for you, assess their engagement level, and see if their other post is also relevant to your brand. When everything is okay, then do not forget to add the influencer to your list in order not to forget about them and keep your bound with them. It is very necessary for turning them into brand advocates.

Advanced search tools

Some social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin have advanced search tools. This is very time-saving as you can dive deeper faster. 

Search for the topic that you are interested in. Once the search results come out, you will have the chance to use filters for people. You will have several filters like location, industry, company, business type and so on. Choose the filter that you need and the search will give you the results that are very close to your need. 

The aim is to reduce the number of results and retain only the most relevant and needed ones. The advanced search tools can give you very specific information and also you can easily contact the influencer through used social media.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

If you want to skip all the steps above, you can use influencer marketing platforms that do everything for you. Keepface Influencer Marketing Platform can be an example of such kind of platforms. It introduces you to its database of influencers with their social media profiles, performance data, audience analysis, and special insights. 

You can get to know the location (country, state, city), demographics (gender, age), score and ranking of each influencer. It also provides you with top-performing posts, estimated impressions, posting frequency and followers growth of the influencer. 

With the Audience analysis tool, you can get valuable information like demographics, languages, ethnicity, interests of audiences. You can also benefit from a special insight that tells you about influencer media value, similar influencers by content and audience, as well as, fake followers. It is a very user-friendly and all-in-one platform. 

You can easily register as a brand, create your own projects, find influencers for these projects from a wide range of influencer database and get the creative help of an in-house project team for briefing the influencers. 

It’s the fastest way of finding the most ideal influencers for your brand 

All the tools above can be very helpful and effective if you use them in the right way. You can try them and choose the most appropriate and effective one for yourself. But do not forget that if you want to add influencer marketing to your strategy then you better learn how to use Influencer Marketing Platforms because they are the most time-saving and cost-effective way. 

Also, bear in mind that these influencers are getting various offers from different companies. Therefore, you should come with the best offer in order to get their attention. Once you find the fitting influencers for your project that would be a huge mistake to lose contact with them when the project ends. The more you build closer relations with them, the more they will be willing to promote your product. 

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.

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?

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

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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A post shared by Orkun Işıtmak (@orkunisitmak) on Dec 19, 2019 at 6:50am PST

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. 

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?

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

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

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

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.

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?

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. 

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

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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 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

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

• 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: 

• Celebrities
• Macro-influencers
• Micro-influencers
• Nano-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. 

• 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.