With over 700 000 podcasts out there, podcasting seems to be the next generation of influencer industry. Shift to mobile devices has a huge impact on the increasing popularity of podcasting. The time-saving side, it allows people to do their works while learning. According to statistics, 59% of podcasts have been listened to while doing housework, 52 % while driving, 46% going for walk. Because of busy schedules written contents lose their viability. Podcasting is also a fast-growing media channel for influencer marketing. It is a new path for influencer marketing that creates new opportunities for brands. Unlike in other social media platforms, podcast influencers are communicating with their audience for 30, 60 minutes at a time. It is an interactive way of reaching an engaged audience. 

Podcasting is also a crucial element of B2B influencer marketing. From the media industry to science, different companies made successful B2B influencer examples with the help of podcasting. Plus to interviewing top industry influencers on your podcast, you can leverage your own employees. 

The low entry cost eases the process of becoming an influencer. People who have the creativity and are curious about sharing their thought can be podcast influencer. All you need is audio equipment and quality content. 

Podcasting may not be the best channel for every industry if your niche allows, then, definitely invest in podcasting. Keep in mind to host relevant platforms that compatible with your niche,  accessible to your listeners. 

Tips for successful podcasting

Be committed to your podcast. If you plan to podcast for long-term marketing purposes, you need to invest in high-quality equipment. Knowledge is not the only parameter for being a podcast influencer. You may have a creative idea, experience to share but keep track of podcasting orderly and frequently. 

Try to avoid aggressive marketing. Invite influencers to let them host the show in their unique style. Keep in my that people listen to the podcast to learn, instead of over-promoting your product, the host can mention product features, facilities, and benefits.

Invite industry specialists. For long-term work, you can start by interviewing high-profile influencers on your website. Because a podcast is a promising marketing channel, top influencers also interested in engaging in podcast experiences. 

We’ve picked some of the must-listen podcasts.

Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam 

Being one of the most popular podcasts, Hidden Brain is a serial podcast about unconscious patterns that direct human behavior and choice. Shankar Vedentam adding his humor uses science and story-telling to express facts. He usually opens shows with a question, then continues with academic answers based upon researches.

Unemployable by Brian Clark

Unemployable is a weekly podcast providing blueprints for entrepreneurs, idea creators, and digital marketers. The focal point is about multi-billion business with no-investor and no-employee. The host Brian Clark is a marketer with more than 20 years of experience from solo to a digital entrepreneur in marketing, gives insights about being “unemployable”. 

Stuff You Should Know by Josh Clark & Charles W. Bryant

An educative podcast is about a wide variety of concepts such as science, human, history.  Often hitting a million times of download, SYSK is continuously ranking on Top10 on iTunes and Spotify. Hosts assume the reason for the successfulness of the show are researches done by people who enjoy learning. 

How I Built This by Guy Raz

How I Built This is a narrative podcast about successful companies and business people. In each episode, host Guy Raz invites entrepreneurs, idea creators are invited to talk about their stories, fortune and fails. He interviewed over 6, 000 million including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Eminem, Mark Cuban and many more. 

Marketing Madness by Shane Barker

Marketing Madness is a digital marketing podcast, aiming to make digital marketing fun for everyone, as well as helping professionals to become more productive, expand their online presence, make improvements. The host Shane Barker is one of the world’s top digital marketers, a lecturer at the University of California, and a consultant for Fortune 500 companies. Mainly focusing on content marketing, Shane discusses the latest marketing news, marketing strategies, long story short, crazy sides of digital marketing that is definitely worth to check out.

Vergecast by Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn

You can find all the information about the tech news on Vergecast. On Fridays, hosts take the stage for sharing what happened in the tech world and on Tuesdays, Nilay interviews tech leaders for an in-depth analysis of current trends.  

Digital Download Podcast by Paul Sutton

 Last but not least, we can mention the digital marketing podcast. Hosted by specialized marketer Paul Sutton Digital Download Podcast covers digital marketing, social media marketing, public relations. Every Wednesday, he touches on different topics. Discussed topics are artificial intelligence, link building, B2B influencer marketing, and inbound marketing. 

Drawbacks of podcasting

Despite its promising and fast-growing side, podcasting has downsides as well. It costs a lot of money to invest in quality equipment and find platforms to host. Although it expands your audience, podcasting does not create monetary value for influencers. 

According to the Stata report, 80% of podcast listeners listen to the entire episode. However, it is challenging to keep the attention of your listeners for 30 minutes and over. Plus to content creation, podcasting, and mutual communication with your audience you spend a lot of time for your web design and editing skills. Even if you have a relevant topic, you will need to promote your podcast through different channels such as email marketing, SEO, landing pages, and other platforms that your audience can access. 

Now it is your time to decide whether podcasting is a valuable influencer marketing channel or not?!

The rise of social network platforms gave lead to the creation of new-fashioned influencer marketing. With over 6 billion revenue, influencer marketing is a prominent digital marketing strategy. Although 89% of marketers see influencer marketing ahead of other marketing technics, there are still companies that suffer from finding the right influencers, managing campaigns. Influencer marketing is a complex and long-time process, requiring in-depth research and analysis. Before starting the influencer marketing campaign you have to investigate the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the influencer market. Industry of influencers, numbers of followers, country, demographic characteristics of audience, language, aesthetic of their accounts are essential points to consider. Influencers with a large audience may look a good channel for promoting a product. However, based on the scope, nature of the project, one needs to review different metrics of influencers.

The importance of metrics can be changed depending on your objectives. Below you can find some of mostly used metrics before starting to work with influences. 

Engagement rate

The preliminary metric that shows influencer’s monetary value is engagement, a sum of likes, comments, shares of posts. The engagement rate is the percentage of the audience that engaged in the post. Depending on the niche, the influencer size engagement rate can be less or more. It is an essential metric to review before deciding to collaborate with influencers. 

Active usage

It is important to check the frequency of influencer’s posts. If an influencer does not share often it means influencer is not committed to their job. Whilst, sharing very frequently may decrease the interest in influencer, thus, affecting the engagement rate. 

Sponsored posts

You need to check branded posts of influencers, to know whether they had worked with your competitors before and also to understand the approach of influencers to the partnership. It may also tell you the quality of the sponsored posts, their engagement. 

Cost per post (CPC)

Before asking how much an influencer charge, it is better to estimate influencers’ average earnings per post. Earnings or costs can differ from industry, country, sector, follower number.  This is one of the basic pricing options that every business should consider in order to best scale its influencer marketing efforts. 

Influencer Media Value

Influencer Media Value is the equivalent of advertising value. Accounts with more engagement and active status generate higher IMV. It tells the maximum value brand should pay for an influencer. If influencer asks more than the value of IMV, brands can switch to less costly channels. 

Earned Media Value 

We mentioned several metrics for estimating the value of influencer before collaborating. Now it is time for checking metrics for company performance. EMV is gain from unadvertised media, including affiliate links, influencer marketing, blog posts, reviews, mentions. Earned Media Value formula is the product of impression, cost per impression and another factor, which depends on the case. The reason behind estimating EMV is to compare the values you earn before and after the campaign.

In conclusion, 

As we mentioned, finding the right influencers for your company takes time and a lot of work. For a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to define your objectives, target consumers, set time for the project, create content, choose a platform, then pick influencers up. After completion of the project, you need to check the above-mentioned metrics again to check the ROI of your influencer campaign what is the benefits to your company, share of voice your company owns. 

When it comes to visual content marketing, Instagram is arguably the best place to showcase creativity and strengthen the brand image. Instagram has over a billion users, out of which more than half are active daily. This translates into tremendous exposure for brands, be them small businesses, or industry leaders. Apart from that, Instagram is already recognized as having the highest level of user engagement amongst all social media platforms, precisely because people seem to be drawn towards visuals that send a message, rather than reading entire pages of content. After all, we live in a fast-paced world, so you need to get your message to the audience quickly.  

If those numbers convinced you to turn towards Instagram marketing, but don’t know where to start, keep reading to discover what are the five essential steps to set your campaign into motion. 

#1: Focus on creating a goal-driven strategy

If you don’t know what you are planning to achieve with the campaign, then you will end up pouring resources towards something that may or may not succeed, and playing the lottery of success has almost never worked. 

The first thing you need to determine is the ultimate objective of your campaign. Instagram can be used to accomplish a multitude of goals, but you may want to focus on one at a time, to ensure success, especially if you are new to Instagram marketing.

Maybe you want to raise awareness about your brand or to prepare a big product launch, or even to increase sales. No matter your goal, it should be clearly defined before you even start thinking about your next post. 

After establishing the ultimate goal, it’s time to get into technicalities. You need to ask yourself two main questions:

• How much time do I need to achieve my goal?
• What are the resources I can pour into this? 

The answer to those questions, as well as the ultimate goal, should determine the most effective strategy. But before we get into that, there is one other aspect that needs to be taken into consideration: your audience. 

#2: Get to know your audience well enough

When you first launched your brand, you had an idea in mind about the people you want to attract. This is your target audience, and, ideally, all your decisions should be oriented towards them.

Who is your ideal customer? What are they doing on a daily basis? How are they spending their free time? This is what you need to know, in order to effectively interact with them. 

Put a good amount of time into finding out who your audience is. The more you know, the more you can tailor your campaign to appeal to them.

Look back on your previous posts and focus on the ones that seemed to engage your audience the most. Which one of your pictures got the most likes, comments, or reposts? That is the type of content your audience wants to see. 

#3: Decide on the message you want to send

With your target audience in mind, it’s time to start designing a message that will appeal to them. After all, the entire point of defining your audience is so that you will know how to “talk” to them. Take Dove for example. 

Dove is one of the best representations of how social media should be used for marketing. The brand has made it clear they want to address to women everywhere, regardless of their financial status, skin color, age or looks.

This is why, for the past several years, all of their campaigns seem to be focusing on promoting diversity, natural beauty, and women empowerment. 

People are not as attracted to direct product advertising as they were before, and Dove knows that extremely well. They managed to steer away from product advertising, and focus on consolidating their brand’s position when it comes to real-life issues that women are dealing with.

Their most recent campaign, #ShowUs, called for women to share everyday photos on themselves, to showcase that beauty is everywhere. They came up with this campaign after conducting a study that shows 70% of women are not pleased with how they are represented in the media. 

#4: Connect your Instagram account to your website

I’m not only talking about putting a link in your Instagram description, that redirects to your website, but really making a connection between the website and your Instagram profile. If you are looking to create a powerful brand, then everything you do should align with the kind of message you want to send. 

Ikea, for example, created a landing page that is shared on their Instagram account. The page is made to look just like their Instagram, which sends a consistent message to the customer. If you don’t want to create a different page, then make sure your website and Instagram account look like they belong to the same business. 

Writing companies can help you create content for your website, which you can then link to your Instagram account. You can include the link in the description, as well as in your Instagram stories, by using the “swipe up” option, to direct those who view your story to the website. 

#5: Choose one (or more) of the best Instagram marketing strategies

The last step you need to take is to decide, based on the information you have gathered, which type of campaign is best suited to achieve your goal. You can even go ahead and combine two or more strategies, as long as they work well together.

The most used strategies are:

Influencer campaigns: many brands partner up with influencers, to reach an entirely new audience. Influencers can review your products, give out promotional codes, or become an ambassador for your brand. 

Hashtags: encourage people to share photos that relate to your brand, and use a hashtag that you have created, to form a community.

Giveaways: people can enter your giveaway by following your account, sharing a photo, making a story, or using a hashtag. You can then randomly select a winner. This will help, again, reach a new audience base. 

User-generated content: encourage users to post content that is related to your brand, then go ahead and share their content. This will increase engagement and draw new potential followers. 

Bottom Line

The most important thing when it comes to Instagram marketing is not what type of strategy you use, as there is no exact recipe for success, but that the type of campaign you create speaks to your audience.

Whether you contact influencers for collaboration, decide to use stories, or user-generated content, you need to ensure that you know what your goal and your target audience are, to make sure you get as much as you can out of it. 

Influencer marketing is in the new center of digital marketing. It helps smaller brands to scale bigger by targeting possible buyers rather than spending huge money on TV commercials for large consumers. With the help of influencer marketing, small businesses can expand their sales and large businesses can reach out to broader audiences. The high ROI of influencer marketing is one of its great advantages compared to the average display ad. Also, influencer marketing ROI has proven to be able to blow online advertising out of the water.

Influencer marketing statistics show that 89% of marketers already find influencer marketing more profitable than other marketing ties. Successful influencer marketing is aimed to increase brand awareness, create a conversion, generate positive ROI and reach your target audience. 

What is the ROI of influencer marketing?

So, how the success of influencer marketing can be measured? Influencer marketing provides significant tangible as well as intangible return on investment for brands and is a growing trend for B2B. 

Tangible benefits 

Here include the total performance of your posts and the audience’s responsiveness to the campaign. It ensures profitable returns for particular amounts invested. 

Metrics like engagement, views, impressions, reach, conversion rates, etc. can show how your posts are performing. You can measure all of them with the help of in-app data insights that most social media platform provides. You may ask influencers to provide these insights.

Intangible benefits

Being less contrived than traditional methods is the key reason why influencer marketing works so well. It’s a great ability to grow loyal customers over time, build authenticity and trust, brand awareness, organic conversion, creative content and many more. 

Eventually, instead of creating more content, the clever strategy for businesses is to focus on ROI provided by influencer marketing as well as companions like employee advocacy and brand advocacy. 

How to measure ROI of influencer marketing?

Engagement, engagement rate, reach, impressions are the most-used metrics to calculate ROI of influencer marketing. However, none of these metrics exactly tell the true ROI. 

In order to estimate the true ROI of influencer marketing, brands need to consider pre and post collaboration sales figures, links to the brand’s website, keep track of ongoing campaigns. So read on before getting launched your next influencer marketing campaign. 

Here are several factors need to be examined for high ROI generating influencer marketing:

• The relevance of influencers with the campaign
• Partnership experience of influencers  
• Demographic features of influencers’ audience
• Using the right platforms for promotions
• Creating organic and engaging contents
• Using project-special hashtags 

Set achievable influencer campaign goals

First off, you need to decide what you want to accomplish. Defining the end goals is important for determining how you’re going to measure them. Some of the most common goals for launching influencer campaigns are: 

Increase brand awareness. Measuring the number of pieces of content produced and the total amount of impressions are two ways of measuring brand awareness. 

Lead generation. Leads may qualify themselves as subscribing to the blog or newsletter. 

Generate sales. Affiliate links to the influencers’ posts and discount codes help to record a more precise estimation of ROI. 

These are broad goals, however, for running a successful campaign you need to get more specific about your goals and which digital marketing techniques you’re aiming to use. This will also make measuring ROI easier.  

Share of Voice 

Share of Voice typically shows the percentage share of the brand’s paid advertising in the market. It reveals the performance of campaigns and allows you to benchmark your future marketing campaigns. 

Measure the share of voice by dividing a target metric that represents your brand by the total in your industry or market, then multiply that number by 100 to get the percentage of market share for that specific metric.

There are plenty of social media listening and analytics tools that measure your SOV relative to similar businesses. Mentions, hashtags, reach, impressions are metrics used to calculate the share of voice. 

Earned Media Value

Earned Media Value refers to the gains from various marketing channels, blog posts, word-of-mouth marketing, influencer marketing, brand mentions.

Although there is no exact formula for measuring EMV, the general formula is a product of impressions, CPM (cost per impression) and other specified metrics say, the share of voice and engagement depending on the project. 

One drawback of EMV is that it is a simplistic and unprecise method for calculating the true ROI of influencer marketing. Impression, reach are partial numbers, as they do not exactly tell us who viewed the posts while surfing on the social networks. For comprehensive measurements, marketers need more complex analytics.  

Influencer Media Value 

Influencer Media Value is a genre of Earned Media Value. It is the equivalent value of the advertised post. Thus, if IMV of a post is $100 it means the post would have $100 value as a sponsored Instagram post.

IMV helps to estimate the worth of influencers before engaging in collaboration. Obviously, profiles with a large audience generate high IMV. It shows the maximum amount which brands can charge for a sponsored post.

At the end of the project, brands need to compare IMV with the previous post’s IMV. A successful influencer campaign should generate higher IMV.  

Evaluate the results

Measuring the performance of the overall campaigns is not usually enough. You need to pick a group of influencers to start with and in the beginning track each influencer’s performance.

With the unique discount codes and URLs, you can get the metrics for attributing sales brought in and track direct traffic coming from those influencers’ posts. 

Assessing the performance of each influencer will help you to filter out the poorly performing influencers and keep only the top-performing ones.

Repeat the process by running a short term campaign using the new mix on influencers – from your initial list and new ones. To track this ROI keep an eye on likes, shares, daily views, visitors to pages, comments and so on. 

It’s risk-free to run several short-term campaigns and keep filtering out low-performing influencers, so when you start a long-term collaboration with a chosen group of influencers, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure. 

Traditional marketing in China is losing its popularity because of the progress of influencer marketing. Although the social media ecosystem is different from the rest of the world, China has a very unique influencer marketing in terms of customized influencer platforms, credible influencers, high ROI sales and many more. Restrictions on almost all western social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube lead to the creation of a better influencer market. Closed influencer networks created a more interconnected influencer-brand-follower environment. Influencers otherwise known as Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are essential factors in guiding the purchasing decisions of customers. 

Differences between Chinese and Western influencer market

Let’s start with understanding the main differences from the Western industry. 

First of all, influencer marketing or KOLs marketing as it’s called in China has more complexities and is more business-oriented. It entails tight integration with the e-commerce and supply chain. 

Credibility is another factor that differentiates the Chinese influencer market from that of the Western. Instead of gathering huge audiences, Chinese influencers have real-life followers who are inspired by the influencers and share their thoughts about products.

Fashion influencers in the West tend to advertise ready products for their audience while Chinese involved in the production process considering follower views on the product, its design and finally selling the ready products. 

E-commerce sites are transferring into social media which is one of the future trends influencer marketing in the US. Multifunctional platforms such as WeChat and Weibo bring together online payment, chatting and e-commerce interface that enhances influencers’ role. 

Media Matrix, a self-sustainable social media ecosystem, is a distinct influencer ecosystem where influencers invite and support new influencers on their channels which helps to expand the audience and to create more quality content.

Influencer Marketing is a $9 billion industry in China

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A post shared by Angelababy (@angelababyct) on Nov 1, 2018 at 7:03am PDT

China is not only the world’s largest social media market – but it also owns an incredibly rich and diverse online landscape. Despite the differences between the Chinese and Western social media landscape, China is three to five years ahead of the rest of the world. The advanced functionality and integration of social media, digital payment and e-commerce have enabled business models that are yet to be explored in other countries.  

Rhunn is one of China’s earliest and most successful influencer incubators. The company which enables influencers to sell through e-commerce has runaway success to the point that the e-commerce giant Alibaba invested in the company leading the Chinese influencer industry to grow to nearly $9 billion. 

Chinese KOLs turn fans into sales

Chinese influencers mainly consist of columnists, reporters, socialites, video produces and photo & video bloggers who are extremely powerful with the ability to heavily influence consumers’ purchasing decisions on a level that their western peers can only dream of. We can categorize them as the following groups:

• Celebrities
• Experts
• KOLs
• Micro-KOLs
• E-commerce KOLs

Yes, there are E-commerce influencers in China. Because of the huge price gap between the mainland and other areas of the country. These KOLs are also entrepreneurs who have their own retailing channels. 

With many influencers in different segments, we can list a few most well-known Chinese KOLs here:

Becky Li 

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A post shared by 黎贝卡 Becky Li (@beckys_fantasy) on May 26, 2019 at 10:58am PDT

Having 3 million followers on Weibo and 4.5 million followers on WeChat, Li is one of the most powerful influencers in China. Dubbed as Goddess of Shopping, she sold 100 Mini Coopers with five minutes in her blog on WeChat in 2017. So, she is not our average digital influencer. 

Apart from collaborating with Western luxury brands Burberry, Armani, Rebecca Minkoff, she launched her brand over WeChat with 1 million renminbi of revenue. Becky stated that the key to her success is writing on the topics that interest her, credibility, promoting products tested on herself, considering customer reviews. 

Zhang Dayi

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A post shared by ZHANGDAYI (@milksmellbest) on Jul 21, 2019 at 5:22am PDT

Zhang Dayi started her fashion career as a model. Followers’ huge interest in her stylish clothes led Zhang to open her own stores. Her sales reached 100 million RMN on SIngles’ Day in 2017. With 20 million followers in total Dayi is a prominent figure in Chinese retail e-commerce.

The success of her first store on Taobao made Ruhnn create a new influencer-incubator-supply chain model. Instead of telling features of dresses, products, Li finds it better to communicate with followers, asking their opinion on her photos on social media. She believes that her followers love her because not only for her style but for her values and personality. 

Chrison

Being a former magazine editor led Chrison to create a unique fashion blog. In contrast to other fashion and beauty influencers, Chrison has rarely shown his face off on social media. With a black background on his profile, he focuses on the content he writes rather than the perfectly edited photos.

Besides stylish outfits, his followers are interested in the quality of his writings. Thanks to aesthetic storytelling ability Chrison worked with luxury brands Fendi, Cartier, Gucci, Prada. 

Popular Chinese social media platforms

While there might not be the exact version of Western social networks, China has several social media platforms with similar and even better features. 

Chinese super app WeChat is a combination of chat, ordering, online payment sites. Its official accounts ease transactions between business people. The official account helps to directly connect to target customers, advertise products.

Once you have an official account, you can easily store, sell your products in an e-commerce panel. CRM functionality allows companies to manage contacts within official WeChat accounts. In recent years, the platform launched WeChat Advertising, which includes KOL ads, banner ads. 

Not just only WeChat, the other social media platforms like Weibo, Douban, and Douyin are also quite popular in China.

Weibo – the Chinese version of Twitter

With more than 500 million monthly users, Weibo is the second biggest social media platform in China. It is a micro-blogging site mainly resembling the features of Twitter.

Weibo amplified its functions by adding live streaming and short video channels. It also works with Alibaba in commerce and marketing fields. Enterprises can either work with influencers to promote your sales or set up enterprise accounts to interact with customers, display products, track sale process. 

Xiaohongshu – giant community e-commerce platform

Xiaohongshu is a luxury shopping platform comprising social media and e-commerce sites. The company is also known as “Little Red Book”, mainly serves young women by selling fashion and beauty products. Users can buy and share their reviews about products on the platform. 

In 2018, Xiaohongshu launched its own influencer marketing platform which connects brands with influencers. Global brands like Dior, Fendi, Channel, Gucci, Shiseido, YSL partner with Chinese KOLs to reach local customers. The company’s mission is to create authentic word of mouth advertising. The site gives rewards, earnings for active and quality content creators. 

When it comes to Influencer Marketing the fashion industry is winning big. Information about fashion spreads quickly, in other words, the effect of fashion is fast. But to stay up to date, it is important to vary in marketing activity. Fashion marketers should be in harmony with their target customers and reach the customer with accurate and complete information in order to target sales and profit. But…

How effective is Influencer Marketing in the fashion industry?

Turkey’s cosmopolitan cities are known as a hub of the fashion industry. In terms of disposition of sectors, the report states that beauty and make-up with 19%, fashion with 18%, travel with 13% and life and food categories with 12%. From local designers to international brands, Turkish fashion bloggers like to mix it up to create their own unique style as well as write about/photograph it effusively. 

According to the state of the Influencer Marketing Report in 2019, 25% of all sponsored posts on Instagram are related to fashion. With an audience willing to scroll and shop, Instagram has created exceptional opportunities for all fashion brands.

Both established fashion labels such as adL, Hepsiburada, Defacto, LC Waikiki and smaller brands are leveraging the reach and engagement of this visual platform. They attract and engage more people with creative Instagram Stories, branded hashtags, shoppable ads, and influencer-created content. In terms of usage of social media networks in Turkey, Instagram takes first place with 48%, followed by Facebook with 21%, YouTube with 16% and Twitter with 15%. 

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LC Waikiki ile bu bayramda çok şıksınız! ? #bayram #bayramlık #yaz #summer #lcwaikiki

A post shared by LC Waikiki (@lcwaikiki) on Aug 10, 2019 at 4:55am PDT

Let’s take a look at some of the Influencer Marketing campaigns in Turkey which leveraged Celebrities and Fashion Influencers. 

Trenyol “Chagla x Milla” Collection

Trendyol created its private collections called ChaglaXMilla, with the Turkish model and actress Cagla Shikel. The launch of the collection, which combines quality and trends that a woman wants for the summer months, was released at Happily Ever After. On the same day, the CaglaXMilla collection which was put up for sale on Modag.com got a considerable attraction. The brand created the collection based on the designs of its brand ambassador. 

Collection consisting of beachwear, bikini, kimono, blouse, lace skirts, prints, midi skirts, Spanish pants, tops, and leather jacket, was designed by Cagla Shikel.

MODGREY & Modest Fashion

MODGREY, a clothing brand for women that combines modern, stylish and elegant clothing styles with unique designs. Making a rapid entry into the Turkish Fashion Sector, MODGREY has opened Turkey’s first Modest Department Store that offers modern and modest designs in Istanbul.

The brand intended to increase the digital power and brand awareness while collaborating with 21-year-old fashion influencer Sena Sever who is one of the pioneers of “modest fashion” in Turkey. Within the scope of the 5-month agreement with Sena Sever, the brand organized 4 different creations and many activities every month.

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Ne gömlekler yapıyorsun sennnnn @vesna_design ???

A post shared by Rabia Sena Sever (@senaseveer) on Jul 18, 2019 at 11:26am PDT

By the end of 2017, to start introducing the 2017-2018 winter creations, the brand partnered with Sena Sever, who attracts a lot of attention in the digital world with her posts and style, to increase both wholesale and digital sale. The campaign introduced MODGRAY to her followers of more than 500,000 people in a natural way and to draw sustainable traffic to the brand’s online shop.

Do the influencers are really a choice over celebrities?

Research done for Marketing Turkey explored the effectiveness of collaborations with both influencers and celebrities comparatively. 

In the study (that is called DigitalheAD), brain dynamics and eye-tracking measurements were performed with 256 participants and the dynamics of 1000 TV ads and 38 ads on YouTube Ad Leaderboard were compared. The aim was to detect thoughts and emotions that could not be expressed via brain imaging. 

When the scores obtained in the study are examined, it is seen that Danla Bilic, who is famous for make-up blogging, have a more effective harmony. The same scores cannot be achieved when the target group is the Benefit brand, which is both known and economically distant to the target audience.

Similarly, Berkcan Güven, who feels more related to the participant of the study, and Puma accomplished more successful collaboration, while it is seen from the consumer’s brain scans that compliance with Guess, which has a more premium brand, is not so effective. 

The results of the study revealed that celebrities like Cagla Shikel who is well-known on TV performed higher than social media influencers if we measure the scores without brands. However, when we in terms of their relevance with the brand, it was found out that social media influencers have a higher effect on consumers’ purchase decisions. 

The reason for this difference explained as “consumers are the fans of a celebrity, but the friend of an influencer.”

In another example, Cagla Shikel whose wardrobe is more wondered by her fans because of both her physical appearance and fame on TV, seems to perform higher scores in collaboration with Trendyol (fashion e-tailer) than Danla Bilic whose expertise is on make-up.  

In conclusion, the study highlights the relevance of a particular influencer or celebrity to the strategy of the brand. While celebrities who are thought to consume luxury and premium brands can perform better with top brands in digital media, the brands that appeal to a wider audience may have more effective collaborations with social media influencers who are more connected to their audience and thought to be one of them.    

Recently, Instagram announced hiding “likes” that posts have accumulated to start the test as a way of creating “a less pressurized environment” on the app and to encourage users to focus more on the content than the number of likes. Initially, Instagram has been trialing a new formula in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand by concealing the number of likes a post has received. While the users who are parts of the test will be able to see likes by themselves, their followers will not. This is applied to video views as well.

And there’s been a lot of chat about whether or not this change will signal the end of the Instagram influencers. This change is not global yet, so we may not be able to analyze the whole effects, but one thing is certain that this move has the potential to dramatically change the commercial landscape of this platform.

What does it mean for Influencers? 

Somewhere along the line, the platform changed from casual posts, to precisely curated, well thought out, artistic creations invented particularly to get likes and comments, so, as a result of a change like this, it is expected that Instagram will turn to more “healthy” environment.

However, marketing experts say the changes could also further incentivize brands to put paid media support behind their influencer posts, and also to focus on Instagram Stories, the video and photo posts that are only live on Instagram temporarily.

The potential change could also mean that influencer content will need to become higher quality since users won’t be able to lean on the number of likes their posts are receiving when a brand considers working with them. Marketers will still be able to look at an influencer’s follower count, but that metric doesn’t mean much in the way of showing how “engaged” a user’s audience is. 

Youngsters vs Adults

From the adult influencers’ perspective hiding those numbers are like a pretty juvenile way to treat them and seem like something that would be perfect for users under 18 instead. The disappearance of the likes total has had little impact on their online life and they believe the company’s decision could increase users’ comfort by posting authentic material and displaying their creativity. In fact, likes have become so devalued that a picture of an egg holds the record for winning the most.

Compared to the adults, younger generations’ entire digital landscape has been defined by numbers and metrics.

Hilton, who has a personal account as well as one for his dog, the latter with more than 3,200 followers, added that he understands why Instagram is doing this. Hilton said his younger sister, who is in high school, is “obsessed” with likes. “It’s mostly for the younger generation, people in high school,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure. If someone has 1,000 likes and someone has two likes, that probably makes them feel not very nice.”

The change will probably slow down the Instagram influencer world a little bit, a lot of young influencers now are using live videos, not static photos, to build their following. And they will definitely find a way around if the platform will apply this change globally.

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How will it affect the brands who depends on likes on their Instagram posts to sell their products?

Likes are a huge part of Instagram’s business model and how they monetize the platform, so it seems like an odd move to make on a full-time basis.

Professionally, that might be a little harder to explain to clients and also to brands that it shouldn’t be an issue but it just means that they will need to use third-party metric platforms to see the actual likes moving forward.
Besides, as a business or brand, you will be looking for more than just likes anyway (as these can be purchased) when engaging influencers. There are way more metrics for serious businesses and influencers than just likes. 

On the bright side, this change may have the effect of drying up the economy for fraudulent likes on Instagram since they would no longer be as valuable when it comes to showing engagement. Plus, when it comes to the clients of major brands like Pepsi or McDonald’s, engagement is already less of a priority. Trialing an Instagram without likes is a small gesture that is not nearly as dramatic as it sounds, and it’s one that weakly waves at the problem, rather than doing very much to handle it. 

Influencer marketing is steadily replacing traditional advertising that consumers have already lost their faith. Smart marketers and brands choose to work with influencers to persuade the buying decisions of their audience. Depending on the number of followers, we categorize influencers into mega, macro, micro and nano influencers. In our previous blog, we have talked about things you brands should know about micro-influencers and how brands can take advantage of them. Now we will look at another type of social media influencers – the nano-influencers.

Who can be defined as a nano-influencer? 

Having an account with a large number of followers or being widely popular is not necessary to be an influencer. It doesn’t matter how many fan base influencers have, the only thing is needed is the ability to shift their fan’s behavior or thought process. Think about any of your family members, parents or siblings. How many influences do they have over you? Whether you admit or not, some of your decisions are the result of their influence and you are the audience of one. 

There is a predominant idea that the bigger the influencer, the better your results which are not always correct. A word from a nano influencer may have more impact than macro-influencers with thousands of followers.

Nano-influencers are defined as Instagram influencers with at least 1,000 and usually not more than 5,000 followers. Here we can specifically include Generation Z. Instead of traditional advertising and celebrities which have been grown to mistrust, they have more tendency to turn to the opinions of their online peers. Clearly, we are heading towards a trend where consumers, in particular, the younger generation, will increasingly rely on nano-influencers to assist with their purchasing decisions.

Here are some of their notable characteristics of nano-influencers: 

• A small number of followers
• High probability of not working with any brand before
• Appearing as a “friend” persona
• Very specific niche
• A higher engaged community

Reasons to choose nano-influencers

We used to praise social media influencers with hundreds and thousands of followers and give them a big amount of money to endorse our products. But making more unique and relevant advertisements and targeting the right audience is key to every successful marketing strategy. 

Nano-influencers achieve this by creating original and user-generated content. They usually have more niche content. That’s why brands can reach various segments and better position their products with the help of nano-influencers. These new niches are a good opportunity for brands to test the new product, to examine the reactions and to get feedback from the audience. This is also a good opportunity to open up a new market space. 

Just like your family members or friends, nano influencer is “normal” people with a nano-lifestyle. A nano-influencer is almost considered a friend by most of their followers. As they don’t use influencer marketing as their main source of income, they appear more relatable and approachable for a brand. 

Fewer followers = More engagement

State of Influencer Marketing 2019 research states that nano-influencers have twice a higher engagement rate on Instagram than that of any other influencer group. It has already proven that if the influencer has a larger audience their engagement rate decreases. Compared to a celebrity with more than a million followers, nano-influencers can engage about 8.7% of their audience, while this percentage for a celebrity is just 1.7%. 

In comparison with the mega-influencers, they have more category-specific audiences who are closely interested in their publications. Therefore, they can create a stronger relationship and one-on-one communications with their followers. They are more likely to reply to every comment and interact with the audience. They don’t simply reply with a catchphrase but give meaningful answers to their questions. As a result, these relationships lead to higher engagement and trust.  

Cost-effectiveness

In having a considerably large following, mega-influencers provide brands with a notably greater reach, but at a very high cost. However, leveraging multiple nano-influencers will have more influence than working with a mega-influencer with the same audience. Of course, there are more financial benefits of this collaboration. A few percentages of nano’s prefer monetary compensation, which means they are ready to collaborate with you in exchange for products or services which makes them more approachable for small businesses as well. 

Grow your future ambassador

They are enthusiastic and easy to work with. So they are growing faster than any other group of influencers. It is more likely that in the near future they can become micro-influencers or even macro-influencers. So it is a chance for brands to grow their army of ambassadors. 

They are more like “friend figure”

Nowadays, consumers exposed to promotional content every day, so they can easily identify them. However, nano’s feed is not filled with paid content yet, therefore they are able to provide a sense of authenticity.  A recommendation of a brand or product from a friend (or a nano-influencer who provides that level of friendly intimacy) will bring better conversion rates than a paid advertisement. 

Finally, before starting to leverage nano-influencers brands should consider that they don’t have much experience in advertising. So they are going to need more help, advice, and control from brands. Brands can help by giving a detailed brief and not interfering with their way of interaction with followers. It is also necessary for nano’s to have a general understanding of the brands they collaborate with. Not having a thorough understanding may risk the brand’s message being fragmented.

The term “amazon influencer” appeared after The Amazon company run an affiliate program to help people to make money. This affiliate program run by Amazon for two years, allowing social media influencers to get a commission on products that are sold and earn a cut of prices generated from Amazon links within Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter. 

This is a cost-effective way for sellers to reach potential customers

Amazon’s Affiliate program became so popular that, the company decided to slightly take it several steps further and in 2017, Amazon Influencer Program was created. Unlike Amazon’s affiliate program this new program is more exclusive as it lets anyone link to products for the small number of commissions. The program is open to qualifying consumers who have YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts.

Creators say that revenue from the Amazon Influencer Program can vary from a few dollars to $1,500 a month. Commission rates range from 10% for Amazon’s private-label fashion line to 1% for video games and consoles.

Why Amazon started this program?

Amazon realized that social media influencers with large audiences could broaden its reach by promoting products. They also realized influencers were searching for better ways to partner with brands to monetize their fame.

At first, Amazon took a risk by knowing that influencers would take advantage of the program, giving misleading reviews to products just to make money. But, that’s not how today’s young influencers work. Influencers don’t necessarily promote products because they know followers trust their opinions and crave discovering relevant brands. Influencers are also keenly aware of how Amazon bans fraudulent reviewers. And those young, rising stars don’t want to make it onto that list.

How does the program work?

It’s pretty similar to how Amazon Affiliate works. Users can build links and shopping ads, and then integrate them onto their own websites or blogs. When people click on that link and buy a product, the affiliate gets a commission on the product. The amount of commission depends on what type of product was sold.

The main difference between Affiliate and Influencer programs is that, with Amazon’s Influencer Program, people have to apply to be “using the social media account in which they’ll have the most influence on their followers, while on Affiliate program anyone can sign up and get started. 

There’s no guarantee they’ll get into the program. If you don’t qualify right away, Amazon encourages you to come back in the future as the eligibility requirements may change over time.

Here are some of the eligibility requirements:

• Broad audience. However, there’s no precise number that has been stated by Amazon. 
• How much they engage with fans with posts, and how many/which social media platforms they engage on. Again, there are no exact numbers, but rather that Amazon wants to see you have a noticeable presence.
• Your content is of a high standard. Amazon’s looking for influencers who post quality material, and not just trolling comments to get a reaction out of people.
• Lastly, they also want to see that there’s relevance for themselves. Amazon needs to see that the influencer chosen will also benefit themselves.

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 How successful the program is?

The program is a win-win for both influencer and Amazon. The company gives you countless social sharing tips on all platforms, including podcasts and Snapchat, plus examples of real-life influencer campaigns.

As the program is relatively new, it is a little difficult to quantify the success of the program for brands. There are some gray areas at this point when collaborating with influencers. If a brand decides to work with an influencer, will the influencer feature that brands on his or her storefront? Even with the complexities, studies show that influencers have generated billions of dollars of revenues for brands. Other surveys say that most marketers are trying to assess the ROI of working with influencers.