Danica Kombol, speaker at 2016 Spark.Me conference in Budva, Montenegro talked about how to make influencers the life of a brand’s party. In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of influencer marketing, it is one of the best marketing trends out there. Why? Because brands initially focus on finding leaders, opinion makers in different industries that genuinely care about that industry, particular brand or product and can present it in the way that amuses their audience.
LOCAL EXAMPLE
COCA COLA NETWORK ADRIA BLOGGERS PROGRAM
CocaCola Serbia is the best example of understanding where the customer eyes are going and what are the modern marketing tendencies. Through their CocaCola Network Adria Bloggers program that they came up with in collaboration with Dragan Varagic, the online strategist in the field of Internet marketing, they are enabling bloggers from Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia to become online team for one year, together decide on topics that are going to be written about and get compensated for their work.
Chosen bloggers have only one task per month, to write anything they want on a subject related to their blog’s usual content and related to a meaningful moment happening at that time in Coca Cola company.
Why is this cool even though we never mention CocaCola anywhere except in the end of each article where we clarify to our readers that this post was a result of CCBNA project? Because in this way CocaCola demonstrates they value bloggers, online opinion makers, influencers and their customers because they want to offer them valuable and engaging content.
MILLENIALS AND GEN Z
I belong to so called millennial generation. We don’t really care about advertorials, we skip them, we don’t watch TV commercials, we just infinitely scroll our Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat & Facebook feeds during them. We don’t like disruptive marketing, actually dislike is a mild term. We want our content to be interesting, entertaining, funny, creative, unique and different.
TRUST IN ADVERTISING TANKED IN 2009, AND PEOPLE FLOCKED TO BLOGS TO HEAR WHAT THEIR ‘FRIENDS’ THOUGHT, NOT MEDIA.
So, if you are trying to reach us, forget everything you know and start from scratch. Watch Garry Vaynerchuk, read his book and memorize what he is saying, because that guy really gets it. Subscribe to Seth Godin’s newsletter and read carefully. Watch Marie Forleo on YouTube and pay attention to her guests on the show, they have some meaningful messages to share.
It is important for a brands to realize that video producers, photographers, bloggers, vloggers are going to make probably better, more authentic, genuine content that will appeal to Gen Y and Gen Z, because they know exactly which buttons to push in order to entertain and educate their followers.
KYLIE JENNER PHENOMENON
It is no surprise that Kylie Jenner for example gets $100.000 for posting 1 Instagram photo. You know why? Because money goes where consumer attention goes.
Great excerpt from my friend Lauren’s post:
“It’s not an accident that she has 50 MILLION Snapchat followers or 100 MILLLION INSTAGRAM followers. Tons of eyes watching her. DAILY. Consuming everything she’s doing, saying, wearing. If I was Coca-Cola, I’d want Kylie sipping me on social media too.
Evolve with what the consumer wants. The consumer is over commercials. They want raw, real, authentic, real-time content. People are over the untouchable, TV commercial, overly saturated, in my opinion, boring advertising. Evolution is especially important if you’re running a business.”
AGENCIES NEED TO EDUCATE BRANDS ON WORKING WITH INFLUENCERS
Danica’s Everywhere Agency is doing an amazing thing, because they are not only working with influencers, but also focusing their efforts on educating brands how to properly work with influencers. Brands need to understand influencers aren’t paid media and they don’t function that way. They won’t write what you tell them, forget it. They will however take time to really understand your product, honestly review it and make it useful and informative for their followers to watch that video or read that post. Brand’s job is to properly brief the influencer about all the pro’s and con’s of a product. Brands absolutely need to give influencers the freedom to be authentically who they are, otherwise their followers will notice it and the brand will look lame, lose credibility and their fan base will drop.
INFLUENCERS ARE DIGITAL STORYTELLERS WITH NOT JUST THEIR BLOG, BUT ALSO PEOPLE WHO HAVE ENGAGING CONVERSATIONS ON TWITTER, CREATE VISUAL ART ON INSTAGRAM, AND SO ON.
IMPORTANT: FORGET NUMBERS AND FOCUS ON YOUR NICHE
Brands need to stop focusing on numbers, because numbers mean nothing if they are out of context. If one blogger has 100k followers on Instagram who are teenagers and another has 10k who are business women and you are selling expensive jewelry who do you think is a better influencer to hire? Quality and context are important, not just numbers. Brand need to track sales that a certain collaboration with an influencer brought them, because impressions mean nothing if you don’t have engagement and sales as a result.
The post What you need to know before hiring an influencer appeared first on Jovana Miljanovic.