Why social media and influencer marketing are important

Quotes

• “It is becoming more and more important for the brands to really cut through the noise. There are only so many Facebook ads you can run, or Instagram ads you can runor TV commercials, or billboards that you can put up but when you actually start working with individual people who have real stories, real audiences that really care about their day-to-day life, or what they are posting about, and you build a relationship with that person and the brand, all of a sudden, the message becomes so much more meaningful for the audience and the results are tangible.” -Mae“The term that I throw out to our advertisers on the MarTech podcast is inferred credibility. When we readan ad for some of our sponsors, we vet them to make sure that they are relevant but hopefully or listening audience believes that I’m credible because I’ve had lots of conversations with experts like you and I can pass along that inferred credibility.” -Ben“Mega brands are needs larger and larger market share and they are always launching new products, they are always looking for ways to increase new revenue so they really need people to tell the unique stories of why should I buy Amazon’s new securitysystem?” -Mae “One interesting thing about working with large brands is they know their customer base is huge. So the question becomes how they pick the exact right people to work with to hit their target audience and how do they do that at scale.” -Mae“There are a number of reasons to work with micro-influencers as opposed to working with macro-influencers and usually we don’t put them in opposition to one another because it is part of a larger strategy. We’ll probably work with 1 or 2 macro-influencersand a few hundred to a few thousand micro-influencers to make sure you are getting a really varied group of stories out there to your target audience.” -Mae“It can be really expensive to work with a macro-influencer and you might get the reach of a hundred million followers on Instagram right now but how many of those hundred million people are the exact right profile that you want to get in front of. Most likely you really are overpaying to reach that much smaller fraction of an audience when you are working with a person with a large following.” -Mae“But if I said, I am able to work with a thousand influencers who each have 20,000 followers and they are so excited to work with a brand and they genuinely love the brand and the product, that price point is significantly lower, like 10x lower and much more chance of finding the audience that really converts.” -Mae“We have thousands of influencers reaching out to our company on a weekly basis who are filling out surveys and we then really see all the content that they are hosting on their own accounts.” -Mae“So you have the inbound interest from the influencers and you are able to ask them for the data.” -Ben“We have to build a lot of our tools internally because everything is changing so quickly and it’s key to what we do. If you are a small start-up, looking at people who you already follow, asking them for their audience data is now a pretty common thing. They’ll just send a screenshot of what Instagram is telling them.” -Mae“A huge thing that I stress is that you have to test and learn. It is a marketing channel. Some influencers are going to work really well for you, some are not going to work well for you at all and that’s okay. That’s part of it.” -Mae“Instagram is where we do the majority of our work. We really see brands associate Instagram with influencer marketing. It’s a great way to be in front of a targeted group of people. It’s a great way to work at scale with micro-influencers and really get high-quality content that can forma lot better than an Instagram ad.” -Mae“We do a lot of work on Tik-Tok as well. I think that it is a really interesting platform especially given the fact that the algorithm really prioritizes its content in a way that is totally disassociated with the size of your following.” -Mae“We work with an influencer for a very large shoe brand, they have 5,000 followers but their piece of content was awesome and was seen by 3 million people in 24 hours. Those are the sort of potential results you don’t really get on other platforms.” -Mae“YouTube is also excellent. You have influencers who are spending 12 to 25 minutes really going in-depth about why they care about certain brands and that long-form video really converts people in a very trackable way.” -Mae“A big thing about YouTube is that it’s very good at conversion. You can really see people click through and buy. Promo codes do work extremely well and the content lasts for a very long time. It’s the second largest search engine so you are really going to see people a year to two years after still converting from videos if they are well done.” -Mae“YouTube is also very expensive. We start our pricing 50,000 dollars to start testing. Maybe work with 1 or 2 influencers out there. On average we arespending 60,000 to 80,000 dollars for an entire feature.” -Mae“I think the podcast is emerging and I think that there is going to be a lot more volume and a lot more brands are going to do a lot more podcast advertising. I think it’s early days right now. There is also a lot fewer venues to do B2B influencer marketing and there are a lot of brands that want to reach the B2B customer so I think it is going to grow significantly.” -Mae