//
Simply applying traditional marketing techniques to social media is a recipe for disaster
With the Internet doing wonders to cut out the middle man, consumers today enjoy a degree of engagement between themselves and brands that was difficult to imagine before the rise of social media.
Film and TV celebrities are now actively gravitating towards Instagram, Snapchat and other platforms. PewDiePie, an online comedian, has grown from guy who streamed video games on YouTube to enjoying a popularity rivalling that of traditional celebrities.
With up to 400 million users on Instagram reported from the third quarter of 2015, influencers using the service have steadily become an increasingly legitimate avenue for brands to engage with customers.
This means Influencer marketing needs to be part of every startups marketing plan when they brainstorm the future. A good deal of young people look to social media to find their idols and role models that in previous generations may have been famous actors, professional athletes or rock stars.
This shift from traditional media has spawned a change in how brands approach their marketing campaigns with consumers.
But it requires nuance
In Singapore, the epic failure of a hard selling approach by the influencer Naomi Neo and the juice brand Marigold shows how applying a ’20th century approach’ to the social media sphere leads to failure.
Below is the post for reference:
Companies that dedicate resources to a marketing arm looking to engage social media influencers need to consider certain realities before moving full steam ahead with the strategy. Let us share some of the pitfalls that others have faced.
Overpaying for the wrong talent
Being a relative impactful newcomer, influencer marketing has hit various snags. Hiring an influencer just because the boss’s loved one “liked them” doesn’t serve as good business practice.
Just looking at the raw numbers is misleading, interactions and engagements between those numbers are what the team should be analysing.
Some companies still view a massive number of followers as an acceptable ROI for the amount spent for an influencer, attributing more followers to a pay-per-click (PPC) model.
The 2014 Instagram purge had debunked the large number of celebrity followers as bogus. For example, below are some statistical breakdowns from Popular Chips Insight.
Let’s take a detailed look at Taylor Swift’s account (obviously, Taylor Swift has an immense reach, but the same model can be applied to a far less famous influencer).
Upon first glance she has a good spread of followers with 44.21 per cent sporting a over 2500 followers. However, upon closer inspection, the number of followers who have posted less than 10 times makes up 14.77 per cent of her followers.
This suggests a slew of inactive accounts that are boosting follower statistics above the engagement level to warrant a solid lead on her Instagram resume.
Also Read: Remember us for our failures, not our pseudo-successes.
For someone of less fame than Taylor Swift, take a look at interactions, engagements and good use of hashtagging to help track the progress of a campaign. Actionable statistics resulting in ‘calls to action’ are the proper benchmark to determine the success of an influencer’s campaign.
Understanding the reach of your influencer geographically
Localisation is key in getting your targeted market — but it does not mean, for example, a Singaporean must be restricted to Singapore. Sometimes, influencers have a surprising reach beyond their home borders.
For example, let us compare two graphs of different influencers from a Singapore Instagram campaign that we pulled from Popular Chips Insights.
The first influencer has reach in Singapore at just 23.08 per cent, with the rest being scattered too little across the region — having 10 per cent in the US and 13 per cent in Malaysia. This shows a lack of focus in the demographic and will make the relatability and tone of the campaign an uphill battle.
Conversely, with the second graph, a healthy split of 39 per cent each for both Singapore and Malaysia means the message is unlikely to be lost in translation the influencer probably has a more firm hold on the localisation process.
The next step is understanding the landscape and how active people are on social media in the given market.
Getting the right influencers and statistics to chart the reach and progress of the company’s efforts can make or break the campaign.
However, armed with the relevant data, it is easy to plan and budget for your campaign to work in sync with the right influencer to get measurable and consistent results.
—
The post Snags and pitfalls to avoid when launching influencer marketing campaign appeared first on e27.
from e27 http://ift.tt/1TV65Hq