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If a brand wants actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to promote a product to his 187 million Instagram followers, it can expect to pay $1 million per post, according to social media analytics firm HopperIQ. But millions of other influencers reach smaller groups of consumers interested in particular topics, such as baking or photography. The question is: How does a brand on a limited budget find influencers that reach the right shoppers?
It’s an important question because retailers have gotten mixed results from influencer marketing. While about two-thirds of the 143 retailers surveyed this month by Digital Commerce 360 said they had promoted products through social media personalities, only 30% said the tactic was effective, including 17% who said influencers were very effective. By contrast, 58% called paid search marketing effective and 57% said the same about email marketing.
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But there are plenty of influencers for brand to choose from, as millions of Instagram users have at least 1,000 followers, according to influencer marketing agency Mediakix. And there are a growing number of technology providers seeking to match brands with the right influencers.
One is NinjaOutreach, which scrapes social media sites like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as well as blogger sites to maintain a database of 1 million active influencers. For each influencer, the platform tracks areas of interest, location, number of followers, number of posts and how engaged followers are with those posts, based on comments and likes, says Ari Oster, vice president of growth at Technology Commerce Management (TCM), which acquired NinjaOutreach last year.
TCM buys small brands that mainly sell on Amazon and uses tools like NinjaOutreach to increase sales and brand awareness. The company was especially focused on increasing consumer awareness when it launched a campaign in the 2020 holiday season for its brand Lensball, which sells glass spheres that photographers use to achieve special effects in their photos.
Examples of social media influencer campaigns
NinjaOutreach identified influencers likely to reach photographers, approached them about posting about Lensball and sent free products to those who agreed. Some with larger followings received monetary compensation, Oster says. An influencer with 50,000 to 500,000 followers on a major social media platform typically earns $500 to $5,000 for a post, according to Influencer MarketingHub.
Lensball reached an agreement with 75 individuals who posted about the photography product and was pleased with the results. The campaign reached 2.3 million followers of the 75 influencers in a 45-day period, says Liran Almog, brand CEO for Lensball at TCM.
But that figure of 2.3 million consumers “reached” is based on the assumption that all of the followers of those 75 influencers saw the comments they posted about Lensball. NinjaOutreach says it does not mean that 2.3 million people engaged with the content. All it means is that the bloggers who posted had that many followers, not that 2.3 million consumers saw, liked or passed on those posts.
“The reach figure is a very contested one,” says Forrester Research Inc. analyst Ryan Skinner, particularly because consumers are less likely to forward a post from an influencer than one from a friend or relative. That may limit the impact of promotional posts like the ones that promoted Lensball.
But Skinner says virtually all big consumer-focused brands work with social media influencers, often as a way to build awareness of a brand. “Between ad-blocking and cutting the [cable TV] cord, there are not that many ways to reach the younger population,” he says. “Most brands are doing it as a complement to their conventional media and customer engagement efforts.”
Indeed, in the June 2021 Digital Commerce 360 retailer survey, respondents cited brand awareness No. 1 when they were asked for their view of influencer marketing.
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Brand awareness—and the boost that awareness gave to selling his company—was a key benefit from an influencer campaign for Omri Zaltzman, who used NinjaOutreach a few years ago, before it was acquired by TCM. He used the influencer marketing system to promote a line of kitchen and dining products that he says was generating more than $1 million in annual sales on Amazon.com.
After NinjaOutreach identified bloggers who posted on social media about topics related to his products, Zaltzman reached an agreement with about 50 of them to write about his brand. He says in most cases he only offered free products, though he paid modest monetary compensation to those with larger followings. Each of the influencers got a unique coupon code to include in their posts.
“For each of the bloggers, I gave them an exclusive coupon code to send to their audience, and on Amazon, I could see which coupon codes were used how many times,” Zaltzman says. “It was very easy to track the performance of each of these bloggers.”
Influencers could play a bigger role as retargeting becomes harder
The campaign boosted sales by about 3-4%, he says. But he adds that the biggest benefit from him was the comments and videos posted by the bloggers.
Zaltzman was trying to sell his brand at the time, and he says that online attention increased the credibility of his brand and helped him get a better price when he sold his company in 2019. He is now chief operating officer of Fortunet, an Israeli company that specializes in brokering sales of Amazon brands and helping them raise funds.
Zaltzman says at the time he used NinjaOutreach it was charging about $50 per month. Pricing for NinjaOutreach now starts at $119 per month.
Even adding in the cost of shipping free products to influencers, Zaltzman says, “For me, it was totally worth it.” That’s particularly true, he says, because he knew many Amazon brands that were spending thousands of dollars a day advertising on Amazon when his influencer campaign cost far less.
Influencer marketing could be especially important in the near future as retargeting becomes more difficult, with Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google both taking steps to make it harder to track consumers behavior online, and thus to market to groups that demonstrate an interest in a particular topic, such as photography.
TCM’s Oster says consumers voluntarily follow people they like on social platforms, and thus influencer marketing, “will not be affected by those changes.”
Forrester’s Skinner says “it’s a reasonable hypothesis” that influencer marketing might be comparatively more effective as retargeting becomes more difficult. But, he adds, that companies like Criteo, which provides online advertising technology, “are helping to identify privacy-friendly ways to do things brands have done in the past. So it may not be as much of a shift as some people would like.”
The post Social media influencers with small followings can deliver a big impact appeared first on Digital Commerce 360.
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