Here's how to cut through the crap and find influencers who are actually worth your money: Generate a unique URL that will allow you to track conversions on your site and offer them a cut of whatever sales they drive, similar to an affiliate marketing campaign.
This approach will scare off the vast majority of influencers who are like the person mentioned in this article because the generic influencer's audience honestly isn't worth much. (Unless you build your company around vanity metrics, like the number of "likes" a sponsored post received on Instagram)
As I said in another recent comment on IH, most people in this community don't need more traffic. They need higher quality traffic.
As I said in another recent comment on IH, most people in this community don't need more traffic. They need higher quality traffic.
100% true, but it's really hard to grab the attention of your best potential customers to turn them into high-quality traffic. Also, you need to do a lot of testing to know who is buying and for what use case (like April Dunford says in product positioning).. and in order to do tests, you need huge traffic so your tests become eligible.
This may be correct for other industries but in gaming, it doesn't work like that. Streamers are making shit-load of money that they don't care if you don't give them base money + cut from sales :)
Again, this is unique for gaming and streaming. No idea about Instagram influencers.
I'm not saying influencers don't charge exorbitant rates for featuring products on their profiles, I'm just saying that I am skeptical of the value the majority of them drive if you're paying based on the number of followers/impressions.
So in the case of the streamers, I would be curious to know how their advertisers are measuring conversions if they aren't cutting affiliate-style deals.
I am not defending this influencer, but there are some things to consider:
The story is almost 2 years old
The influencer is an 18 year old, her audience is young and not a lot of 18 year olds have money to buy non-branded t-shirts. Teens are extremely brand loyal and their budget is limited. I am questioning her go to market strategy simply because she is 18 and probably not experienced in this sort of thing.
The audience mismatch was real on this, but it would have been a completely different result if she marketed a consumer/teen targeted APP, like a game or something. To say her audience is fake is wrong, she had solid engagement, the audience just didn't have $ to spend on the specific shirts she was selling.
I personally think, like so many marketing channels that people talk about a ton, influencer marketing is one that's had its day and is now saturated. If business insider is writing about it, it's already too late.
This particular channel is made even worse (in performance and the feeling it puts in my stomach) by the fact that 'influencing' is so heavily tied to ego. You're literally putting a price on your worth, of course egotistical instagrammers are going to overvalue that!
Influencer is now niched to do something called Friendfluencer, a friendly opinion leader or someone with clout minus the ego. Let's see if works well then.
Marketing performance is essential for influencers. So they should know their audience. It's also hard for them because there are so many influencers nowadays. Everyone with an Instagram account thinks he's an influencer. That's obviously not the case. Besides this and the fact that not everyone is made for this, it is rarely brought something new on the market. This definitely doesn't come as a surprise for me, the fact that she didn't succeed. You have to be unique and give people new stuff. Some people know how to do this www.ooyoo.co.uk , some don't.
I saw something on Facebook probably a year ago where there were two different ladies in a small business group that said something to the effect - our product is so good it should sell itself. They didn't do any work to either market or sell their products and were upset that they hadn't sold anything.
It seems like a similar problem where the sellers did not do any work to understand their audience, buyers, or (in this case) understand that their own product choice could've had something to do with the failure.
Here's how to cut through the crap and find influencers who are actually worth your money: Generate a unique URL that will allow you to track conversions on your site and offer them a cut of whatever sales they drive, similar to an affiliate marketing campaign.
This approach will scare off the vast majority of influencers who are like the person mentioned in this article because the generic influencer's audience honestly isn't worth much. (Unless you build your company around vanity metrics, like the number of "likes" a sponsored post received on Instagram)
As I said in another recent comment on IH, most people in this community don't need more traffic. They need higher quality traffic.
100% true, but it's really hard to grab the attention of your best potential customers to turn them into high-quality traffic. Also, you need to do a lot of testing to know who is buying and for what use case (like April Dunford says in product positioning).. and in order to do tests, you need huge traffic so your tests become eligible.
This may be correct for other industries but in gaming, it doesn't work like that. Streamers are making shit-load of money that they don't care if you don't give them base money + cut from sales :)
Again, this is unique for gaming and streaming. No idea about Instagram influencers.
I'm not saying influencers don't charge exorbitant rates for featuring products on their profiles, I'm just saying that I am skeptical of the value the majority of them drive if you're paying based on the number of followers/impressions.
So in the case of the streamers, I would be curious to know how their advertisers are measuring conversions if they aren't cutting affiliate-style deals.
She has 2.7m followers but her posts are averaging at only 30-60k likes and 100-300 comments? Something smells fishy here
pretty average engagement for Instagram these days
Instagram oraganic reach is pathetic ... hardly 10% of your followers sees the post. so 40K likes on 200K impressions is not bad .
I am not defending this influencer, but there are some things to consider:
The audience mismatch was real on this, but it would have been a completely different result if she marketed a consumer/teen targeted APP, like a game or something. To say her audience is fake is wrong, she had solid engagement, the audience just didn't have $ to spend on the specific shirts she was selling.
maaaybeee...
Also, teens are definitely NOT "extremely brand loyal."
I personally think, like so many marketing channels that people talk about a ton, influencer marketing is one that's had its day and is now saturated. If business insider is writing about it, it's already too late.
This particular channel is made even worse (in performance and the feeling it puts in my stomach) by the fact that 'influencing' is so heavily tied to ego. You're literally putting a price on your worth, of course egotistical instagrammers are going to overvalue that!
Influencer is now niched to do something called Friendfluencer, a friendly opinion leader or someone with clout minus the ego. Let's see if works well then.
Thanks @adonic, I took note on that "ego" word first. I also wanted to hear from others 👍🏻
Marketing performance is essential for influencers. So they should know their audience. It's also hard for them because there are so many influencers nowadays. Everyone with an Instagram account thinks he's an influencer. That's obviously not the case. Besides this and the fact that not everyone is made for this, it is rarely brought something new on the market. This definitely doesn't come as a surprise for me, the fact that she didn't succeed. You have to be unique and give people new stuff. Some people know how to do this www.ooyoo.co.uk , some don't.
I saw something on Facebook probably a year ago where there were two different ladies in a small business group that said something to the effect - our product is so good it should sell itself. They didn't do any work to either market or sell their products and were upset that they hadn't sold anything.
It seems like a similar problem where the sellers did not do any work to understand their audience, buyers, or (in this case) understand that their own product choice could've had something to do with the failure.
I found this. It's also a lesson for myself in selling my own product.