10 learnings from running 1,000 influencer campaigns in South East Asia

Capssion has been around for 4 years, helping brands run their influencer marketing campaigns in South East Asia and connecting them with thousands of influencers. And guess what? We recently hit a key milestone with 1,000 campaigns completed in the region! We decided to look into what we have accomplished, crunch the numbers and… we ended up writing a report with many insightful takeaways about the influencer marketing industry in South East Asia!

The industry is still in its early days, rapidly changing, and all stakeholders are constantly on their toes searching for ways to make processes, deliverables, interactions more efficient and impactful. This report aims to help marketers and companies make better decisions on their influencer marketing practices and educate around influencer behaviour.

From the evolution of influencer payouts, volume of collaborations, brand budgets, to the repartition of spend across social media channels, jobs coming from D2C brands and key social commerce points, this report will showcase the state of the influencer marketing space from 2018 to 2022 in South East Asia. This report has been generated with campaign data and user insights from influencers and brands operating in the following 7 countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong. 2022 data are a forecast based on the first 6 months of the year (January to June).

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TABLE OF CONTENT:

• Influencers double collaborations & payouts driven by COVID19 and new forms of content
• 97% of brands are increasing their influencer budgets
• 92% of influencers are uncomfortable selling on their first collaboration with a brand
• Repeat collaborations account for only 21% of the total collaborations
• Instagram is still on top, but TikTok is rapidly catching up
• Short video is King, Livestream is Rich
• Brands dismiss awareness campaigns when they hold the key to conversion
• Testing & opening new markets through influencers is more and more popular
• Campaigns execution times halved thanks to platforms like Capssion
• Influencers are overloaded with peak on e-commerce period

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1- Influencers double collaborations & payouts driven by COVID19 and new forms of content

There used to be a scarcity of jobs for influencers, with only a small percentage of them getting all the attention from brands: macro influencers and celebrities. With the industry growing fast over the years, not only more influencers are offered jobs (nano and micro influencers are now targeted by brands), but influencers also get more job opportunities in general every year to choose from.

The rise of ephemeral content like IG stories, shorts or even TikTok videos that are more spontaneous than other types of content, have translated in influencers being able to manage more collaborations at a time. It is now very common to see content creators post about paid jobs on IG stories alone, when it used to be a supplement activity to Instagram Posts. They are now a standalone deliverable.

At Capssion, we are seeing this as a one of the many ways the industry is getting more and more professional. Thanks to the number of opportunities they get, an increasing number of influencers can dedicate themselves full-time to this activity, leading to better execution and greater impact for their clients.

As a direct result to multiplying by 2.5 the average number of jobs opportunities influencers can take on per year, it seems quite logical to see an evolution of mentalities on unpaid campaigns; pure gifting campaigns are harder and harder to achieve as they are often discarded for paying ones by influencers.

With less and less time on their hands, influencers are now more selective as they have the luxury of choice. Therefore, we have witnessed a tremendous increase not only in the volume of business each influencer takes on but also on the average payout each one gets from these collaborations; as you know, the amount influencers charge per gig depends on the brand they are working with, the number of followers they have and the engagement they can generate for the brand and the type of content they’ll have to create (and many more factors). In North America and in Europe, the CPM rule of thumb is usually to charge $10 per 1,000 subscribers of followers. It’s obviously a bit less in South East Asia, but we have observed a “catch up” effect over the years: it used to be a CPM of $3.5 and it has almost doubled to reach $6 from 2018 to 2022.

With increased demands from brands, quantitively and qualitatively speaking, South East Asian influencers will naturally keep increasing their prices.?

2- 97% of brands are increasing their influencer budgets

The first and most important point of this section is that almost every brand in South East Asia is increasing their influencer marketing budget year on year. 97% of them have shared with us that they have bigger dedicated teams, budgets and overall resources to achieve their influencer marketing goals year on year.

Back when we started working with brands in 2018 at Capssion, many brands were already engaging in influencer marketing activities but most of them were either not dedicating serious budgets for this kind of marketing or were simply engaging in unpaid PR campaigns to gain social media mentions here and there. It is also telling that nowadays, we mostly work with “Influencer Marketing Managers” when we used to deal with “Marketing Managers”: it does show how professional the industry is getting!

When we deep dived into the numbers, it is quite striking to analyse the number of brands who were spending less than $1,000 USD per month on influencer marketing back in 2018 and how it has evolved over the last 4 years.

Only 12% of brands in 2022 are now spending less than $1,000 USD vs 45% back in 2018. This shows how seriously brands are now taking influencer collaborations in South East Asia. However, it is worth noticing that brands in the region are still spending less in comparison to other regions.

Most brands in Europe and North America in 2022 are spending $5,000 USD or above. We explain this difference by the premiums influencers charge in these other 2 regions. This leaves a lot of room to grow for South East Asian brands as the industry matures year after year. From the data listed above, we also expect that unpaid gifting campaigns will become an activity for prestigious brands only, as the expensive gifts they send will serve as compensation for the content generated by the influencers. We are already witnessing a rejection from influencers in South East Asia on unpaid collaborations as influencers are becoming full time content creators versus doing this as a hobby.

3- 92% of influencers are not confortable selling on their first collaboration with a brand

One of the strongest, if not the strongest takeaway from this report is the one we will develop now: so many brands enter the influencer marketing space expecting to generate traffic and sales on day one; and if the first collaboration doesn’t meet their quantitative KPIs (usually sales or traffic), they then move on entirely on finding new ambassadors for their brand.

There are so many missed opportunities because of this state of mind / thinking. First, end-consumers need to see your product(s) repeatedly to start considering a purchase. Next, influencers need time to learn more about your product and your brand. As a matter of fact, only 8% feels comfortable hard selling a brand on day one. This means that the more you collaborate with an influencer, the more the content will be on point, and the more impact it will have on the influencer’s audience. When you enter a collaboration with an influencer, always think forward and prepare your second collaboration and it will be a win-win-win. Win for the influencer, win for you and win for the end-customers!

One of the key data we got from running 1,000 campaigns and working with thousands of influencers on performance driven campaigns is that, on average, an influencer will really start selling after 3.4 postings of a brand. Yes, 3.4 postings. With only 11% of influencers generating sales on their first post, you will burn your budget as a brand and get tired of the influencer marketing space if you only work on “one time” collaborations.

We love to have our clients on a call when they sign up on Capssion, to learn more about their expectations, their previous experiences etc. So many of them tell us they are a bit frustrated because they can’t find the right influencers for their business! When this happens, we usually take the time to share more about the mechanics that would make it work and share examples of 4 to 6-months campaign plans to activate influencers efficiently.

If you are a brand and reading this report, think about building a community of influencers you like, who are professional at their job and whose content you would follow yourself. From there, you will gain the influencer’s communities’ trust which will eventually translate in sales.

4- Repeat collaborations account for only 21% of the total collaborations

As mentioned above, there is a big difference between engaging in influencer marketing activities and doing them well. When we survey the brands from our portfolio, it is shocking to see how few of them say they engage with influencer more than once.

Only 21% of brands work with influencers more than once and when you connect this data point to the fact that sales really start happening between the 3rd and the 4th time influencers post about a brand, it is quite appalling. This could be explained by the brands’ intentions that could be centered around PR and Communication activities, thus multiplying the faces carrying their brand. It is however not the case as 79% of the brands say they are engaging in influencer marketing to drive traffic and sales as we will see later in this report.

Also, the assets generated by influencers represent a huge opportunity for brands to reuse the content on their social media channels, on their website or even on their SKUs. Only 12.5% of brands reuse the generated content for commercial use in 2022. This is still too low as a figure, but it is worth mentioning that this number, even if minuscule, has more than tripled in the last 2 years, going from 4% to 12.5%.

5- Instagram is still on top, but TikTok is rapidly catching up

58% of influencer campaigns are still run on Instagram but TikTok is rapidly growing. It is no secret that Instagram has been the centerstage for influencer marketing over the last few years. The Meta-owned social media platform and its beautiful posts have taken most of the attention and budgets from brands in South East Asia, as it does in the rest of the world because the content on it is versatile and quantifiable.

But as you are probably all aware of, TikTok has been the new excitement in the space for both brands and influencers with a more playful and authentic approach. Common perception is that TikTok has taken the budgets by storm and has become a priority for most marketing teams.

As we can see above though, in one year only, we’ve already noticed quite a shift of the budgets from Instagram to TikTok with 64% of budgets going to Instagram in 2021 (and only 18% to TikTok) versus 58% on Instagram in 2022 and 28% on TikTok. What is even more interesting is when we surveyed brands about their intentions, 92% of brands said they will increase their TikTok budgets next year while only 55% of them said they will do the same on Instagram. The overall trajectory is still extremely favorable with 97% of brands saying they will increase their influencer budgets overall.

6- Short video & ephemeral content are King, Livestream scarce but Rich

Short videos (TikToks and Instagram Reels for instance) have risen in popularity as one of the brands’ favorite form of content, ranking in second place. The rise of TikTok as a platform, the launch of Instagram Reels and its rapid adoption in the last couple of years have made short videos one of the most requested deliverable from brands. It’s addictive, it’s creative, and it’s engaging: everything for a perfect branded collaboration!

Ephemeral content with IG stories is still a strong leader retaining 41% of campaign asks. Instagram stories have been popular for a while now. It gives many options: influencers can add stickers to engage with their community (polls) or to help drive traffic with a link (thank god Instagram removed its 10K followers minimum rule!). The content is easy to create for influencers and will remain a key deliverables for the years to come.

A chunky 21% remains invested on Instagram Image posts for branding & content repurposing reasons.

Livestreaming has been on every brands’ radar, with the Chinese model as a reference. Yet, it still represent only 2% of influencer spend. Many brands are interested in the livestream format, but it fails to become mainstream with influencers not being necessarily comfortable with a live situation. Instagram has not yet found the solution, IG Live never really took off but it is still developing new features (Live Room) to make it work. This type of content, along with Longer videos (4%), is expensive and complex to master. They might become increasingly popular as they are more authentic by nature and pay extremely well in comparison to other content types as you can see below.

Livestreams on average pay 7.5 times the average rate IG stories do. It is super interesting to notice that 5% would be happy to livestream but 40% would consider livestreaming with more information and/or control before engaging in this practice.

7- Brands dismiss awareness campaigns when they hold the key to conversion

When we look at all the campaigns we have run, we noticed that the reasons why brands engage in influencer marketing are very diverse (launch a new product, share a promotion, get feedback from social networks users). However, if we look a the marketing funnel, most of the time, brands in South East Asia put conversion (traffic and sales) as their main objective.

With sales and traffic generation in first and second place, it is very clear that influencer marketing has been associated with Conversion in the region. Brand awareness and product reviews still represent a fair share of the pie combining 21% of the collaborations together.

8- Testing & opening new markets through influencers is more and more popular

Back in 2018, influencers would on average collaborate 24 times per year with cross-border brands (brands that have no local presence in the country they are advertising in). On average in 2022, influencers are now working 72 times per year with brands that do not have a local presence. At Capssion, we have noticed that more and more brands are using influencer marketing to open new markets and test the waters to see if their brand, products or services would be a fit. They are using them as a feedback loop, as their first employees on the ground or even as an extension of their sales team before they even get a chance to set foot in that country.

It did not really come as a surprise to us as we have noticed more and more brands are direct to consumer and ship globally, testing new markets with influencers. How? They select a few dozen influencers to talk about one of their products, chat with influencers to have a better understanding of the situation, and analyse the comments and the reactions!

Covid19 for sure has had a tremendous impact on how brands perceive influencer marketing activities, shifting from a nice-to-have to a must-do activity and opening up the variety of campaigns we see on the market.

9- Campaigns execution times are halved thanks to platforms like Capssion

The traditional end-to-end process to work with influencers can take quite a lot of time whether you decide to do it in-house or work with an agency. However, influencer platforms such as Capssion have drastically driven down the time it takes for a brand to execute a campaign. There’s a lot of steps and many of them can definitely be squeezed:

• The biggest impact platforms have on lead time is also the first step in an influencer campaign journey: finding the right influencers for you. No need to receive countless emails and powerpoint decks with influencer profiles; a platform will, through data and smart matching, find relevant people for you and drastically bring the lead time down, from on average 7 days to 2-3 days.
• Shipping a product and Content generation are relatively the same whether you are on a platform or not as they remain pretty manual. We notice a slight improvement on content generation lead time on platforms as the influencers have all the information stored and formatted in one location which makes it slightly easier to access and understand.
• The next two big differences are around Payments and Reporting. Both tasks require time and headcount when not done through an automated platform and can be prone to mistakes when done manually. Payments go from an average lead time of 7 days to 1 and the same goes for reporting. You no longer require a specific (and usually time-consuming) process to send payments to influencers; you only have to deposit funds on platforms like Capssion and it will manage the payment automatically after the collaboration has been completed! This means that the post-mortem phase of the campaign goes from lasting 2 weeks to 2 days.

We did not include content repurposing in this timeframe as it happens in the post-mortem phase of the campaign. However, it is much easier to repurpose influencer content through software like Capssion as we store all of the videos and images generated in high quality for the brand to access them easily. Brands, say goodbye to Gdrives!

All in all, campaign times are more than divided by 2 when on platforms versus in-house or agency campaigns.

The fastest campaign we have run on Capssion took less than 48h (from posting the brief on our app to content posted on social networks). How? No product shipped, clear and simple deliverable expected.

10- Influencers are overloaded during the end-of-year sales season

On average influencers are solicited for their services almost every single day as we saw earlier through the year (250 collaboration opportunities / year). Still, there’s a high seasonality effect, and it follows the e-commerce sales calendar. You won’t be surprised that lots of gigs are offered to influencers for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, 11.11, 12.12 or Christmas. This reflects in influencer rates during those times.

Indeed, influencers are up to 6 times busier with jobs around November and December than in January, the slowest month of the year in terms of number of collaborations. Brands should read these numbers as an opportunity to work more with influencers on low months to get more attention and greater content quality as they are less busy with other tasks. Remember, influencers are more efficient when they work repeatedly with a brand!

Months like January, February, July or August are great for brand awareness & content generation campaigns you can capitalise on as a brand further down the road.

A lot of brands lack anticipation when it comes to their influencer marketing needs which often leads to poor execution down the road. Forward planning is key in light of the graph above.

CONCLUSION

As people spend a growing amount of time on social media, brands need to be present and promote their image, products and services. But we know how hard it is to be active on all social media channels, with their specificities, and be relevant. That’s why influencers serve as important vehicles for promoting those brands: they create native, trendy and impactful content. And because it works, they are getting more professional year after year and they get more opportunities from brands. This competition between brands to attract influencers tend to drive the prices up.

The industry is getting bigger and bigger, but there is a lot of room for improvement! The main advice we have for brands is to forget about one-offs and get ready to collaborate with each influencer multiple times before assessing their efficiency. Thinking medium to long term will drastically increase the success rate of your influencer marketing programs!

From nice-to-have to have-to-have, here’s how influencer marketing has engulfed brand strategies in the last 4 years in South East Asia.

Visit www.capssion.com for your influencer marketing needs.