The Changing Landscape of Influencer Marketing in 2021

Social Media Influencers—a specific set of consumers who promote products to their followers started catching up fire majorly, only in the last eight years.

Social media?has shaken up a number of industries and created new?opportunities for consumers like never before. Influencer marketing is a prime example, enabling once anonymous consumers to supplement and sometimes overshadow traditional marketing campaigns.

Influencer marketing defined

Influencer marketing can be defined as people on social media with a following. Previously we were having film stars & athletes on Head & Shoulder Ads, which is essentially influencer marketing as well.

The way we use the term today is hyperfocused on social media and people with followers because they were on a reality-TV show or they’re actually a celebrity. Or maybe they’re just the average kid next door. But it’s really all about people engaging with your content. The concept of influencer marketing has existed for a long time. We’ve been used to the idea of celebrity endorsements in TV ads or traditional marketing campaigns.

Influencers can come in all forms - moms, kids, athletes, models,....anyone with enough creativity to create content at scale. Over the years, that concept has evolved, and these influencers are really driving marketing through content. That’s usually done on digital channels like social media, such as YouTube or Instagram.

What’s changed

What’s changed is that a lot of companies these days that are very familiar with performance marketing are really transforming the way they are attributing and giving value to influencers’ programs.

Before, with celebrity endorsements, it was really hard to put a return on investment (ROI) behind these investments. They were usually really big investments, but the results were sort of unknown. Today, when companies leverage influencers, especially on social media, it’s much, much easier to attach an ROI to the campaigns because you can just place your links, look at view-through conversions, and really understand the impact of these ads to your revenue stream.

The digital space really opened up the door for anyone to be an influencer. It used to be the case that you had to be a big celebrity, or you had to have a big name behind you to get one of these deals. But now anyone can be an influencer. And I’m sure at some point tonight we’ll talk about micro influencers, who are people with 1,500–2,000 or maybe 5,000 followers on Instagram, which is relatively small compared to some of the celebrities.

Micro versus macro influencers

We at Obsel, actually worked with influencers starting off from 2,000 to more than 10 million+ followers. So if it’s less than 5,000, followers, I think they’re micro. Influencers with something like 5,000 to 100,000 followers are medium, and those with over 500,000 are definitely macro.

But we use them in different ways. The great thing about micro influencers is that their content is really authentic and relatable because these are women who don’t have professional photographers, and so it resonates a lot more with your audience.

Macro influencers are really interesting, because if you can find the right macro influencers who are already saying the same things as your brand messaging, you can find some really good synergy. You can get a really big brand lift from something like that, as opposed to the micro influencers.

When we’re thinking about planning our month or our quarter, we also want a certain number of influencers that fall within those two buckets, because we know there’s a right balance we need to strike.

we generally work with these mega influencers a few times a year. When we have to launch a new product or a new campaign, we really try to leverage these big names.

But we also have micro influencer campaigns and work with about 150 influencers in a really organic way. We want to help them grow to become bigger influencers, so we host about 5-10 influencers a month in one of our studio in Chennai. We don’t ask for money, and we don’t ask them to post for us.

Sometimes, we also provide photography, video production, and so on, as well where they are free to shoot whatever they need for their own brands or for other brands, and we have these live events where we connect them with the various brands out there. That gives them the opportunity to meet other people like them and discuss career opportunities with these brands.

It’s been really successful. Over the course of a few years we grew some of these micro influencers from a few thousand followers to mega influencers with millions of followers. What’s interesting is when we actually ask them to post for us or give them a monetary reward, we get less response than when we don’t ask for anything. That’s actually when we see the most success, when they post even though they’re not asked to do so. It feels really authentic at that point.

There’s one other thing we do that’s been successful. We’ve found that some of these influencers are very interested in the F&B space and want to become entrepreneurs themselves, and we have connections with lots of factories, which produce on mass scale. So we collaborate with them by giving them the opportunity to manufacture some type of product through us.

The elements of a successful campaign

What works best for us is connecting with influencers who are already relaying our message, even if they’re not necessarily endorsing our products.

In our previous attempts of working with the beauty industry We tried to change the way beauty is seen in the world. We don’t necessarily want to accept the image of beauty that is put out there by all these big fashion brands. So we’re promoting the idea of personalization, that beauty is what’s beautiful to you, no matter your size, your race, or your age.

We’re planning to work, for example, with few macro influencers with large following, as well as some medium- to nano influencers that are really diverse, from transgender people to people who used to be homeless. Working with all these different types of people and developing relationships with them has helped us get in touch with different type of audiences. As a result, for example, one of our most successful target segments on Facebook is actually the transgender community.

Recruiting influencers, and the perils of managing them

We have one person who works in influencer marketing and she does a lot of the sourcing herself. She’s looking for women who are talking about body positivity. Of course, we also work with some talent that is represented by agencies, and then we’ll get leads from the agents.

This really opens up the door for some of this talent that we might not have had access to when we first started doing the influencer marketing program.

We do all the sourcing in-house. One of the challenges for us is that it’s hard to maintain such a big network of creators. We rely on some influencers’ tools, but there is a lot of work, and so our team is fairly large. I think our creator-plus-experiential team is probably more than ten people.

Figuring out how to scale influencer marketing

Companies are still going after followers, and so they are mostly engaged with macro influencers, which really gives your brand a lot of visibility.

But then what you see often is that it doesn’t pay off, because this audience might not be as engaged, might not really relate to that particular influencer, the conversions are really not there. So companies started optimizing for quality over quantity, but it takes a lot more resources internally to scale with micro influencers.

The scale is very hard, especially when you want a really authentic message, particularly coming from some of the micro influencers. You either need to work with agencies, or you need an in-house team that can manage it, but it’s certainly still a very manual process. Whatever the approach, I think brands need to put the effort behind it because it’s so valuable. What better way to get a really authentic story out than to work with an influencer?

Pros and cons for big players

I think that even though the big companies might be late to the game, they have a huge advantage because everybody is already aware of brands like Nike, Adidas, and Apple, and some people just feel really, really close to them. We often have to introduce our brands to influencers who aren’t aware of them.

On the other hand, I actually think bigger brands might be at a disadvantage in the sense that they are so big that when they do partnerships or when they work with influencers, it’s very clear it was a paid partnership. I think they’re somewhat at a disadvantage because they aren’t able to drive that authenticity that comes with smaller influencers and smaller brands.

Endnote

I think as the market becomes more saturated, it’s much harder for brands, especially smaller brands, to differentiate themselves. You know, direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands have used this as a way to really build their brands and their voices. As bigger companies come into the space and start using influencers, D2C brands are going to be forced to figure out the next new thing. The beauty of D2C brands is that they are typically very scrappy and behave a little differently, because they can be nimble and move faster.

And if the trend is becoming more and more micro, I think the other danger is that people might become less authentic, because they’re going to start seeing that monetary reward. So I think the challenge is how much longer will the audience believe that message is a real message?

As always, don’t overfocus on short-term noise about influencer marketing growth. Try to identify the medium-term direction of the parts of the economy relevant to your business.

About the Author: Nazreen Saleem?is the Managing Partner of Obsel Endeavours and a founder of D2C baking brand, PlateStory.