Every customer is an influencer.

As the adage goes—fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. There’s no debate, the internet swimming in fake news, fake products, and recently fake influencers. And people are getting fed up. 

"Fake influencers are over a billion-dollar a year problem"

Early this year the influencer bubble popped as news broke when an influencer with 2.6 million followers couldn’t sell a few dozen t-shirts of her personal brand. Turns out robots don’t have their own credit cards (yet).

A research study by the University of Baltimore discovered over half of paid influencers are padding their content and metrics with faux likes and follows—yikes! And it gets worse, it is estimated fake influencers are over a billion-dollar a year problem.

All the #fakeness is not just hitting our wallets, it’s also taken a toll on our mental health. Countless studies have shown over-use of social media, specifically, apps like Instragram have been proven to increase depression. It’s easy to draw comparisons and feel lesser about our own lives up next to the rose-tinted views of everyone living their best (fake) lives.

It’s no wonder people are fighting back. There is a growing trend to air out phonies through hashtags like #instagramvsreality or poking fun at guides to “hack your photos”. To top it off, a subreddit dedicated to comparing instagram and reality has grown over half a million subscribers in less than a year.

Instagram’s reaction to this shift has been to pilot the removal of likes on posts. We are left to wonder is Instagram's move will protect or exploit fraudulent influencers. It’s more than likely the goal is to increase the app usage by encouraging people to post more, as it will reduce anxiety to post something and not worry about likes. But as the research shows, the more time we spend on social media, the worse our anxiety and stress become.

So what’s next—when we aren’t obsessing over the number of likes, follows and shares we have? An increasing caution for fake influencers is driving brands to move down the line to support micro-influencers and impact influencers that focus on authenticity. There is less pressure to be perfect, to post more often and share less-polished content and new whitespace for authenticity. This whitespace is already being filled by people who influence with purpose-driven (impact influencers) content like environmentalism, inclusivity, or animal rights.

Before going too far into a post-influencer world, we’ll first take a minute to visualize what an influencer is, what they do and what they get for it.

What do influencers do?

• Use/wear/purchase your product
• Talk about your product
• Share your brand on social media
• Refer new customers
• Provide a return on investment

What do influencers get?

• VIP Treatment
• First access to products
• Free and/or discounted product(s)
• Prioritized customer care
• Platform to provide feedback

What makes influencers important is when they provide some kind of ROI, you get something back in return for investing in them. But if we can no longer trust influencers to provide a return, who can we trust?

Our customers.

Every one of your customers is an influencer. They already love your brand, they want to share you with the world, you’re just not giving them a reason to. What would it look like if you started to treat every customer the way you treat an influencer? Lucky for us, there are some brands already doing this:

STIL (@stilclassics)

Co-create products with customers

Personalized (monogrammed) product journey

Educates and coaches customers

Instagramable products

VIP / Member’s only club platform

Atlas Supply (@atlassupply)

Co-create products with their customers

Engage and encourage user-generated content

Instagrammable products

Glossier (@glossier)

User-generated product tutorials

Highly engaged social media

Instagrammable products

What do these brands all have in common?

#1 They provide a product, packaging and customer experience that is WORTH talking about.

#2 They co-create products with their customers and deliver exactly what they need.

#3 They encourage customers to share by engaging and resharing content.

Let's take a closer look at each of these:

#1 Make products that are beautiful and WORTH sharing.

As a top contributor on unsplash with millions of views and downloads, STIL’s photos get used frequently in editorial write-ups and by customers. Simply because the products make you and your workspace look amazing. It doesn't end there, every package STIL sends out is worth posting, personalized (monogramed) product, hand-written notes, beautiful materials.

#2 Co-create products with customers and deliver exactly what they need.

Atlas Supply designed a travel bag for creative people, it’s no wonder over half of their content is user-generated. The photographers taking the incredible photos are actually using their bags to carry their gear. This is because when Atlas Supply makes a new product, they involve their customers in the process, they do Q&As, Polls, and show behind the scenes.

#3 Encourage customers to share by engaging and resharing content.

Glossier makes it a priority to engage and encourage user generated content and the results show. Of the THOUSANDS of Glossier “Get Ready With Me” Tutorials you will find online, almost all of them are UGC. If you watch Glossier on social you will see they love to generate conversation. They are consistently resharing and answering questions, posting tutorials, and featuring their customers.

Case Study: tentree co-creating with top customers.

This year, tentree experimented with co-creation through several product launches. I wanted to share the process and results behind one of them, and demonstrate how treating our customers like influencers can be a recipe for success. 

To begin, we built a list of highly engaged tentree customers through email segmentation. Once we had our list, we invited these customers by email to find us on a private instagram account for their eyes only. Once we had a good number of followers we began asking questions and generating a conversation. What products we should create, what things they want to see, and questions to ask our creative teams.

As we familiarized with our following we invited them to join us on a product journey to create something from the very start. In this case, we helped create our Wildfire Collection. The process was simple, we show them what we’re doing, we ask for ideas, they ask for questions and we have a conversation. But instead of sticking to a handful of big “influencers”, we shared it with thousands of micro-influencers.

We took them through processing wildfire cuts to create printing blocks and to the production floor of our print house. While we were there a lot of people were suggesting we create posters, so we took a live vote—and we made them there, on the spot. The result was a hit, we sold out of our woodblock printed items, lifted our return on ad spend (ROAS) by 50% and brought in over 55% new customers to the collection.

By treating your customers like influencers, you are investing in people who already believe in you, versus those that need to be convinced or paid to talk about you. The results can range from increased word-of-mouth, increased engagement and UGC to increasing conversion and ROAS when you involve customers along the product journey.

The examples provided range from small to large business. Regardless of the scale of business, it’s easy to start treating your customers like influencers. Just start small. To get you started, here are some ideas to start treating your customers like influencers:

• Create a member’s only club for your top customers and provide them a discount and exclusive product/content.
• Give your customers first access to something new.
• Go behind the scenes and generate a conversation. Everlane does a great job at this with Transparency Tuesday
• Co-create with your customer. Use Instagram polls, Facebook groups, WeChat groups, to ask for questions, feedback, and vote on new products for them.

Did I miss anything? Please share in the comments how you or other brands are treating every customer as an influencer.