The Untapped Opportunity of Influencer Marketing, Alllll the Sunscreen Challenger Brands, and Where is NBA Top Shot Now?

Deep Dive

?? When you read the words ‘influencer marketing’ what comes to mind? Instagram? CPG brands? Fyre Festival? 

Let’s take a step back for a second and reframe our collective perspective on what influencer marketing is and where the opportunity is for the modern, challenger marketer. 

Influencer marketing is modern PR. Not in the sense that influencers can replace media outlets (and we’ve seen the problems it can create when they do), but in the sense that both influencer marketing and PR are all about tapping into the pools of attention of your audience that someone else has already built up. 

It’s just earned media. Someone else has been able to attract the attention of the audience you’re trying to reach and you’re asking or incentivising them to put your brand or product in front of that audience. The fundamentals and opportunity both channels offer are the same. 

The biggest difference is also the biggest opportunity for businesses that move quickly and execute well: influencer marketing is tremendously underpriced for the attention you can get. Top tier influencers can be incredibly expensive - these are the modern celebrities of our time. If you were going to pay a movie star to promote your brand, you’d be prepared to pay a pretty penny. It’s the same with top tier influencers. But mid-tier and “micro” influencers can be much cheaper or even free in some cases. 

Many industries have already figured this out, and you have plenty of case studies of both incumbent and challenger brands in CPG, retail, hospitality, and plenty of other verticals driving hyper-growth with influencer marketing. GymShark built most of their business in the UK on the back of early YouTube and then Instagram influencers. Glossier has built a $1B business by leveraging influencers as advocates, mostly in the US. 

The opportunity that influencer marketing presents is industry agnostic because it’s built on human and economic truths, not industry-specific ones. Underpriced attention coupled with a strong brand/product offering will drive growth. The way you need to execute an influencer marketing strategy or campaign might be different based on the industry you’re in or the business you are, but the fundamentals are the same. 

Take financial services - very few fintech, not to mention traditional banks, insurance companies, etc are maximing the potential of influencer marketing. Sure, some of this has to do with regulation and risk appetite, but if that were the only factor there wouldn’t be any success stories of influencer marketing in FS. Check out this case study on how Cash App grew 60% YoY with influencer marketing. It’s amazing how under-valued influencer marketing still is, especially in the financial services world. The attention is incredibly underpriced if you have a smart campaign, something of value to offer, and a strong product to back it up. Look how this CAC math stacks up: 

Based on research done by Ark Invest, retail banks are spending between $350 and $1,500, which converts to an average of $925 per new customer acquired. If Cash App is to spend the same rate of $925 per new customer, with a $10,000 giveaway budget, they would only gain an underwhelming total of ten new customers. However, since Cash App is adopting a viral marketing strategy, they are reaching a conservative estimate of 50,000 unique Twitter users per post. Even if only 1% of the 50,000 users are new to Cash App, that converts to 500 new users. Hence, with $10,000, Cash App would be able to gain at least 500 new users at the rate of $20 per customer acquired.

There is a huge opportunity for any businesses to tap into influencer marketing as a viable, effective, and efficient channel to drive growth. Now, the execution matters more than the idea, meaning you need to do it the right way. You need to be aware of the regulations, choose the right influencers, manage them the right way, and deliver the right message. But if you can do that well, it will work. And because the industry is behind the curve on this opportunity, there’s even more underpriced attention to tap into. If Cash App ran the same campaign even two years from now it would not deliver the same results. The landscape and pools of attention are constantly changing and challengers like Block are excellent at finding and tapping into them. 

Most businesses are doing some kind of influencer marketing at this point, but few are maximising its potential as an awareness, acquisition, and advocacy channel. Challenger businesses don’t just find the underpriced attention, they double, triple and quadruple down when they do find it to maximise the business results it can drive before their competition gets there. 

Every business should have a strong earned media strategy that maps the pools of attention of their audience and analyses where it’s over and underpriced. The specific tactics will differ (maybe traditional PR is a good move for you), but chances are, especially if you are a financial services brand, influencer marketing holds a big opportunity for you that you haven’t fully tapped into yet. 

Challengers in Action 

??L’Oreal’s Garnier Fructis is doubling down on esports by re-upping and expanding their partnership with Team Vitality, a leading esports organisation. This is a great example of an incumbent brand thinking and acting like a challenger, chasing some of that underpriced attention from the nearly 3B active gamers who will be online by 2023, including 80% of Gen Z. If you’re not up on the stats of just how massive esports is…go check it out. 

??There seems to be a lot of challenger activity in the sunscreen space these days…(or maybe it’s just summer so they’re getting more media coverage?) We highlighted Vacation and their fantastic 1980s retro vibes in a recent edition, and now Edgewell, one of the big incumbents in the space has launched Fieldtrip. There’s not much out there yet on the marketing strategy, but it’s clear that natural ingredients and ESG are a big part of the brand strategy, which is pretty much a prerequisite for any CPG challenger brand launching in 2022. 

?? We’ve talked before about how we’re not huge fans of the ‘innovation center’ model within big orgs (shouldn’t innovation be everyone’s job?), but sometimes it does do good things (or at least gets good press). Here’s an interesting look into how Pepsico has been using “data science” *said with Dr Evil air quotes* to get new products to market sooner. 

 Grab Bag 

?? One forecast is predicting a 9.2% growth in global ad revenue by the end of 2022. Recession? What recession? 

?? Influencers are charging more for their services! But what actually is the ROI on influencer marketing? Check out this deep dive from last year by Influencer Marketing Hub who, admittedly, may be a bit biased. Oh, also, Kim Garcia, CMO of influencer martech platform, Tagger, had a thing or two to say about this on last week’s Punchy - make sure you're subscribed to hear the episode when it drops tomorrow!

??? If you’ve been following the NFT and Web3 space (and doing your 15 mins a day like we told you too!!!) you’ll have heard of NBA Top Shot, one of the early success stories for branded NFTs that helped crack open the market last year. If you didn’t hear about them then, you probably haven’t heard about them now because things have been relatively quiet from the NBA on the NFT front recently. What happened? The Verge has a great deep dive into things behind the scenes. (Also, we have the GM of NBA Top Shot coming on Scratch in a few weeks. #nbd #humblebrag)

Rival this Week

???And we’re back with an awesome conversation with Anna Griffin, CMO of Intercom. Anna has a ton of experience and advice to share from working with some of the biggest brands in enterprise tech. 

Some of the highlights for us: 

?? How she sees the role of the CMO in challenging the status quo 

?? How to work with sales, commercial, and exec teams to invest properly in brand-led growth as a B2B business 

?? How to position yourself for a CMO role in the future as the nature of the role and our industry evolves

Listen 

Watch 

Challenge of the Week

? Who has the attention of your audience and how can you be doing more to tap into it? (I.e. how can you scale up your influencer marketing?)