Alongside staples like content, social media, and email marketing, influencers became an integral a part of brands’ marketing mix. Our recent research revealed that 71% of companies currently use influencer marketing or have used it within the past. What’s more, 42% of companies cite influencer marketing together of their primary channels.
This demonstrates that influencer marketing has become a mainstay within the overwhelming majority of companies across virtually every sector. However, despite being a long-time a part of our marketing mix the view from senior marketers is that influencers remain an activation, as against an overarching strategy. Just 32% of companies feel that influencers should be considered at the strategic marketing phase. Instead, 48% think influencer marketing should inherit the image much further down the road at the content creation stage.
Baffling
Influencer marketing’s exclusion at the strategic level seems even further baffling when the overwhelming majority of marketers see huge growth potential within the channel. More than three-quarters (76%) of marketers agree that the channel will become more important over subsequent three years. The growing investment in influencer marketing is in no small part thanks to the channel’s ability to assist address a number of the large questions facing businesses during a post COVID world. The pandemic has greatly accelerated brands’ shift towards the digital marketplace. But, while adopting a digital-first approach offers huge potential rewards, it also presents immediate challenges. But, the fastly evolving digital space gives these questions a totally different paradigm.
Compounding this, as further data privacy regulations roll out alongside the demise of third-party cookies and therefore the launch of iOS 14.5, traditional marketing tactics will become prohibitively costly where they even remain possible. While this move to a privacy-first mentality is essentially a victory for consumers, it’ll leave many digital marketers scrambling to seek out substitutes for strategies that have historically relied on users’ behavioural data.
And this is often where influencer marketing comes into the image . With audiences naturally segmented by the merit of the influencers they like to follow, brands with an in-depth influencer strategy can circumvent limitations on behavioural tracking.
Tricky question
What often keeps influencer marketing out of the board room seems to be the tricky question of return on investment (ROI). Firstly, it’s worth noting that accurate ROI data is integral to senior decision-makers – if we can’t measure our results accurately, then we’ll never understand what success looks like.
Influencer marketing are often a very hard channel to read. This is because more than 70% of the effect is generated via other channels such as organic search, direct traffic, and paid search – understanding these synergies is the key to measuring ROI from influencers correctly. Like content marketing, influencers play a crucial role in passively creating traction above within the funnel by starting an idea process which will eventually cause a sale . However, from an ROI perspective, the result’s often recorded as a win for other channels (SEO, SEM, etc.) which will pull within the customer via the inevitable google search immediately before the purchase takes place.
The most efficient thanks to achieve this is often by taking a more holistic approach to our marketing mix and never measuring success channel by channel or keeping leads to silos. There are many things to think about when measuring ROI in marketing and this is often an equivalent in influencer marketing as in the other channel. But, once we solve this missing piece, influencer marketing can become even more impactful not just to our marketing mix, but to our commercial goals.
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