Do You Have an Influencer Marketing Strategy?

Okay, everybody. Tom Augenthaler here. Influencer marketer, consultant, strategist. Wanted to chat with you today about influencer marketing and setting a strategy and just how, how important that is. So I'm going to share my screen with you so that we can walk through the conversation in a little bit more of a structured format. I wanted to sort of do this as a little mini webinar. Because I think that sometimes that's just a little bit more productive for everybody. Okay, so look, what's your influencer strategy? We're in 2018 now. Influencer marketing has grown up a lot, continues to grow up. But what is your influencer strategy? How are you planning on using influencers to reach your goal or goals, whatever, whatever they happen to be? I'm going to walk through a little bit about this, why it's important. I'm also going to show you some survey findings from a company called Clear, which I've been doing a little co-marketing with, and I have a lot of respect for those guys. So with that said, who is this for? Well, this is for— this little webinar is for brand managers, if you're an online marketer, social media agencies, If you're a freelancer, you're a consultant, you're an entrepreneur, you're a Fortune 500 company, even Fortune 10 company, doesn't really matter, small business owner. It's for everybody under the sun who's doing any kind of marketing, doing any kind of advertising, and is looking at doing something with influencers. So what is this for? Well, this is for anyone marketing health supplements, fitness products, info products, technology products, gadgets, apps, clothing, beauty, or if you're not really necessarily marketing some particular products at this point, you want to engage valuable audiences for your brand and to build awareness around your products and services. So this, this little tutorial here is for, for all of the above. So for me, Influencer marketing is probably the number one shift that enabled me to really market products more effectively without traditional advertising or public relations. And I come from a public relations background. I did public relations for many years, worked inside the agency environment. I worked inside the corporate environment too. So I'm very familiar with how both sides of that fence operate. But the proof for me in working with influencers was when I got assigned a product by management when I was still at the technology company, and they said to me, look, this product's been sitting out there on store shelves. Upper management wants something done about it. We got to move it. We've got to gin up some kind of excitement about it. The problem is, from a public relations standpoint, if a product's been out there, it's already been announced, and it's sitting out there for 3, 6 months and it's just not generating any real interest or sales, well, it's hard to do anything around that. So what I did was I got together with a couple of other people and we brainstormed an idea because we'd already been working with influencers a bit, but we decided to really blow it out and do a major influencer marketing program to rehabilitate this product. So like I said, the product was stale, sat on store shelves for a about 6 months, maybe it was even more than that. And we ended up selling thousands of units and we did a sales boost of over 84% within 45 days. And that equates to millions of dollars. But my influencer marketing background goes beyond even that. I marketed B2B brands for many years by reaching out to valuable audiences and embracing their marketing cycles, their sales cycles, and driving conversations throughout the totality of those cycles that are beneficial to the customers, beneficial to the clients, and even beneficial to the influencers. So your approach, your strategy really matters depending upon what you're doing and where you want to go. So the other thing I want to convey to you is that Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs are doing this every single day. And I'll get into a little bit about how they're doing that. So I'm making an assumption that a lot of you know me, whether it's here on LinkedIn or whether it's on— through my blog website or through Facebook. But let me tell you a little bit about what I've done and what I'm up to now so that you can kind of get what I'm about. Who am I? My name is Tom Augenthaler and I am a family man. I'm a father of a 14-year-old son. I'm a writer for Social Media Examiner. I'm an influencer marketer since around 2008 when the light bulb went on in my head and I could see just how powerful leveraging online influencers really can be. And I'm a consultant. I help big brands, I help small brands, I help entrepreneurs, I help small business owners. It doesn't really matter. I can work with just about anybody and help them through their influencer marketing sticking points, help them set a strategy, and help them get to where they want to go. But I'm also a martial artist of sorts. I'm not going to get into that now because many of you would think it's kind of a weird martial art. It is a little bit, a little bit different. But anyway, I like to do a lot of outdoorsy stuff too. You can see down here in this photo Um, here I am with my buddy Jeff, and, uh, we did this sort of survivalist expedition course out in Utah a few years back where we pretty much learned how to live on nothing. It was really great, but one of the best parts about it was just being outside all the time and being completely disconnected from the internet or the iPhone or whatever it was. Um, and over here, I'm— here you can see me with my, my buddy John Ambetto in the middle. John's a— an influencer, somebody I've— I I know and respect. I've worked with him for many years. We've done a lot of great work together on different projects, and he's just a super dude. So, so this just kind of shows, you know, I really, really enjoy the people in this industry, and it's one of the things that brings me the most joy. Okay, so look, let's talk a little bit about the state of influencer marketing. And like I said, Clear is the provider of these information here. They conducted a survey. I found the survey results to be rather interesting, so I'm going to touch upon some of the highlights here. And one thing I want to make clear is that— clear about clear? No, one thing I want to make perfectly clear is that this survey was really conducted around Instagram. So Instagram as a platform, I see Instagram as sort of a platform that acts as a barometer if you will, for influencer marketing. A lot of activities done around it these days. So let's dive into that a little bit because I think some of the results are kind of interesting. The first chart here is just the number, the volume of hashtag ad posts on Instagram in 2017. You can see that these have just been going up, not quite exponentially, but just growing consistently. So something that Philip Brown and I call influencer advertising is growing by leaps and bounds on Instagram, but influencer marketing is also growing a lot on Instagram too. The volume of the ad posts, you can see here blue represents 2016, red represents 2017, so it's just really blown the doors off, and in 2018 and 2019 I think you're going to see even greater growth. Getting down into brands, focusing on micro-influencers, the shares of posts in the hashtag ad market, you know, the number of likes these things are getting between 10 and 100 we're seeing is the greatest number. But all this really, I included this here because I wanted you to see that These posts that are technically ads, that are sponsored content, are really doing rather well. And some of this depends upon the size of the account, of course. Some, you know, the larger the account, the lower the engagement, all that kind of stuff. But I just, just for general purposes, I want to show that micro-influencers are a big deal. You can find many, many of them on Instagram. Actually, Instagram is just filled with them. And there's a lot of opportunity there. So influencer partnerships, top 10 industries. This was probably one of the most interesting slides in Yuval's deck there at Clear, this whole survey. I thought it was really interesting. The first one being fashion and accessories, number 1, that did not surprise me. But I was kind of interested to find out that tech was at number 9 and automotive was at number 4, for instance. And that travel was number 6. I would have thought travel would have been number 3 or 4. But anyway, the findings are just really interesting. It shows you the top 10 industries here that are involved in this. This is by no means all of the industries that are getting involved with influencer marketing and influencer marketing on Instagram, but it does give you an indication of where things are at, and it shows you this tremendous, tremendous opportunity. So let's just talk a little bit about strategy. What is your strategy? Your strategy is how you're going to get to the goal that you've set for yourself, whether you're a Fortune 500, Fortune 10, small-medium business, an entrepreneur, doesn't matter. You've got goals. The strategy is how you're going to get there. Now, if you're going to work with influencers, setting a strategy is very, very beneficial. to do, because how else are you going to measure how well you're doing in terms of getting to your goals? So knowing what your strategy is, is a key factor. And this is something that I've always worked with my clients very carefully on. Sit down, talk about what it is that you want to do, where do you want to go, and how are we going to get there using influencers? One other thing I want to stress here is if you're a big company or big brand, You should be looking at influencer marketing in terms of how it fits in with the rest of your marketing. So if you're doing traditional marketing, I'm sure you are. If you're doing some advertising, you're doing PR, where is influencer marketing going to fit within that, that matrix, if you want to call it that? And it should fit nicely and holistically in so that it complements everything else that you're doing. The important thing to know about influencer marketing is you don't necessarily want to measure it like public relations or advertising because the 2 things are quite different. So influencers, remember, are not bots. They're people. So there's sort of an art as well as a science to working with them. So when you're setting your strategy, you want to build all of those— that kind of thinking into it. You want to bake it in. So, okay. So are you doing smash-and-grab influencer advertising? That's what a lot, a lot of the activity is on Instagram. That's not a bad thing necessarily. It just is what it is. And it's happening because it works. I deal with a lot of people on the Facebook platform who are doing a lot of affiliate marketing. They put together a sales funnel. They've got an affiliate product that they want to market through that funnel, and they hit up advertise— excuse me, they hit up influencers to help them advertise the link to the funnel, driving traffic through it. And then, you know, of course there's a percentage of sales that result of that. So they are able to make money. But it's very important to know that just doing shoutouts like that, even little ads in the bio, even video ads, that's just it. It's advertising. You're advertising on somebody's little publication because every Instagram account, think of it as a little publication. That's what you're doing there. Now, a lot of that is very short-term in thinking. It requires just reaching out, making an arrangement, and making a payment, and boom, you've got the link there and you're starting to drive some traffic through, hopefully. If you really want to do influencer marketing, you've got to think of it in terms of building relationships with these influencers and not just buying them so that they're suddenly your brand advocates, but really building a relationship with them, understanding what they want to do with their brand, what you want to do with your brand, and then meeting in the middle and doing something that is beneficial to both sides. That's what it means to build relationships, and that's what it means to really build a robust strategy. So like I said, are you thinking short-term smash and grab? Are you thinking longer-term, I want to build something here that's really going to support my brand, going to support my product line, it's going to continue to generate awareness and it's going to get me in front of those valuable audiences that I want to be in front of, my target customers, you know, for the long term? So you've got to know your goals in order to set your course. But then when you set your course, you've got to stick to your course and you've got to really kind of make it work for yourself. So there's a lot that goes into that. Like I was saying, very important that you know where you want to go so you can set your strategy to get there. Okay, so I hope that this kind of helped you guys. You got any questions, you know, let me know. The way to reach me is through my website, theinfluencemarketer.com. You can reach me through my Facebook group, The Influencer Marketing for Badasses. It's free. Or you can hit me up on LinkedIn or through Facebook, whatever you want. I'm available for consultation. I can help you with all sorts of things regarding strategy and implementation. So please don't, don't be shy. Hit me up. Thank you.