Tom Augenthaler argues COVID lockdowns created a captive audience hungry for content, benefiting influencers offering quality material and escapism. He sees B2B influencers helping professionals navigate economic turbulence and consumer influencers thriving with lifestyle content. Brands should shift disrupted 2020 budgets toward digital and influencer strategies.
Hey everybody, welcome to this next episode of Influence Unpacked. I'm your host, Tom Augenthaler, and it's been a little while since I've done my last video. And even with this coronavirus lockdown thing, I've been taking a lot of time to observe, think, and ponder the situation, and especially in regards to influencers and influencer marketing and where I see things going from here and how it's going to play out. And honestly, I think that the time has never been better for influencers in a couple of different ways. And one is that since everybody is now a captive audience around the entire globe, they have really no choice but to seek out content. And I know that more content than ever is being created, but the question is, is that content of quality or not? Now, the influencers for the most part are pretty used to creating quality content, and there's a couple of different reasons why influencers are being watched, viewed, read, probably more than ever now than it was before the lockdown. And the reason is that People are looking for 2 different things. One, they're looking to make sense of the world as it stands now. So whether in terms of their career employment, you know, where the economy's going, business issues like supply chain procurement, airline industry, all these types of things— everything's in a bit of turmoil right now. So people are looking to make sense of the world. Influencers, especially on the B2B side of things, are looking to help people out with that, and they're doing it. On the consumer side, they're also doing this too. They're trying to help people make sense of the self-quarantine lifestyle and how they can adjust to it by sharing what their own— what they're doing with their own selves and their own family to help people out. The other thing is that people are also craving some kind of normalcy. So they are looking for content that they can kind of escape to, and influencers are one of those avenues. They create content about— a lot of it is aspirational. A lot of consumer influencers will post about, publish information about places they're going, places they've been, places to visit in the world. Things they're doing that are interesting and exciting, and I think a lot of people are glomming onto that and catching on to it. So I see the influencers using this opportunity to really grow their audiences more than ever. Now, how that plays out once we start getting quote-unquote back to normal, we'll see. But if you're a company or brand and you're looking to start working with influencers, probably right now is a great time to be doing that dipping your toe in the water because the traditional marketing that you've been planning on doing for 2020 is obviously disrupted. So you can pull back some of that budget and you can put it towards more of a digital marketing, digital marketing strategy. And influencers are certainly part of digital marketing. So that is what I see happening now. I'm very positive on everything so far regarding digital marketing, influencer marketing. I think that with more people piling into it now, both on the influencer side and the brand side, I think that it's going to get better in terms of metrics as well. That's already been improving over time as I've described in some previous videos here. I see that doubling down now. One of the things I've talked about recently also is the virtual events. Because physical events can't be run right now or can't be held because of the coronavirus and the risk of infection, all events are now being run virtually. So that really opens up a new opportunity in terms of how are we going to do that? How are we going to do something rather than just presenting some information over the internet? How are we going to do it in such a way that it's much more interactive? Because the beautiful thing about physical events is that interactivity, right? There's nothing really like sitting down with somebody and having dinner or a cup of coffee, chatting even for 15 or 20 minutes to get to know them. And then, you know, of course, great things can come of that, whether it's partnerships, purchases, whatever, just content, you know, sharing, whatever, whatever, whatever it happens to be. New relationships can easily and quickly be formed that way. So how do we replicate that in the virtual sense? So that's going to be really interesting to Watch and see. So anyway, let me know what you think, and I will talk to you soon. Bye.
