Brands pay more than 10x what they would pay to reach the same number of people in traditional or digital media buy

In a Forbes article it states: “In today’s market, many influencers are convincing brands to pay more than 10 times what we’d pay to reach the same number of people in a traditional or digital media buy.”
We don’t believe you should directly compare influencer marketing spend to a traditional or digital media buy, the top two reasons being:

1. When you work with influencers you are not simply buying reach, you are asking an individual to solve a creative problem for your brand and asking them to produce and distribute content. In most cases, all content produced comes with licensing rights, which is hugely valuable.
2. Reach is not just reach. Instagram influencers accumulate their followers from submitting hundreds or thousands of posts and know better than anyone what works for that specific subset of Instagram users. When you sponsor the same image to 10 million users on Facebook you can easily match the reach of an influencer marketing campaign, but you’ll never get the same engagement or ad-recall.

46% of marketers believe influencer marketing should be part of their marketing plan, however only 19% have budget for it

With brands continuing to drive efficiencies with their marketing budget, they will look to different sources for creative content. Influencers are the gateway to creativity. Making a huge pool of smaller creators available to marketers is a powerful thing. The authentic tone, creativity and visuals make for fantastic marketing collateral. It also often results in more creative content than would otherwise be produced. Combine this with a low CPE (when compared to social advertising) and it’s clear to see why marketers will take more interest. The quality content creatives provide a great deal of supply to the market of content.

Traditionally, you’d have to pay for content to be created by a creative agency and distributed by a media agency. Now, you really get two for the price of one. Over the next few years, we are confident that influencer marketing will become a $10billion industry and the budget will gradually increase. We see influencer marketing growing and it will become a bigger part of the marketing mix.

The pressure to launch an influencer campaign often means that campaigns have loose metrics. Influencer matching continues to be a huge challenge for marketers. No tool has been able to solve the matching problem

This above mentions two separate points:

• a) Pressure to launch campaigns results in loose metrics
• b) Matching brands with influencers is a challenge no one has solved

a) As with everything, if done under pressure without adequate planning you’ll get sub-par results. That does not only apply to influencer marketing campaigns. Takumi has run c. 2,000 campaigns for global and local brands alike and each one has been run with a clear goal, whether that’s related to content production, reach, engagement or tracking direct business goals like sign-ups or sales.

b) We’ve seen a few approaches when it comes to matching and some definitely work. Two key risk factors here are that you are getting the wrong person with the wrong audience, and secondly that you are simply getting a fake audience. Platforms do a good job of minimizing each risk. They have processes and tools in place to onboard only the top influencers with real audience and engagements. At Takumi, we only accept 7% of applications, and regularly review all profiles. Furthermore, we have recently adopted a new three-step matching process where 1) a targeted group of influencers see campaign opportunities, 2) influencers express interest if they align with that brand or product, and 3) Takumi works with the brand to select the final list of campaign participants.

Nine of out ten influencers say they must already like a brand to accept its sponsorship, and that brand affinity matters more than money. Big Problem: brand affinity doesn’t pay the bills

A genuine endorsement is key for an influencer. As consumers become savvier to influencer marketing, influencers who accept sponsorships which aren’t authentic to them will only erode the trust of their followers. Additionally, followers won’t trust an influencer who posts about products or services that are not relevant to their channel or content. Influencers need to stay authentic to their audience and show to their following a true emotive human story — therefore brand affinity is key to the success of an influencer

71% of influencers’ income is almost exclusively from sponsored content, versus more traditional ad streams like display ads, affiliate links and e-commerce. If you want to make money, you have to partner with big brands

Influencers don’t need to partner with big brands in order to make money. Brands are harnessing influencers to power their advertisements across paid social, commercials, and even billboards, to great measured success and this is providing an extra avenue of income for the influencers. This type of content typically outperforms brand or agency-created content on social.

Secondly, as the industry continues to mature, brands/agencies will be seeking long-term partnerships with influencers, to create brand ambassadors. These sustainable long-term partnerships naturally yield better, more organic content and opportunities for the influencer in the long run.

Bad matching = more brand control = fake posts. 80% of influencers say they are deterred to work with brands that control their content too much. Influencers want to create their own brand, not mirror someone else’s brand

This all comes down to alignment between the brand and the influencer. Brands need to understand that the influencers know best with what resonates with their followers. Something we learned early on is that the more open you leave campaign briefs, the better results you get. Writing campaign briefs is almost an art in itself. You want to provide the influencer with a canvas that ensures they relay a certain message for the brand, but in their own style and voice. If you miss this point, you might just as well be sponsoring your ad on Instagram — the reach is cheaper :-)

Consumers are tired of seeing fake posts — Fake posts = low engagement from consumers. What is an above average engagement rate for an influencer post? 4%!! So, what do consumers really want?

It’s true no one likes a bad influencer/brand partnership, we’ve all seen when this goes horribly wrong. But again, this can be avoided by ensuring you have the right people working with the right brands, and you give the influencers enough freedom to be creative.
When done right brands realise they get much higher engagement rates when working with influencers vs what they get on their own channels, and that comes from the strong relationship influencers have with their followers. What we’ve also seen is that the content influencers produce often achieves higher engagement rates than what brands produce internally or via their agencies. At Takumi, we’ve done several A/B tests where we run digital ads powered by influencer content vs traditional content and every single time the influencer content performs better. And we believe that through trial and error influencers have found what type of content people engage with.

Consumers are almost twice as likely to consider a product recommended from a friend rather than an influencer. 61% say they’d be more likely to research a product or service recommended on social by a friend versus only 36% for influencers

Consumers tend to use social channels to learn about a brand and for inspiration — using influencer content as the source. In our whitepaper research — The Takumi Influencer Index (released Sep 2018 with YouGov, polled over 500 online Instagram users) found that a quarter of Instagram users in Britain have made a purchase because of the social network, either buying directly from the app or in-store at a later date. It found that purchase behaviour is significantly higher among 18–35s, with 32 percent having bought a product or service they’ve seen on the platform.
We know that sometimes a purchase might not be immediate, but influencer content can contribute to the purchasing decision and with the recommendation from a friend this adds to the final decision.

N.B. The points raised in this article were referenced in a Tweet discussing the model of influencer marketing and its flaws.