Kamiu Lee on Influencer Marketing Fallacies, Opportunities and Value

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to bring you the newest of our speaker interviews — one with Kamiu Lee of Bloglovin’.

She was kind enough to answer a few my questions, leading up to her Influencer Marketing Days 2016 panel on The Innovation Shift to Empower Emerging Influencers & Brands.

Question: What’s the biggest misconception you’ve seen brands have about influencer marketing?

Kamiu: There are two key misconceptions that come up again and again with brands as they consider influencer marketing — (1) understanding the overall cost of influencer marketing and (2) the full value that comes from incorporating influencer marketing in their overall marketing strategy.

1. The full cost of influencer marketing
   With regards to the cost of influencer marketing, brands may find that on one hand, the hard costs of activating influencers when you look beyond the mega-influencers are actually much lower than one might expect; but on the other hand, they also typically overlook the additional costs that come with managing these influencer relationships: from influencer identification to activation to campaign management to reporting, a hefty amount of work goes into ensuring success when it comes to influencer marketing.
2. The full value of influencer marketing
   Many brands tend to think of influencer marketing as an extension of their social media marketing, and in many respects it is–as much of the content typically lives on various social media channels. But most do not consider the full value when they question why influencer marketing costs so much more than paid social media marketing. Engaging influencers means brands get (1) the model, writer and photographer all in one person, along with built-in distribution, (2) original content, and with it the brand’s ability to re-purpose and re-use the content and further amplify on the brand’s own channels, (3) evergreen and SEO-friendly content that can bring ongoing value long after the campaign is over, and (4) tap into niche, engaged audiences that can be difficult to reach with traditional paid media.

Certainly there is still a lot of confusion when it comes to influencer marketing. As the industry continues to mature, we are excited to work with initiatives and organizations like IMD to bring more transparency into the marketplace–to both brands and to influencers.

Question: What top 3 mistakes should advertisers be aware of as they look into getting their feet wet in/with influencer marketing?

1. Choosing influencers based on reach
Advertisers that are new to influencer marketing tend to gravitate towards mega-influencers, and understandably so. These influencers are typically savvier when it comes to working with brands, they have case studies, they have rate cards, and they have agents dedicated to managing the back and forth with brand partners. The thought of all the work in identifying and coordinating a large set of less-experienced micro-influencers is unappealing to an advertiser that is looking to dip their toes into influencer marketing.

But beyond potentially paying a large premium for mega-influencers, brands that choose influencers based mostly on reach numbers also risk paying for influencers that are ‘over-sponsored’ (whose every other post is branded, thereby diluting their connection with their audience), have celebrity-like followings (their audience may be following them because others follow them, not because they engage particularly well with their content), and may be less excited/willing to really create incredible content for the brand (they are churning through so many campaigns).

2. Overly controlled brand messaging
Brands are often (understandably) uncomfortable about leaving the fate of their brand messaging in the hands of influencers, and end up micro-managing influencers and the content creation process — resulting in content that feels overly ‘sponsored’ and less than engaging — defeating the purpose of engaging influencers in the first place! Advertisers should work hard to identify the right set of influencers that they believe will represent their brand well, and then place their trust in the influencers to create great content that will engage their audience.

3. KPIs and measurement
Like any other marketing channel, advertisers should have goals and KPIs set at the onset of an influencer marketing campaign, and follow it through with proper management and reporting. Without a way to measure success, brands can come away from a campaign without a clear idea of whether or not they are actually happy with the results. With the number of tools that are available now with regards to tracking and measuring influencer marketing campaigns, brands would be remiss if they did not properly allocate resources in this area before launching a campaign.

Question: What is the biggest overlooked influencer marketing opportunity, in your opinion?

Kamiu: Micro-Influencers! We are talking about influencers with less than 100K in aggregate reach (across blog and all social channels). I cover this a bit in the prior question ‘Top 3 Mistakes Advertisers Make…” — its hard to identify the right set of micro-influencers for your brand, and even harder to identify enough of them so that you can achieve adequate reach in aggregate. And frankly, it can be a lot more work, these emerging influencers are generally less well-versed in the demands from working with brands and may not have as many examples of previous branded work.

But there is certainly a fair amount of opportunity in working with micro-influencers. We recently took a closer look at the opportunity here by running our own micro-influencer campaign: we engaged 25 micro-influencers to create content on Instagram, and found that we were able to achieve just as much, if not more, reach and engagement at a fraction of the cost of engaging 1 mega-influencer

Question: If you were to leave brands with one piece of influencer marketing advice, what would it be?

Kamiu: We are seeing savvier brands fully integrate influencer marketing in their broader marketing strategy, and not treat it as a one-off PR or Social Media initiative. To fully capitalize on the value you can reap from influencer marketing, brands should consider how it can work best with their other paid media initiatives—we have seen brands take successful pieces of influencer content and repurpose in other advertising efforts, leverage influencers to grow their own social media following, drive to in-store/in-person events and coordinate influencer marketing to bring a ‘word-of-mouth’ element to larger media campaigns.