THE RISE OF INFLUENCERS & THE DECLINE OF YOUR BRAND

Over the past 20 years the tactics available to brands to raise awareness, drive sales, build their credibility, their reputation and build a community of raving fans has expanded beyond all recognition.

Without showing my age 😂, when I got my first job at a PR Agency in the early 2000s, ‘The Media’ included print, TV and Radio. Marketing and Advertising were two very different functions. Social Media didn’t even exist!!

In fact, I remember when I set up my Facebook account. It was in 2007 and I was heading off to Zakynthos for six months to be a holiday rep. I only set up the account because my workmates wanted me to keep them up to date with my shenanigans.

(One of my fellow reps signed me up to MySpace at some point during the summer, but let’s not go there!! I’m not sure if MySpace even exists anymore??)

 

CH-CH-CHANGES

Fast-forward to 2024 and the Comms landscape has experienced exponential growth. You’ll notice that I’m using the term ‘comms’ very loosely here because I genuinely don’t know how else to refer to PR, Marketing, Social Media and Advertising in the same sentence. The point being, with so many different tactics available to drive your business forward, how do you know what to focus on first?

In this blog I’m going to focus specifically on Influencer Marketing as this is an area that has gained a lot of attention and a lot of momentum in recent years, especially on TikTok.

Is that a good thing? I’ll let you be the judge of that….

 

INFLUENCERS VS AMBASSADORS

Influencers aren’t a new phenomenon and influencer marketing isn’t a new concept. When I worked at my previous PR Agency we often worked with celebrities as ambassadors for our clients, so perhaps the term ‘influencer’ is a more modern version of ambassador. Perhaps the term ‘ambassador’ gives off the vibe that that person ‘belongs’ to the brand they’re representing, whereas an ‘influencer’ can work with multiple brands, so long as the ethos aligns.

Interestingly, consumer trust in celebrity endorsements has actually declined in recent years. In an article written by Richard Carufel at Agility PR Solutions, research carried out by casino.org showed that 60.7% of the 3000 people surveyed said they trust brands less when they use celebrity endorsements, with 81% saying they believe celebrity brand deals lack credibility.

Yet it’s a completely different story when it comes to TV advertising, where 25-30% of adverts feature celebrities, due to their credibility.

From the perspective of using ‘influential people’ to promote a product or service on social media, the decline in trust in celebrities shows that consumers are wising up to the fact that brands are paying to work with celebrities who may only be endorsing their products because they’ve been paid to do so (if anyone has actually seen Jamie Redknapp wearing Skechers trainers, let me know!)

So, if trust in celeb endorsements is at an all-time low, it means there’s a gap in the market for authenticity, and where better to get authenticity than from people who actually use your products or services?

 

💣 TIK-TIK-BOOM! 💣

As a consumer, I didn’t start using TikTok until the end of 2022/early 2023. From what I can see, the rise in popularity of TikTok coincided with the 2019 Global Pandemic, when people had the time to spend hours consuming content to break up the monotony of everyday life.

Brands noticed that their customers were spending more time online and saw it as an opportunity to invest more time, effort, creativity and money into being in front of them. 

Luckily for brands, in 2019 TikTok allowed creators to embed merchandise sales links into their videos, giving creators the opportunity to make a sale directly from their videos, rather than directing people to the link in their bio to visit a website or ecommerce store.

 

KICK-BACKS

All of a sudden, content creators were able to make money online through their video content. Individuals were able to grow an audience and make sales without a huge marketing budget. Consumers felt like they knew the creators because of the content they were posting, which meant that they also built trust. As you know, trust is the #1 currency when it comes to business growth, whichever platforms you’re using.

It made sense for brands to start working with creators who had already done the hard work of building an audience of loyal fans before they became loyal customers. The big budgets that brands had set aside for celebrities could be invested in multiple, lesser-known creators instead, that would have a huge impact on their ROI.

Over time, a lot of these early influencers realised that they too were a commodity and could become even more commercialised. If brands were making money from their content, they wanted a bigger slice of the pie and demanded bigger fees. In essence, brands had created a monster and realised that these influencers were becoming just as expensive as celebrities  to work with.

However, the bubble didn’t burst. It simply meant that brands started to look at micro influencers – those with between 10,000 – 100,000 followers. Once again, their influencer budget could go much further with these creators, continuing to infiltrate their audiences and extend their reach even further.

Anyone with an audience between 1,000 – 10,000 is considered a nano influencer, which is where you often see content creators becoming an affiliate for brands in exchange for commission earned on every product they sell.

 

THE STATE OF PLAY

 

When working with influencers, it’s important to know how you’re going to measure the outcomes of working with them. To decide on the outcomes, you need to know why you’re partnering with them in the first place:

❓ Is it to raise brand awareness?

❓ Is it to drive traffic into your website to capture them as leads?

❓ Is it to drive sales of specific products or services?

 

Whichever one it may be, how will you measure their effectiveness? Is it based on engagement on each of their brand posts? Is it based on the data provided by Google Analytics so you can track link clicks and page views? Or is it the volume of sales?

Even more important is partnering with the right influencer in the first place. To determine this, you need to decide why you’re working with them specifically:

➡️ Are you working with them based on their follower count and volume of engagement?

➡️ Are you working with them based on the demographic of their audience?

➡️ Are you working with them based on their mission, ethos and values matching the mission, ethos and values of your brand?

In an ideal world it would be a mixture of all three, yet I’m going to make a bold claim and suggest that mission, ethos and values come way down your priority list, preferring to focus on their audience size and demographic over and above everything else.

And that is why working with influencers will contribute to the decline of your business. 

You may not feel the effects straight away, but you will over time. As consumers become more savvy (which they already are by the way), their trust in influencers will go the same way that celebrities did a few years ago. The only difference is that celebrities know how to stay relevant.

It’s very rare for actors or musicians to pack it all in to do something else, unless they retire, but they still tend to stay in the spotlight due to philanthropic projects.

So, if every Tom, Dick & Harry now has the ability to become an influencer, who do you know who to align your brand with?

 

MY RECOMMENDATIONS 

 

Here are the non-negotiables that I always recommend to my clients before they embark on partnering with influencers as part of their marketing strategy:

✅ Does the influencer align to the mission, ethos and values of your brand? 

By auditing their social media content, you should be able to see what their values are.

• Are they collaborating with other brands?
• Are those brands your competitors or are they working in a similar space?
• What topics are they talking about
• What tone and language do they use with their audience?

The key here is to do your due diligence. Don’t check back on their last few months, scroll back several years. The worst PR disasters happen when skeletons come out of the closet.

✅ Is the influencer someone who would naturally use your product or service?

There’s no point collaborating with a 30-year old influencer if you’re promoting wellness products and services for women over 50 (unless of course you want to educate women about hormone changes and the signs to look for before the reach the natural age of menopause or perimenopause, as an example)

In which case, scroll back to the top of this post and reassess what you want the influencer to do and how you’ll measure their performance

Consumers build trust in people they look up to, admire or have been following for a while. If there’s a disconnect between your brand and the person promoting it, sales will suffer, your credibility will suffer and ultimately, your reputation will suffer

✅ Who’s in their audience? 

It’s important to work with influencers who have already created an audience that’s full of your ideal customers and clients, otherwise you may as well just set fire to money and watch it burn. If in doubt, see point #2 above.

 

✅ Are their posts actually delivering results?

Last year I was having a conversation with one of my clients, who just so happens to be a content creator who teaches business owners how to create content that converts into cash. She was telling me about an influencer who had built an audience of 36,000 people, but didn’t sell one item from her clothing line when she launched it 😱😱😱

 

This is why you should never work with an influencer based on their audience size, or even the volume of engagement they get on their posts. Always ask to see their conversion rates when they post sales related content, or use a CTA button that leads to their clients’ sales page/s.

(You could even go one step further and contact the other brands they’ve worked with to get an honest overview of their performance and the ROI they achieved.)

 

DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE

When any comms tactic has its time in the spotlight, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and swept away in the moment. Ask yourself this questions: is this tactic going to move the brand closer to our growth goals?

If the answer is yes, then save this blog and refer back to my recommendations above to ensure you’re not wasting time, money or resources on the wrong influencers

If the answer is no, then this is the permission you may need to let it go and get back in your lane to focus on the tactics that you already know work

If you’re not sure, then this is an invitation to book a Comms Audit with me.

I’ll meticulously work through all the data you have available from all of your comms tactics over the past six months (from the influencers you’re working with, through to the content that’s posted on social media, the ads you’re investing in and the content that’s been published in media outlets)

I’ll assess:

✅ what’s working

❌ what’s not working and

🔎 identify any gaps that need to be filled

👓  make my recommendations on what you need to do to move closer to the growth goals of the brand.

To find out more about the comms audience and make sure that we’re the right fit, you can schedule a consultation call with me before making a decision on moving forward with your Comms Audit.