Fyre Festival is what many think of as Influencer Marketing—and it’s not a good look. This “luxury music festival” used social media influencers to promote the weekend as the “Coachella of the Bahamas,” but it ended up being more like a dystopian millennial nightmare, stranding its well-to-do guests on an island in the Bahamas with rain-washed FEMA tents and sad cheese sandwiches. This collision of Instagram overhype with disappointing reality may have many marketers wondering: “Has influencer marketing hashtagged its final post?”
INFLUENCER MARKETING WORKS
The fastest way to spread the word about a bad product…is amazing viral marketing.
While the Fyre Festival may have been the death rattle for the Fyre brand, it’s not the final blow to influencer marketing—not even close. If anything, it only confirms that influencer marketing can and does work. However, Fyre Festival’s very public failure to deliver on its brand (and the influencers’) promise not only ruined the brand, but the backlash came upon the celebrity influencers themselves.
NOW WHAT DO WE DO?
If you’re a marketer who is questioning where that leaves influencer marketing today, this post is for you. As always, the best way to move forward is through, and marketers need to evolve their influencer programs to adapt to the new climate that can sniff out authenticity.
Over the past three years, we at Fiddlehead have worked with DVD Netflix to help them evolve their influencer marketing program for today’s DVD Netflix audience, overcoming challenges like proving the value of the program, reducing costs, finding authentic fans, and keeping them engaged—all while being in FTC compliance.
In partnership with DVD Netflix, we designed, built, and launched #DVDNation, an innovative influencer program with a cost-effective gamification platform. The program not only provided immediate accountability but also scaled to embrace both original fans and a new community of micro-influencers for this 20-year-old technology brand.
With this successful influencer marketing program launched, we thought it was time to share what we’ve learned about how to approach this type of initiative.
2 INFLUENCER MARKETING TIPS
TIP #1: IT’S ABOUT MICRO-INFLUENCERS
Let’s start by differentiating between influencer marketing as a whole vs. micro-influencer marketing. When we as marketers think of influencer programs, we are often thinking of the folks involved in hyping the Fyre Festival—what we call macro-influencers. These are accounts with 1M + followers like the Kardashians and millennial superstars like Lele Pons. Macro-influencers are about 15% of the influencer population and drive about 30% of the buzz on social media overall.
The other 85% of the influencer population on the internet drives 75% of the buzz, and they’re called micro-influencers. With follower counts around 1,000-10,000, micro-influencers are highly focused on passionate niches. As a result, they’re perceived as being more trustworthy. The numbers bear that out. Consumer trust is nearly 5 times greater with these individuals than with macro-influencers (92% vs. 18%). When you talk about macro-influencers, you’re almost always talking about reach. But with micro-influencers, it’s all about engagement. Engagement rates (likes, comments) are appreciably higher (nearly 4X that of the macro-influencers).
TIP #2: you can’t buy authenticity
“You can buy followers but you can’t buy authentic engagement. ”
Any time your business can connect with an engaged group of advocates, your company will reap the benefits. This is different than creating a one-time pay-for-play blog post, but rather building on customers’ years of interaction with your brand and a deep love for the product or category.
If you don’t have ready access to a group of advocates, look for an adjacent audience you can connect with. For example, if you sell a brand new kind of ink, look for the thriving and passionate community of writing pen, bullet journaling, and hand lettering fans on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest.
4 influencer marketing myths
myth #1: Influencers hawk fake products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is based on trust. If the product can’t live up to the hype, influencers risk losing their legitimacy and advertisers their brand value. Both influencers and the brand have a responsibility to stand behind their social media support.
myth #2: Influencer programs are hard to measure.
It’s actually not hard to measure the success of these programs. First, decide what type of outcome you’re looking for before the campaign begins, whether it’s impressions, follower growth, web traffic, consumer engagement, etc. The key is to pick your desired KPI and focus on growing those.
myth #3: influencers are fake.
Fake accounts, padded follower accounts, bots, and outright fraud are a fact of life on social media platforms. But there are ways to ensure your influencers don’t use fake followers or bot-driven engagement. Look at your influencers’ followers and check their profiles for content that conflicts with the brand. Also take a look at follower engagement rates. There are a variety of automated tools available to test the legitimacy of an influencer’s followers. No matter what tool you use, there’s no substitute for a final human gut check—especially on Twitter and Instagram, where the incentives to “cheat” are higher.
myth #4: Influencer marketing only works for B2C.
Any company, whether B2C or B2B, cannot go wrong cultivating a group of authentically passionate advocates. While B2C influencers are frequently your most dedicated consumers, B2B influencers are generally recognized as experts and opinion leaders in their field and, as such, the ways of finding, engaging with, and compensating them will be different.
how to maximize influencer marketing on a small budget
1. Measure from the beginning. And get buy-in from all the stakeholders upfront about what you’ll be measuring. It’s critical to make sure everyone is on the same page at the beginning of the project so you’re not trying to defend yourself 6 months down the line.
2. Customize your program to your customer. The audience is more likely to embrace the program if it’s designed specifically for your users’ wants and needs.
3. Make sure your campaign is mobile-enabled—so participation doesn’t tank.
4. Put the value on authentic content—and don’t try to control it. By all means, give your influencers guidelines, but don’t try to control their reactions or the content they produce. It needs to sound like them, not an ad. Create a sense of community by inviting them to special insider opportunities and train them on how to expand their own brands effectively.
WHY COMMUNITY STILL WORKS
Fiddlehead founder Melinda Byerley’s personal take on the value of community from her time at eBay:
“The core of the DVD Netflix program was heavily influenced by my earliest experiences in tech. I started my career at eBay where community had its own team that reported to leadership. Every six weeks, eBay brings community members in to review product changes and no product is shipped without community input. As a result, the community members bonded with each other and helped each other out with customer support. It made the platform stronger and more diverse and that authentic engagement with each other contributed to their engagement with the eBay brand. And as a happy side result, our customer support costs went down.”
“I’m a firm believer that when you enable a flourishing community, good things happen.”
What’s changed since eBay was founded? Our ability to measure engagement. Today we have the opportunity to fuse the concept of community and engagement with social media in a way we didn’t have to in the late ’90s.
For help launching your own influencer marketing program, contact us at hello@fiddleheadhq.com with your ideas and questions.
To dig in deeper on the #DVDNation Influencer Program, watch our webinar “Fantastic Influencers and Where to Find Them: A Data-Driven Micro-Influencer Case Study,” presented by Fiddlehead founder Melinda Byerley and DVD.com Director of Marketing Vanessa Fiske.