As opportunities to talk to people have been squeezed out of traditional channels and into mobile and platforms, brands looking to ensure they have a strong voice and point of view whilst remaining authentic are in luck. Enter Jules Lund, founder of TRIBE, a platform to help brands reach the audiences of micro-influencers. Indeed, influencer marketing has fast become a stalwart of many marketers’ strategies because it plays heavily into our inherently social nature, and, when done right, connects brands with consumers on a deeper level. He explained how Tribe works, and how powerful an asset personalisation can be in tipping the scale on purchasing intent.
What are micro influencers and how do they differ from celebrity influencers?
JL: Micro influencers are everyday people who’ve built small, but highly engaged social media audiences (3K - 100K followers) that they’ve crafted over thousands of engaging posts. There are three main advantages of using micro influencers over celebrity influencers:
Authenticity: Micro influencers are genuine consumers who buy all the products they promote. If they don’t already own the product or aren’t willing to buy it, then they have no right to recommend their audience should.
Engagement: TRIBE has measured the engagement of approximately 20K influencer posts on Instagram, and found that micro influencers attract far higher engagement than celebrity influencers for both sponsored and non-sponsored posts. The smaller the tribe, the more potent the influence.
Content: The most valuable of all. For the price of 1 sponsored post from a celebrity, not only can you fill a campaign with 50 micro influencers, but you now have 50 beautiful pieces of content you can re-purpose in social ads, web, even out of home campaigns.
Why are marketers tapping into content creators and what makes them a trusted channel?
JL: Audiences are increasingly difficult to reach. Unlike TV, radio and print where a handful of networks held the attention of the masses – on social, that attention is held by millions of everyday people. Technology has allowed brands to collaborate with the most influential of these to take mass marketing messages and make them personal. Who better to create content customers love than the customers themselves?
With a barrage of media channels to choose from, what is it about a strong influencer strategy that cuts through the noise?
JL: Personalisation.
Traditional media is mass marketing. Facebook and Google aren’t. They’re the most sophisticated direct marketing operations in history. And their superpower is in targeting precise audiences with precise messaging. This, in turn, requires an unprecedented volume and variety of visual content.
Creative Agencies alone cannot service this growing demand yet today, a brand’s own customers can.
Not only is this more practical but it’s more effective. Even if you lifted the imagery and used it in advertising, user-generated content attracts 6.9x higher engagement on Facebook than brand-generated content.
Is it possible for marketers to have speed, effectiveness and quality without sacrificing one for the other?
JL: Not only are all three achievable, but marketers are now enjoying a fourth: scale.
Thanks to technology, brands have access to the fastest growing creative solution on the planet… you. Yep, with the right eye, anyone with a smartphone can immediately craft magazine quality and billboard size marketing collateral. Brands on average receive 100 – 200 content submissions from Influencer Campaigns in their first week alone, and only pay for the ones they love.
AW360: How much at the will of platforms are influencers, and how important is a constant two-way dialogue between platforms and influencers?
JL: You’re spot on. Influencers are at the will of the big social media platforms. I helped build the most engaged Facebook brand page in Australia, and with a tweak of the algorithm lost access to the majority of my audience. I learnt very quickly that influencers would never own their audience, hence why I built the TRIBE platform on the content you could generate from influencers.
Reach is cheap. You can simply buy it. But content requires talent that is nurtured over years.
What is the best example of an effective micro influencer strategy you’ve seen run?
JL: Bacardi orchestrated a national billboard campaign across hundreds of locations in Australia simply by empowering dozens of their own customers to celebrate their #MojitoMoments. What I loved most about this was it completely shattered the perception that influencer marketing is a category isolated to social media.
What are your thoughts on Australia as a global hub of creativity and why it punches above its weight relative to its size and population?
Perhaps the confidence you can get from becoming a big fish in a small pond. Either that or an innate drive to work hard and apply ourselves. Either way, it works!
Jules Lund will be speaking at Advertising Week APAC commencing in Sydney July 30 - August. For details of his session and the rest of the AW APAC lineup head over to the schedule here. Click here if you’d like to attend.
