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Updated April 24, 2019

If you’ve been following The Shelf Blog, you’ll notice that we are BIG on metrics – from using actual data to separate the influencers from the fakers to making sure the campaigns we run for our clients actually deliver measurable returns (ROI) beyond earned media value. You know… stuff like clicks and follows, and shares…

Last year, the concept of vanity metrics ROCKED the influencer marketing space. Big brands screaming about fake followers. Social media platforms started deleting social accounts by the millions. To many, it looked like influencer marketing was dead, or at the very least headed for a sh*tstorm, but things actually mellowed out a bit.

The truth is vanity metrics negatively affect both bloggers and brands. So, in this update of one of our epic pillar posts, I’m going to show you exactly how to go about vetting bloggers and influencers for campaigns.

By now, most social media marketers know there are lots of techniques influencers can use to inflate their numbers. In this post we’ll review the criteria you need to look at when selecting influencers that will help you achieve the best ROI.

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How to find the RIGHT bloggers to work with, sans vanity metrics http://ctt.ec/qHXc8+

A Simple(ish) 7-Point Plan for Finding the Right Bloggers and Influencers for Your Campaign… without the Fancy Software

“Let’s say you have 10,000 fans and 9,000 of them buy ten copies of your book because you tweeted about it. Well then that sounds really valuable. On the other hand, let’s say you have 10,000 fans because you bought them on some weird website when you were trying to be cool. Then you post something and it gets zero engagement, because nobody gives a rat’s ass. I would say that’s less valuable, wouldn’t you?”  

That quote from this classic classic post by Josh Staubin dives into real examples of turbo-influencers who get overlooked by popularity-focused marketers because their follower counts aren’t skyrocketing. The entire post is a really nice read for anyone interested in the topic.

Vanity metrics sort of suck because they lead marketers to make bad decisions and they’ve turned influencer marketing into more of a gamble. Brands wind up partnering with influencers who don’t (and can’t) deliver at all. And in many cases, these marketers overlook actual influencers who could really launch their brands into orbit because those influencers refuse to play along with the vanity-metric-game.

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Vanity metrics sort of suck because they lead marketers to make bad decisions. http://ctt.ec/6AC9U+

Since vanity metrics are so misleading, the process for vetting your potential influencers is one that should not be taken lightly. Marketers who put a little more effort into making sure they choose the right ones to work with will see huge long-term benefits – ROI and otherwise.

I’ll now walk through our seven step process, which I encourage marketers to use when vetting influencers. This process takes away a pretty hefty amount of risk when it comes to working with the right influencers and seeing real results.

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1. Use Creative Demographic Matching

Before you even start looking at metrics, the most important thing to consider is whether or not the influencer is a perfect match for your brand and demographic. You need to be crystal clear on who your specific audience is because it might not always be who you think.

For example, many companies come to us with incredibly specific blogger targets. Like, “I’m selling underwear, therefore I need to use your platform to find bloggers who talk mainly about underwear.”

Here’s what you have to get: The fact that they’re selling underwear is irrelevant. What’s more important is what TYPE of person would wear their very specific style of underwear.

Is it casual and comfy? Maybe they should target bloggers with a more laid back style, like this post with Styling My Life.

One of our all-time favorite examples of creative targeting was a campaign run by HP. They were selling tablets and they really wanted to highlight the photography features. Instead of running straight to tech bloggers (as one would expect for an HP Tablet campaign), they partnered up with fashion bloggers.

Why?

Evidently HP has some marketing geniuses working there! They were smart enough to see that if they partnered up with tech bloggers, their tablet would get lost in a sea of other tech products.

HP Tablets created the perfect recipe for their blogger campaign by partnering up with fashion bloggers:
1. The bloggers used it to take their blog photos.
2. They talked about how great it was for taking those photos.
3. They walked through how to use it in order to take great photos.

After all is said and done, you can imagine that their fashionable, selfie-loving audiences would be drooling over this HP Tablet! AND because these bloggers are mainly focused on fashion, their audiences aren’t being inundated with competing tablets.

So, the lesson here is, when targeting, you need to think in terms of what characteristics define your audience. Not what you’re selling.

Let’s run through one more example. Imagine you’re selling healthy homemade meals delivered right to your doorstep. Yes, you’re selling food, but does that mean you need to hunt down food bloggers to work with? No, probably not. Food bloggers are usually talking about food they make themselves and their readers probably make their own food, too.

Instead, your audience might be busy people – people who don’t have time to cook. Perhaps mommy bloggers who clearly have a lot on their plates (excuse that pun) or even interior design bloggers who can use the service to complement their decor. You could even get more specific by zeroing in on people who are health conscious.

The bottom line is that you need to find the exact fit in terms of targeting. Our platform is super awesome for this sort of thing. Using our search filters, you can get hyper-specific and narrow down to the right influencers.

For example, you can easily search and find maternity bloggers living in New York who wear vintage clothing and shop in high-end stores. You can even narrow down to the posts where they talk about the specific aesthetic, products, or brands you’re searching. That’s pretty powerful when it comes to gauging the success of those posts and finding the right bloggers to work with.

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2. Look at Follower Counts… But Be Aware of Who your Ideal Influencer Actually Is

Through our platform, I’ve noticed a lot of brands come in and use our search engine to set threshold requirements for high follower counts on EACH of the social networks. The brands who are newer to influencer marketing always go sort of nuts with these follower-count filters. They’ll look for influencers who have 40,000 followers on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram…and many of these people don’t want to compensate anyone for an endorsement.

If this is you, check out this post about why influencers charge for sponsored work and what to expect in terms of pricing.

The problem with setting super high follower requirements on EACH social network is that you pretty much eliminate everyone from your potential list. We’ve seen that most influencers (and I seriously mean MOST) will only focus on one or two social networks max and ignore the rest. If you think about it from their perspective, it makes sense. It’s entirely too painful to keep up with all five or six networks, AND run a successful blog on top of that. I’m sure that most of you only focus on one or two social networks, too. In those first few years, our company ditched Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest in favor of just maintaining Twitter and LinkedIn. It was more manageable and that’s where we’ve seen the best return in terms of new customers. Only in recent months have we added Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to our SMM arsenal. Bloggers and influencers are the same way. They focus on the social networks that will bring them the best returns.

I’ve copied some of our growth-tracking charts to better illustrate this point. Each color represents a social network. In the below example, you’ll see the top two focus on Facebook, the middle two on Instagram, and the bottom one on Pinterest.

Instagram, by far, has the most attention from influencers in the fashion/beauty/lifestyle space, followed by Facebook. There were a select few who really put effort into Pinterest, too. The one that was really lagging behind was actually Twitter.

As much as I’m ragging on vanity metrics, follower counts are obviously important to a certain degree. After all, you want there to be an audience, otherwise what would be the point?

So rather than completely disregarding follower counts, I’d encourage you to keep an open mind about follower count requirements. You might find a blogger whose follower count is significantly lower than what you were originally shooting for, but whose engagement is just off the charts AND a demographic that’s on-point. Just because a blogger is popular doesn’t necessarily mean she can influence purchase decisions for your brand. Arik Hanson explains this beautifully.

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3. Do Some Fact Checking

If you’re putting together campaigns on behalf of a large brand, you probably have a decent budget to allocate toward influencers. If that’s the case, you might not need to get into nitty-gritty fact-checking quite as much (time is money, after all). Besides, when you run lots of campaigns, you are probably more concerned with the aggregate results, as opposed to the results of each individual campaign. Yay for large marketing budgets!

On the other hand, if you’re a smaller brand and you have more time than you have money, I’d recommend putting on your best internet-stalking game-face and channeling your inner Nancy Drew. With enough research, you can place very sound bets when it comes to selecting your influencers. It just takes a little more effort from the get-go.

If you’ve already validated the demographic match of an influencer, as well as confirmed that she has enough of a following to warrant consideration, the chances of her working out are pretty high. The last thing you need to deal with is weeding out the false positives, like the influencers who look awesome but might not be as great as they seem due to vanity metrics.

As we reviewed in Post #1 of this series, there are tons of ways to fabricate metrics:

• Buying followers on any social network

• Buying engagement (likes, retweets, comments) on any social network

• Buying YouTube views

• Buying (quality) blog post comments

• Buying website traffic

• Rapidly growing social followings via the follow/unfollow technique.

If you know what to look for though, there’s no reason that you should ever be fooled by one of the above tactics.

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WHY VANITY METRICS MATTER LESS THAN YOU THINK

4. Detect Fake Followers

Detecting fake followers is actually really easy. You’ll need to go onto an influencer’s social accounts and scroll through their followers. For this, you’ll need to go pretty far down, because no one is buying followers every day. For that reason, bought followers will usually get covered up by the real ones.

Look for blocks of odd profiles because these fake followers will show up as one big group.

Find recognizable signs of fake followers, like Russian descriptions (for some reason a lot of these fake accounts are from Russia) and default egg-profile pictures. Yes, some people really do live in Russia BUT if you come across an influencer with 20% egg-followers, then you’ll know something is up.

Detect the higher-quality fake followers too. Higher quality means that most of the fake followers will have a profile picture and an English description. It’s still pretty easy to detect fakes though because description text (while in English) will usually just be random words that don’t make sense. AND, while most of these higher-quality fake followers actually do have a profile picture, most of them don’t have COVER photos.

Use our platform to review charts that track daily growth of follower counts across the various social networks. If you see abnormally large follower jumps, you should be weary.

Look at the relevance of those followers. If they’re entirely composed of randos (plumbers, Caribbean vacation rentals, uptight businessmen, fake-follower-companies…) then you know that something is amiss. And even if that influencer isn’t doing anything wrong (and they just managed to attract totally irrelevant followers), it’s still pretty safe to assume that your product isn’t going to get a great response from their audience because of the untargeted nature of those followers.

Note: Everyone is going to have SOME random followers. This is unavoidable. What you want to avoid is people who have more than 30% randos.

5. Next, Detect Fake Engagement

Straight-up faking engagement seems a little less common than follower-buying, but it still happens, so there are some things you might want to look out for when you’re evaluating an influencer.

While it’s more difficult to identify fake engagement, it’s not impossible. If you see someone with intensely sporadic engagement on social posts, then that’s probably the best indicator because when someone purchases engagement, they usually have to specify ONE of their posts that will receive the engagement (rather than spreading the engagement out across posts in a more natural way. If someone is getting no engagement for most of their posts, then all of a sudden there is one post with 1,000 retweets, you might want to go ahead and question that.

Take the time to scan through blog comments instead of just looking at comment counts. I’ve seen some bloggers comment like 37 times on their OWN posts without any REAL engagement, so it’s pretty easy to detect.

Check for spammy comments that are totally irrelevant to the conversation. “My cousin makes $10,000 a week by filling out surveys….” Or “Check out my homemade Viagra… ” While most bloggers have put up spam filters to keep out all the random viagra-peddlers, you’ll see some bloggers that have unusually high amounts of spam comments. So again, it’s important to just glance through the comment section for each blogger to make sure that the engagement is legit.

See if hordes of smaller influencers are leaving comments for the sole purpose of sending traffic over to their OWN sites. Many of these comments are half-hearted and irrelevant, like: “Nice post! Here’s a link to my blog: www…” These comments certainly don’t indicate that there’s anything wrong with the original blogger (it’s just something that starts happening once a blog reaches a certain size) but you’ll want to ensure that there’s some genuine engagement too.

6. Suss Out Fake Traffic

Detecting fake traffic is actually kind of difficult. As we discussed in our previous post, some influencers will actually buy traffic, in which case their Google Analytics will back up their claims. I’m happy to report that this tactic is pretty uncommon among the influencer crowd but there are still some tactics you can look out for.

You’ll want to figure out if they’re just presenting the metrics that make their site look the best (and keeping the less attractive ones to themselves). For example, they might be getting tons of traffic, but their bounce rate could be close to 100% and time on site might be seconds instead of minutes. Or they might provide metrics that occurred during a spike in traffic, like when they received press coverage. If they only present stats to you that represent the spike, it’s certainly not painting a realistic picture of what their traffic normally looks like.

You should inquire further about the metrics that really matter, like the average time on site for all non-bounced traffic and how many monthly unique visitors a blogger gets vs. individual page views.

Professional bloggers will be able to provide you with a media kit. According to Allyn Lewis, if you can’t find the media kit on their website, you can just as easily inquire for one. If it’s not clear in the media kit, you should ask whether or not the stats are current. Asking is always helpful, and if someone isn’t forthcoming, then you might want to move on.

Depending on what vertical you are in, you can use traffic estimators like Alexa and Ahrefs. These are great if you’re in the marketing or tech space. These are way less accurate though if you’re looking for fashion, beauty, lifestyle or mommy bloggers.

7. Lastly, Our Secret Weapon

Look back through a blogger’s posts and take note of which brands they’ve worked with in the past. Are any of those brands repeat customers? If there are a few repeat customers, you’ve found the real deal. Get yourself on the books with that blogger!

Our philosophy for that is there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. There are many marketers who have come before you and paved the way. They have done due diligence on these people and put their money into campaigns with them. And after analyzing the results of these campaigns, they’ve decided to double-dip. This is a great signal for you to use as a guide when assembling your own campaigns.

If you find a brand in your space who’s going nuts with influencer marketing and putting more money into that than their other marketing efforts, then it’s also a good idea to follow them and really analyze their strategy. We see this all the time in the fashion space. There are some brands who have practically written the book on influencer marketing (we have, too – one holiday-themed one on Influencer Strategy and another on setting real goals for influencer campaigns). And they’re putting enormous amounts of energy into their influencer strategy. Old Navy, Target, Lulus, InPink, Ruche, Alice & Olivia…these are all companies that you can learn from if you’re in the fashion space.

To that end, you can use our platform to track all brand mentions made by influencers on any blog or social network. Many people use us to keep tabs on influencers who mention their own product. Some are using our site to track competitors. Some are just studying the brands who have run their influencer marketing in really creative ways.

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Conclusion

Here’s the thing about influencer marketing: Its effectiveness is directly related to selecting the right influencers for your brand. Like Goldilocks and the three bears, the influencer needs to be the right match, with the right size following, and have the right demographic of followers.

If you’re careful with who you select, you’ll be blowing past your ROI goals so fast that everyone’s heads will be spinning! Need help with your campaigns? Give us a shout!

Hey! Are you working with influencers yet?

Well, do you want to?

There’s no time like a brand new year to implement marketing strategies that you KNOW work… but you may be dragging your feet on doing. I mean, the planning, the strategy, wooing influencers, shipping products, monitoring campaigns… IT’S A LOT! We get it. But we also have a pretty cool platform that will streamline and automate most of the headache-inducing aspects of influencer campaigns PLUS we have a pretty cool team of hipsters, cool kids, and marketing savantes that will make your influencer campaign much easier to handle and also crazy profitable. Seriously, we’re all about that ROI. In fact, our influencer marketing platform takes away the guesswork and comes with a ton of our patent-pending ROI-prediction reports that are jargon-free, easy to understand, and will help you sleep well at night. You’ll know right off rip exactly who’s representing your brand and whether or not your collaboration with them will pay off. So… contact us if you want to make a ton of money from your marketing efforts. (How’s that for a CTA?)

Get Started Today!

Or give us a quick call : (212) 655-9879

Well, It Looks Like We’re About to Reverse Engineer Influencer Marketing… You Know… So It’s Easier to Understand

Updated February 2019

Over the past few years, influencer marketing has become seamlessly integrated into our lifestyles. But what (EXACTLY) is it? A mommy blogger speaking well of a cream that helps reduce the discomfort of her baby’s eczema? Is it a celebrity endorsement? Is it influencer marketing if no money changes hands? How do we define it? How does it really affect us? More, how do brands translate Likes into store foot traffic? If you’re still having a hard time putting your finger on EXACTLY what influencer marketing is, I wrote this particular post for you. .

Buckle your seatbelts, kids. We’re going to “reverse engineer” influencer marketing!

 

First things first. Don’t get confused by the jargon. There are a half dozen terms out there that essentially mean the same thing as influencer marketing: brand advocates, brand ambassadors, blogger advocacy, blogger campaigns, native advertising, sponsored posts, word-of-mouth marketing.

Some of those terms are less interchangeable than others, but they all pretty much describe the method of marketing using the publicized experiences of authentic, relatable, unbiased people. This is in stark contrast to marketing with the more traditional styles of advertising, all of which are based on branded content and shiny marketing messages.

To preface our discussion, let me tell you what inspired this “Influencer Marketing in Layman’s Terms” post. It all started when my grandfather asked me (for, like, the fifteenth time) what exactly it is that I do. My grandfather was 85 at the time and he calls me every other week with conversations that go something like this:

 

Let’s First Look at What Influencer Marketing Is NOT

A key difference between influencer marketing and traditional marketing is that influencer marketing isn’t created by the brand. In fact, it’s not even branded. When done well, this type of marketing won’t even look like marketing.

Typically, when we think of brands marketing themselves, a certain collection of marketing collateral and brand behavior pops into our heads: Newsletters, banner ads, social media posts, and pretty much any other opportunity the brand seizes to let the world know how great their products are.

Come to think of it, isn’t it odd that this type of advertising was ever really effective at all? A brand telling you that THEIR own product is the best is like a doting parent telling you that THEIR kid is smarter than everyone else’s kids. Or when I boast about my smart little pug (who really IS smart. Like smart smart. Like the smartest little pug in the whole wide world) but I’m only referencing my little genius to drive home my point). Which is that no one believes me, even when I insist. And no one believes those bragging parents or their bumper stickers. The same thing goes for all those brands proclaiming their own greatness.

 

One reason why old school marketing isn’t as effective is because technology has afforded today’s consumers the ability to get wise to a product long before he or she ever comes face-to-face with any brand representatives. They do it through online reviews, chatty groups on social media, the company’s website, its competitors websites… Today’s consumers can even spot fake reviews when they crop up in the results. Our spidey senses start tingling and our BS-ometer rises to the orange level. As we have access to more information, the branded approach to marketing is becoming increasingly ineffective.

An article on Forbes.com by Kimberly Whitler, quotes a 2012 stat, confirming the same 2016 finding from CMO: consumers just don’t trust brands.

Data shown above is from Nielsen’s Global Trust In Advertising Survey

CMO says a brand’s ability to establish trust accounts for 30 percent of total brand loyalty. As time and technology makes it harder for consumers to determine what’s real vs what’s not, more people around the world trust earned media – such as recommendations from friends and family – above all other forms of advertising. Who knew “earned media” was even a thing?

Consumer confidence is shaken because many brands are resorting to brute-force marketing tactics. And that just doesn’t work.

What do I mean by brute-force? Well, let’s start with an example.

One day you’re on the Internet checking out black leather jackets.

Maybe you’ve always wanted one or maybe you recently watched a rerun of Happy Days. Either way, it just so happens that you’re searching online. You stumble upon a random product page from Macy’s and before you even know what’s happening, they’ve ensnared you in their trap. Suddenly, you’re in the middle of a full-on ad attack and for the next year – winter, spring, summer, and fall – you can expect to see that damn leather jacket following you around the Internet, interrupting you with presumptuous reminder emails, popping up when you’re reading the news, commandeering your Facebook feed. They won’t stop until that jacket is haunting you in your dreams, making you rue the day when you innocently decided to google “black leather jacket”.

Now, if  you are anything like a normal human being, that leather jacket is not the only thing that caught your eye, which means every item of clothing you clicked on – whether intentional or not – will now “Walking Dead” you around the web, lumbering behind, and showing up on every site you happen to visit.

 

It’s all fun and games until people start going crazy.

The point I hope I’m driving home successfully is this:
BRANDED marketing comes across as disingenuous.
It’s loud and in-your-face.
It interrupts you.
It fights you, tooth-and-nail, for your attention.

 

Now let’s compare the above (branded) approach with that of Influencer Marketing…

Influencer marketing is the exact opposite.

It’s subtle.
It’s NOT in-your-face.
In fact, most of the time, people don’t even realize they’re looking at it.

We’re far enough along here where a definition might be useful. Let’s see if you’re sharper than my 85 year-old grandfather.

Influencer marketing is the practice of paying for social proof. Brands work with everyday people who have an interest in – and are willing to – promote their products. These people are unbiased and have no vested interest in seeing the brand increase their sales; their only value to the brand lies in the fact that they organically have the one thing all brands are clamoring to get – the attention of a very targeted audience. It is often the case that a brand will have to woo an influencer and provide him or her with a compelling enough reason (usually a great product and money for endorsing that great product) to present the brand’s product or message to the influencer’s hard-won audience.

The job of an influencer is to help you win genuine interest in your product. They spread the word about your product in a uniquely creative and unbiased way. As a result, they get your product in front of people who are conditioned to completely ignore traditional advertising. Score!

 

 

Okay, so back to our big example of the leather jacket, the wedge, the watch, and the jeans. In case you’ve forgotten and are too lazy to scroll back up, these are the products…

When we last checked in, we were being chased around the web by the Macy’s retargeting monsters.

Now, check out the subtlety and authenticity of these same products being advertised low-key by an influencer.

The example below is from Sabrina Fenster’s Vancouver-based, street style blog, StreetScout.Me. Sabrina’s taken those same products and made them into a look that’s distinctive and real – something most big brands miss the boat on when it comes to advertising.

Why is Influencer Marketing So Great??

#1. Influencers know how to thrill!

In the example above, Sabrina’s photos aren’t salesy. They’re not even pitching. For all I know as a reader, Sabrina’s just updating us on her typical Tuesday. The difference between traditional marketing and influencer marketing are targeting and context. Sabrina’s photos not only make these products look much better than the original product shots, her photos also provide real-world examples of how these products can fit together into an outfit that a REAL person would wear.

The same goes for men. The pompadour haircut, infinity scarf, and cigarette-legged pants all came from somewhere – a striking image some guys saw somewhere that stuck in their minds. Oh, and many thanks to the companies who made bushy beards, big glasses, and cardigans a look. Geeks are the new billboards. The annoying banner ads of yesteryear are officially obsolete.

 

#2. Influencers allow brands to strike when the timing is perfect!

Let’s talk about timing.

The psychology of traditional advertising worked because advertisers had a captive audience. People were on the couch every Thursday watching whatever shows NBC had lined up. It was too much of a hassle to get up every commercial break, so brands essentially had a captive audience. That’s not the case anymore. People aren’t consuming media according to a broadcaster’s schedule anymore. We now consume media how and when we want to. What does that mean for advertisers?

Ads are being skipped… and therefore becoming increasingly useless.

Ads interrupt you as you’re doing other, more important things, like watching adorable babies with bed head try to master the art of sleep-eating. Influencers don’t interrupt because, unlike advertisers, they don’t have to wait until they have a captive audience. When an influencer’s reader lands on his or her website or social page, the reader is coming there for a specific purpose – to be influenced. That’s why a popular vlogger like Zoella can make videos that outperform those of multi-billion-dollar companies like Maybelline.

Zoella present products to her audience when they are in their most receptive state. Unfortunately, without the help of an influencer like Zoella, Maybelline doesn’t have that same advantage.

How does Smartphone footage of a young woman talking about makeup in her bedroom get 3 million views while Maybelline’s social marketing team only grabs 22K views?? Two words:

I already talked about why people trust social influencers more than they trust branded ads. Relevance is another hurdle brands have to overcome. Many brands still create ads like they did 20 years ago – they want to somehow find a way to present Hollywood icons, models, and CG to the typical consumer and send the message that, “You can have all of this.” But in many segments, consumers have outgrown that message. They want something they can relate to, something that resonates with them. Very few of us can relate to being on the set of a national commercial spot, trying to make our makeup perfect for the green screen. Zoella’s video wins because most of us know what it’s like to go to the store, grab a bunch of different products, and play with them at home in our bedroom.

 

#3. Influencers can expand a brand’s target demographic.

Influencers have the ability to reach a huge variety of audiences because they each have unique opinions and approaches towards their lifestyle and the products they choose to incorporate. They are like alien ambassadors who translate your mission of peace into Klingon for you.

I went there. Or should I say pa’ jImejbej!

 

 

Part of the advantage brands gain by working with influencers is loss of control. Let’s face it, big companies are slow to latch on to emerging trends. And if they were calling the shots with influencers, it would be more bad commercials and more hit-and-miss print ads.

But the freedom that influencers have to determine how to market products is what enables brands to reach that wider audience.

A beautiful example of this in action (at a very HUGE scale) was the Lord and Taylor Instagram Blitz.

To promote the launch of the Design Lab line, Lord & Taylor decided to focus its marketing power on one paisley dress (shown to the right). No, I don’t know why. Take a look at the product shot. It isn’t terrible…but it’s nothing special. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance if I was browsing their website.

They brilliantly sent this same paisley print dress out to 50 Instagram influencers and encouraged each to style the dress in a way that reflected her personal fashion sense. Then L&T had all the influencers post about the dress on the same day. And that’s exactly what they did. Check out the range this dress actually has when the backdrop is real life on a person with a unique style…as opposed to the infinite white of a studio photo with the dress atop a headless, legless mannequin.

Photos courtesy of Arielle Noa Charnas , Jeanne Grey , and Cara Santana .

At least twenty media articles, hundreds of comments, thousands of Likes and one FTC finger-wag later, the dress sold out. In hours.

OK, now that we all know what influencer marketing is…and why it’s awesome…let’s cover a few common painpoints and concerns that I frequently hear from brands who are new to the space.

Pain Point #1: Influencer marketing is messy.

Yes. There’s no cookie-cutter method for handling 50 influencers, each with their own platforms, ideas, styles, and requirements for entering their domain. When you enter their world, you play by their rules, at least to an extent. So when we see marketers jumping into this space, they often find they don’t really know how to leverage it. They’re used to PPC ads with immediate (although dangerously vain) ROI in the form of clicks.

Clicks that may or may not result in a sale. It’s a world where brands can get exactly what they pay for.

Influencer marketing has a very different setup. For starters, you’ll be working with influencers. And just like their extremely diverse styles and audiences, you’ll encounter that same level of diversity within their work-styles. You’ll get presented with various pricing structures, payment processes, time frames, and attitudes. There are no guarantees. And the process, as a whole, can be messy.

But, this messiness is the entire reason WHY influencer marketing works so well. It wouldn’t be effective if it wasn’t organic! So the messiness comes with the territory.

If you’re looking for an easy solution, there isn’t one that will take away all of the work, BUT platforms like ours, The Shelf, will streamline the crap out of it! Plus, we’re totally great with targeting down to the finest nuance…which, in the end, will give you better ROI than what your marketing intern will be able to achieve after slaving over the campaign setup process for months.

And even if you don’t want to use our platform, our blog posts are turbo-thorough (if you couldn’t tell from this post), and we’ll get you up and running, as well as armed with the info you need to run successful campaigns, right out out of the gate!

• This post runs through the whole process.

• This post is a step by step guide on how to structure your first campaign.

• This post runs through what to expect in terms of influencer-pricing (so you don’t get burned)!

• This post covers outreach.

• And then there are series of posts on vanity metrics here, here, and here…because vanity metrics can really jump up and bite you on the butt if you’re not careful.

Pain Point #2: There are no guarantees.

True. Most influencers won’t guarantee a particular ROI. If you find one who does, latch onto them and don’t let go.

But most don’t. And that can be both a blessing and a curse. This post of ours goes into every ROI question you might have, but to summarize, I think the lack of a guarantee is actually a good thing.

If you’re coming from a PPC background then you’re probably looking for numbers. But, let me wipe the stars from your eyes for just a moment to remind you that while Google Ads give you a guarantee in terms of CLICKS, clicks are not qualified leads, and they are definitely not sales. If you really assess the quality of leads that come through Google Ads, you may be willing to finally admit to yourself that they are so-so at best.

You assume more risk with influencer marketing because there is no “clicks guarantee.” But this risk is tied pretty closely to how well you select your influencers. If you find one who is the exact poster-child of the products you’re selling, you can expect the quality of leads coming through that influencer to be much better than what Adwords would produce for you given the same budget. Paying the RIGHT influencer can give you wonderful, AMAZINGLY successful results.

One more thing: When your Google ad reaches its allotted budget, there are no more leads coming through to you. Like, zip. The Google bots will hear none of that. But with bloggers, their posts about your product remain in the form of great evergreen content and viral images long after your payment to them is gone. Influencer marketing presents you with the unique opportunity to grab residual leads from once-and-done marketing efforts for months after the marketing event. Plus, if the influencer had a good experience with you and your product, be on the lookout for further honorable mentions from that influencer. We like to think of it as the gift that keeps on giving.

 

 

 

Pain Point #3: Disclosures screw up the authenticity.

Many brands get SUPER worked up about FTC disclosures. They fear that if readers and followers know that they’re reading an ad or sponsored post, it will make the posts less effective and brands won’t get the most bang for their buck. The key thing to remember here is bloggers are very discriminating. Most of them aren’t going to cover a product they don’t like because they’ve spent years developing their own brands and building a following. They are not going to risk it all to promote a soft-soled shoe. So brands aren’t paying for an endorsement, they are paying for entry into the blogger’s world. You’re paying for the blogger’s attention and their ability to direct the attention of thousands of other people to your brand.

Case in point:

I am quite the enthusiastic shopper in my own right… And because I run an influencer marketing platform, I am more aware than almost everyone out there that lots of product endorsements are paid for by brands.

But when I’m trying to find cute sandals for summer (which I was literally just doing five minutes ago), I have my go-to bloggers that I follow and I check out some of their recent posts. I browse my favorite pin boards and if I see something I like, I couldn’t care less what’s sponsored or not sponsored. I’m on the lookout for sandals that are awesome (and inexpensive). This is the way many of us discover new brands and it’s a fun and exciting way to find smaller, new brands that don’t otherwise have widespread attention. We, meaning all of humanity, need those sponsored posts!

I joined Stitchfix as a result of a blog post.
I joined Blue Apron as a result of a blog post.
I joined Barkbox as a result of a blog post.
I recently found (and joined) TheGoldenTote because of a blog post.
And if Happy Socks had a subscription service. I would join that as well. Because they are awesome.[Hmmm, I didn’t realize I was such a subscription-box nut til listing them out just now. Ha!]

But in all seriousness, I knew these posts were sponsored. However, all of those subscriptions were super useful, so the knowledge of the sponsorship didn’t affect my decision in the least. AND months/years later, I’m still a member of all of them.

Another super on-point example…Last year, I got a bitten by the DIY bug and I built a whole bunch of pipe furniture. “Pipe furniture?” you ask. I found a pin on Pinterest that originally came from a blog post sponsored by The Home Depot. The pin itself may or may not have been sponsored. I don’t know and I don’t care. Anyway, after seeing this pin and reading the tutorial, I had to have some pipe furniture, so I went to Home Depot and bought the exact materials that the blogger listed in her instructions.

I actually liked that first pipe-table so much that I built TWO MORE pipe tables AND a coat rack! So that was three more Home Depot trips that were all a result of that one blog post that may or may not have been sponsored.

So what (you might be saying)? Well, the numbers that this blog post tutorial generated will show you the true power of influencer marketing:

• On Facebook it received 125 likes, 86 shares, and 44 comments.

• On Pinterest it was repinned a whopping 54,111 times!!

Through this blog post, The Home Depot tapped into a totally new market (for products that are typically used only in plumbing). And this post presents these products in such a compelling way, that you can imagine within the 54,111 times that this was repinned, a huge number of people probably went out to Home Depot and dropped a few hundred bucks, just like me.

I think my point here is this: The only time consumers really get bent out of shape about sponsored content is when the post doesn’t support the original mission and theme of the blog itself. If it’s a post about the most delicious, fancy gourmet cheese from our vegan sister, that ticks us off a little and lets us know she’s selling out.

If you target your market and your influencer properly, the marketing will go off without a hitch and without ruffling any feathers. They’ll just see it as a super dope product that you’re selling, and they will buy.

We have a whole post devoted to disclosures with ideas for writing them creatively AND honestly, and I think it will make you feel a little better if you’re still an FTC-hater. Don’t be a hater.

 

Painpoint #4. We sell niche products that might not do well with influencers.

If you think you sell something weird and that no one will get it or want it, you must not be familiar with a tool we use to find anything and everything. It’s called the Internet. Trust me. Your crowd is out there. You just have to look for them…and sometimes it’s the long tail.

Then, you need to find influencers in that space. Influencers exist in every industry, and the other important thing to note is that you can get super creative with your influencer targeting. Just because you sell underwear doesn’t mean you need to find underwear bloggers (yes there are a few of them out there). But, everyone wears underwear. Lifestyle, fashion, and mommy bloggers, for example, are all perfectly equipped to get in front of the right people and sell those undies off the rack. Just remember that it’s about demographic-matching, not vertical-matching.

There are influencers out there for just about every industry. The chart below is a bit old (a senior citizen in Big Data Years), but it gives a pretty cool breakdown of influencers across 16 of the top industries.

Source: Izea

Wrapping Up

Let’s finish up this 15-minute training course exactly how we began, talking about my grandfather. He was right about something: Influencer marketing is nothing new. An influential dude by the name of Liberace did it back in the 1950s when he got people to go in droves to Citizens National Trust and Savings Bank, to the tune of $400,000 in new business in just four weeks with an average deposit of just 10 bucks ( about $100 or so today). He did this by mentioning how he admired the bank’s products. Liberace was so influential during the 1950s, the papers pegged him as a sorcerer.

Influential people have been around since the beginning of…well, the beginning of people, I guess.

The only difference between influential people from back in the day and the influencers of today is internet access. Harnessing their power before the Internet was a much bigger feat, but the Internet as well as social networks and blogging platforms have allowed the voices of influencers to travel far and wide in ways that weren’t eve imaginable. Birthing in the process, the greatest form of marketing EVER!

Hopefully this article brought you up to speed on what influencer marketing is. The next thing for you to do is to start influencer marketing! We can help with that. Either sign up for a demo, or check out our resources section, where we have more articles just like this.

 

Vanity Metrics: The Shady Side of Influencer Marketing (and Why Big Brands Are Finally Calling BS on the Whole Industry)

Last Updated September 2018

“Vanity metrics” is a term that comes up pretty often in the context of influencer marketing, typically referring to metrics like follower counts and blog traffic.

Vanity metrics, by definition, are meant to increase the PERCEIVED value of a blog or social influencer by presenting influencer stats that make that influencer more appealing to brands. If their follower count is high, but engagement levels are low, bloggers might direct attention over to their follower count because that particular stat makes them look really valuable. Unfortunately they might be neglecting to mention the fact that they have very low engagement.

We run The Shelf, an influencer marketing platform, so literally every single day we talk brands who are basing their entire outreach strategies on these types of vanity metrics…and getting nowhere.

At first, it surprised me that so many brands put so much weight on metrics like follower counts, as it’s pretty common knowledge that follower counts are easy to inflate. People can go on Fiverr right now and buy 5,000 Twitter followers for a few bucks… or if you’re dealing with a “set it and forget it” type of person who’s in it for the long haul, there are services that will consistently grow an influencers following with bots, cloned accounts, fake accounts, and dummy accounts for a hundred bucks a month or less.

But the influencer rarely retains their newly-purchased follower numbers… and fake accounts don’t offer great engagement, so… there’s that little piece.

 

 

While most people know that it’s possible to buy followers, I don’t think that everyone knows that these shady practices have been going on for years.

So, that’s what this post is about. I’ll be covering:

• Why dishonest metrics (we call it influencer fraud ‘round these parts) have become so prevalent within influencer marketing

• Which metrics bloggers and influencers are easily able to manipulate

• The signals marketers should analyze INSTEAD of these tired little vanity metrics

 

Why Dishonest Metrics (i.e. Influencer Fraud) Became the Thing

Influencers have all realized that popularity – whether real or fabricated – is often the first signal of an influencer’s potential value to brands. If you have craploads of followers (is craploads supposed to be hyphenated?), brands are far more willing to stuff money into your expensive little pockets.

…And if you don’t, they won’t. Simple.

This preoccupation that brands and marketers have with popularity (i.e. follower count) presents bloggers and wannabe brand ambassadors with a moral dilemma:

1. They can grow their following the hard way by networking, sucking up, and publishing years worth of quality content (without getting paid a dime)…all with the hope that one day their hard work will pay off, and they will finally know what it feels like to achieve that true, unadulterated state of popularity that they so long for…

OR

2. They can simply BUY their popularity for five or fifty bucks (depending on how much popularity they want and how legit they want that popularity to look), and rocket-launch themselves into the company of influencers who get the big contracts, the pretty photo ops, and the free stuff.

I’m going to be a sweetheart and say that most influencers probably start out with noble intentions, but after struggling for enough time, as well as watching other, less qualified influencers zoom past them for the price of 5 dollars worth of followers, many of them start to venture into the vanity metric gray-zone.

 

There are a few social media users who will leap head-first off of their moral high-ground, and flat-out purchase their followers, traffic, YouTube views, etc…Meanwhile, others will utilize less extreme tactics that are more like shortcuts instead of outright cheating.

Regardless of the intentions behind these tactics, by inflating their numbers these influencers are engaging in deceptive practices and making it a total nightmare for marketers to find the RIGHT influencers for their campaigns.

The flip side is if brands and marketers weren’t bent on finding a quick fix for the Instagram puzzle, this particular “influencer black market” would never have emerged.

So, I can totally empathize with the brands who have to navigate through this mess… and I can totally empathize with the plight of the influencers.

 

 

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Whether or not you feel influencers are justified in manipulating their metrics, it’s a real issue for brands.

2018 was bang-up year for influencer marketing.

1. Influencer marketing is largely responsible for making Kylie Jenner one of the world’s youngest billionaires…

2. It also attracted enough negative press this year to make people totally sick of it, and make brands call out influencers who are buying their followers (I’m specifically thinking about Unilever’s dramatic announcement at Cannes)…

3. The UAE required influencers to become licensed publishers, and at a pretty hefty price tag…

4. The FTC refined its Endorsement Guidelines and got rid of a lot of the loopholes and trap doors…

From the outside looking in, it could be easy to assume all these changes were signs influencer marketing was dying.

 

But dying and maturing are two different things. If you’re doing influencer marketing and you’ve been using vanity metrics as your go-to, you need a new way of evaluating influencers and measuring the ROI of campaigns.

So, we’re going to tell you which signals matter.

 

Here’s How to ID Legit Influencers Using Data (you know us)

When I went on Google and started typing in “buy Twitter…” check out what auto-populated. Clearly I’m not the first person to be typing in this search query. If you click through Google’s search results, you’ll be confronted with literally thousands of companies selling followers!

Right around the time influencer marketing really took hold of social media and blossomed into it’s own cottage industry, search volume for terms “buying followers” began shooting up, with Instagram being significantly higher than the other social networks.

Back then, to gauge the real demand for fake followers, I checked out Google’s Keyword Research Tool, which reported that there were more than 100K searches per month for the various types of follower-buying.

Perhaps that number doesn’t sound super high. But, Google’s Keyword Tool typically underestimates search volume so I included a search for “cat videos” in the screenshot below just so you can see how the numbers compare to something as widespread as the various cat memes that are ransacking the internet. You can see that there are more people looking to buy Instagram and Twitter followers (combined) than there are people searching for “cat videos”!

One more thing to note here is how much higher Instagram searches are compared to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Instagram is by far leading the race in buying followers. And the fact that it’s still that much further ahead than the rest is impressive, considering the frequency with which platforms like Instagram and Twitter go through and purge fake accounts.

 

As I mentioned earlier, anyone who engages in this tactic has their own reason for it. And in most cases, I don’t think it’s to manipulate anyone. Oftentimes, these bloggers bring in extremely good ROIs for the brands they work with, yet they’re getting paid paltry amounts because they aren’t gaming their follower counts like everyone else.

• This article, written by Kristen, the blogger behind Just K, walks her readers through her various adventures with buying followers. She’s done quite a few experiments and actually wound up getting hit by Instagram’s big cleanup. Her take is an interesting one, and it also explains the rationale for follower-buying from a blogger’s perspective.

• You might also want to check out this post written by Gilad Lotan, a data scientist who blogs about social data. He did an experiment with buying followers and explained the various positive effects that he experienced as a result of that one large jump in his follower count.

Just for fun, go onto Fiverr and look for “Instagram followers” or “Twitter followers”. You have to click around a little because I think they try to prevent people from using the phrase “buy followers”…but you’ll see all sorts of posts that say: “I will 2500 FACEBOOK Likes” or “I will 3000 Instagram followers”. It’s crazy how much clout 5 bucks can buy you!

Obviously that sort of thing isn’t allowed by the various social networks, so they’ll up their ante from time to time in order to discourage that behavior.

Without fail, crackdowns by social media platforms will typically affect everyone. Some are affected WAY more than others but almost everyone on Instagram has fake followers, whether knowingly or not. So purges cause dips in everyone’s numbers. The people who had abnormally large percentages of their followers dropping off are the ones you’ll want to be a little of.

On our platform, The Shelf, we have tools that help with this quite a bit. We track follower counts over time and plot each social network on a graph. So it’s helpful to see what’s going on before you reach out to someone about a collaboration. When the Instagram cleanup happened, we noticed that quite a few people had huge dips in their follower counts.

In the above examples, you can see where Instagram made it’s fake-follower-sweep and removed all the fake followers. Our charts can also show you where there are extremely abnormal growth patterns.

For this person, their Instagram was growing at a nice steady rate, but Facebook and Twitter were lagging behind. It looks like they purchased followers for both Twitter and Facebook on the same day in order to get their growth rate up near their Instagram’s. And while the jump doesn’t look huge, this influencer’s social accounts grew by around 500,000 total followers that day!

Below are two separate Pinterest influencers that seem to be up to something too. I can’t really say definitively that they’re buying followers but growing by 700,000 followers within a few months seems sort of unlikely, especially with such abnormal spurts AND considering they both started down near zero.

Anyway, there are countless ways and reasons why influencers buy followers. Regardless of the measures that these social networks are taking to prevent this kind of behavior, it’s a practice that is here to stay. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and as long as follower counts determine the worth of people, there will be people trying to game their follower counts.

Purchasing Engagement

This one was actually news to me. When I was on Fiverr, doing research on how to buy followers, I saw that there were just as many people who were selling social network ENGAGEMENT. You can get people to retweet your tweets, Like your Facebook posts, pin your Pins, like your Instagram photos, and comment on any of your posts across your social networks. You can even buy views for your YouTube videos!!!

I thought that it would be difficult to fake YouTube views but evidently bots are out there doing all sorts of nonsense. And it isn’t just the randos out there who are purchasing followers and engagement…even Justin Bieber has been rumored to play in this space.

Below I’ve pasted a variety of Fiverr options that you’d have available if you were in the market to buy engagement.

$5 gets you 5 (QUALITY) Blog Comments

Discovering sellers on Fiverr who are selling blog comments was actually a little depressing. I assumed blog comments were safe from this but evidently you need to be wary of blog comments as well.

I would ALSO think that fake comments would be easy enough to notice if you take the time to read through some of the comments but if an influencer opts to pay a little more for said comments, those comments will actually be of higher quality, making them harder to detect. Five for $5 will get you quality comments, as opposed to the normal going rate of 15 comments for 5 bucks, which will earn you low quality comments.

Traffic Scams

I was already aware that it’s possible to send fake traffic to your site but I was always under the impression that it required the help of a developer. Evidently you can take care of this too for the meager price of 5 dollars…

Here’s an article on the Observer that talks about this happening to a very extreme extent, where publishers were scamming ad buyers out of millions of dollars by using fake “bot” traffic. This isn’t at all what most influencers are doing, but it shows just how widespread this issue is.

All of the above tactics are straight-up breaking the Terms of Services for these social networks, and even more than that, they’re eroding the trust that brands have with influencers as a whole.

I’m sure that a large percentage of influencers are not frequent Fiverr shoppers but it’s always good to be aware of the options that are out there so that you know what to look for when finding the right influencers to work with. My exploration into the seedy underbelly of Fiverr was actually quite enlightening, so hopefully you were able to learn from all of that as well!

Moving on, we’ll now cover vanity metrics that are less “illegal” than those covered above.

 

How Influencers to Inflate Metrics Without Breaking Laws

The world of buying followers isn’t completely unmoderated. Many influencers have seen their fake followers removed, and in more extreme cases, their accounts deleted because social networks have built-in mechanisms to prevent abuse.  For many, the possibility of having their account deleted is enough to stop them from buying followers and/or engagement.

But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

First, there’s the age-old Follow/Unfollow technique, one thats been rocked by some of the most “popular” people out there. It involves following a whole bunch of targeted Twitter users, and then several days later, unfollowing the ones who didn’t follow back. A tool that’s popular for this is Unfollowers.com.

 

This technique will definitely kick the follower counts up for the influencers who go this route, but it does cause the follower/following ratio to get out of whack. In an ideal world, popular bloggers will have a ratio similar to that of Justin Beiber and his massive following of Beliebers (most of whom HE is not following back). Being popular just isn’t as cool if you “like” as many people as those who “like” you. You need to be snubbing a large enough percentage of those people in order for it to be legit popularity.

So for the influencers who are concerned about their ratio, it just requires a small adjustment to the follow-unfollower strategy. Rather than unfollowing the people who don’t wind up following back, they just unfollow everyone, including the people who were nice enough to follow back.

Another mechanism for growing followers without breaking rules is through the use of auto-engagement tools, where an influencer can auto-engage with certain hashtags. In return, those people who received the engagement will typically follow back or reciprocate.

There are many ways to speed up the growth of a social following. Some involve tools. Some just involve focused effort. And…how does one even define foul-play here? Followers don’t just materialize out of thin air, so a certain amount of effort is going to go into growing one’s follower count.

 

Conclusion

This is the first post in a series of three on the topic of Vanity Metrics. Hopefully it gave you a nice overview of everything that’s possible in terms of the manipulation of an influencer’s metrics. It should also arm you with the knowledge of what to look out for when choosing influencers to work with.

The second post in this group discusses which bloggers will have accurate Alexa/Compete rankings and which ones won’t, plus why. We did a whole bunch of experiments, so you can read all about that here.

The third post will bring everything to a close. Now that you know what to watch out for, and what metrics to avoid when finding your influencers, you now need to know how you should go about picking your influencers if you don’t have stats like follower counts and traffic to base your decisions on. The third post covers all of that, so stay tuned!

 

The Costs Of Influencer Marketing Campaigns and Sponsored Posts

* This post was last update August 10, 2018 *

This article is the first in a series of posts I’ll be sharing around the questions of cost, ROI and strategy. I want to address these pain points as they come up time and time again when brands and PR pros are getting started with influencer marketing.

If you go online and google “influencer marketing” there are loads and loads of posts that talk about how great it is…and why you need to be doing it.  Influencer marketing has been so useful for driving brand awareness and engagement that some marketers have even wondered if we’re  witnessing a sort of “influencer marketing bubble” that’s bound to cave in on itself this year.

Still, six years after Instagram influencers first showed up on our radars, it’s still hard to find content that will give you in-depth strategies around this growing digital marketing technique.

Exactly how does one navigate the still-murky waters of influencer marketing? And why haven’t more brands been able to successfully and consistently get a handle on how to leverage it?

The landscape is changing. Fast. In 2018, we saw the FTC making updates to endorsement regulations (this time in plain English) in the US. We saw the EU putting up a virtual electric fence around its residents with GDPR to keep marketers from coming in and gathering (and hoarding) private data. We saw the UAE institute influencer licenses that require anyone who accepts payment to endorse products online to be licensed. And brands like Procter & Gamble and Unilever are soapboxing all over the place (that’s a win for influencer marketing, by the way because it will force social media platforms to provide better tools for analyzing influencers- we hope).

Where influencer marketing was once the wild child of marketing strategies, it’s now matured to the point where companies and governments are pushing more and more toward creating regulations and standards.

And yet, there are still tens of thousands of searches every single month from people trying to find information about how to roll out and measure influencer marketing campaigns.

To pay or not to pay? That is a questions brands are still asking.  If you’re one of those people who says, “F-off” to any blogger who asks for compensation then you should definitely read this!  

OR, maybe you simply didn’t realize that bloggers charge. If that’s the case, I’m going to give you a run-down of what to expect so that you can plan your strategy accordingly.

 

 

The Pitfalls of Influencer Marketing

To give you some context, I’m the co-founder of an influencer marketing platform called The Shelf.  I talk to new customers each day about various influencer marketing strategies and techniques that they should consider because we’ve seen that if someone is totally new to the influencer marketing space, they’ll almost always fall into the same pitfalls.

One pitfall I see over and over again is that our customers don’t realize that blogger rates vary for sponsored posts.

For our customers who are new to influencer marketing, this is how their first attempt at setting up some campaigns typically goes:

• First, they go straight to our search engine.

• Without applying any search filters, they’ll start at the very top of our list and send out collaboration emails to blogger-celebrities like Lauren Conrad.

• They don’t mention compensation of any sort, aside from gifting her a t-shirt…or some shoes…(whatever it is they want her to blog about).

• And then in return for the free product, they want her to endorse their brand in front of her massive audience of more than 6M followers Instagram.

• They’ll send out maybe 20-30 emails like that to these top-level bloggers and celebrities.

• Then, a few days later, we’ll get an angry email from that customer telling us that none of these bloggers are responding to them.

The problem is, they’re reaching out to bloggers who are simply out of their league. That sounds a little harsh but it’s true. If you’re a small brand looking for newspaper coverage, you might be able to achieve that in your local newspaper without much effort but you’ll have a rough time getting coverage on the front cover of the New York Times.  This same concept applies to blogger coverage.

For most of these mega-bloggers, when a brand sends them an email, it’s not even going to the actual blogger.  It’s being re-routed through their agent.   And these agents are getting bombarded with requests every single day from thousands of other small brands.  They can’t respond to all of them.

And this is a hard lesson that many of our newer customers learn.  They’ll blast through a list of 20-30 bloggers without having any luck.  And then comes their inevitable angry email, after which, I’ll quickly hop on a call with them to come up with a better strategy.  From there, they’re off to the races!

Well, it occurred to me today that there’s really no need for these angry emails because we should be helping you BEFORE you get started.  And I’m going to do that by telling you everything you need to know about payments and targeting, right here in this blog post!  Yay!

Plus, there are two more articles after this one that deal with other common pitfalls.  So you’ll be all set!

Reason #1 Bloggers Charge for a Sponsored Post: The time/effort required for a collaboration.

There are a number of variables here, so lets quickly walk through them:

1. Brands tend to be super-picky. They want the blogger to mention a variety of key points. They want their items displayed in a certain way. We’ve seen that our customers go back and forth with a blogger an average of 23 times before the post goes live. That’s a lot of time spent on just emailing back and forth about the details! (Some customers, we’ve seen go back and forth more than 60 times, which is just extreme. I think I would tell a brand to go take a hike at that point. But that’s just me.)

2. After the details have been hammered out, then contracts have to be signed, invoices supplied, and payments made.

3. At that point the blogger is finally able to start working on the post.

4. For most verticals, photos are a super important part of the post. So planning is required from the blogger’s standpoint. In fashion, what photos will the sponsored product get paired with? Where will the photos be taken? (While location doesn’t sound important, it is! Good bloggers (we’ve seen) don’t take their photos in the same location each day. Just like the unique outfits and products they’re showing, the setting gets swapped out too. It keeps things fresh and interesting for her regular readers. When a blogger doesn’t switch things up…regular readers find themselves saying, “Oh, there’s that damn porch again…Look, she has a holiday wreath on her door now. Lame!”

5. Many bloggers hire a professional photographer to take these inspirational photos of your products in action.

6. Once the photos are done, then there’s editing.

7. Plus the writing of the post.

8. Finally when everything is live, the blogger will need to work her social media magic and spread the post throughout her social networks.

9. AND finally that blogger will hopefully be following up with any comments she receives on her blog or social networks.

It’s a big rig-a-marole.  

All of those tasks listed above are reason enough for compensation.  Would you ever hire a contractor and rattle off that same laundry-list of tasks that you need them to do (and do well)… and then tell them, “Hey, for all your trouble, here’s a blouse.”?

Most of the people we talk to have no idea how much time goes into these posts.  But once they realize what all is entailed, the compensation seems a little more reasonable of a request.

 

One thing to note though: Despite all of that effort involved in putting together a sponsored post, smaller bloggers who are trying to get their blog off the ground often don’t charge.  And this makes sense from their perspective. If they’re wanting to start monetizing their blog they need to have some brand experience under their belt.  They sort of take an “intern” style approach to the jobs they take on…they do free work in exchange for the experience and resume building.  This works out for the brand (if the brand is on a super super tight budget)… because they are able to get some exposure.  But the exposure isn’t really enough to justify a payment.  So the brand is able to stick within their tight budget.

 

Reason #2: Supply and Demand

Yay for a little Econ 101. Supply and demand.  As soon as the blogger has a little bit of an audience, brands will start to notice that they get traffic from her post as well as some purchases here and there.  Other brands start to see that this blogger is working with brands and they decide to get in on the action. Before you know it this blogger has posts lined up all week.  She’s running herself ragged doing free work.  And then it dawns on her, “Hey, I can start charging now!”  And so she does.  

 

 

Demand for a blogger just continues to increase as she becomes more well-known.  She gets more traffic and followers…more brands discover her and her workload grows along with this. All of a sudden, her week is once again filled up with jobs (even though she’s charging $200 per post)…so she raises her prices.

Now, when a brand comes in and says, “Will you cover my products, and, by the way, I NEVER pay bloggers,”  she says, “Suck it!” And makes a gesture of some sort.  Probably.  Her schedule is already filled up with brands paying her $400 per post.  Why would she make an exception for your company?  Be honest, here.  Would you advise your blogger friend to do the post for free if she could easily get a few hundred bucks from another brand willing to pay her what she’s worth?

Another thing that I don’t really think brands realize is the volume of requests that even the mid-sized bloggers are getting.  We’ve spoken to a number of bloggers about this who are in our network and they’ve mentioned that by the time they hit the 10,000 follower-count on Instagram, they were getting 200 emails a day from brands as well as fans.  That’s a ton of mail to sift through…and suddenly their little blog has turned into a much more full-time effort.

 

Two hundred emails is a lot, and when you start considering the amount of time that it takes you to sift through 200 emails, you’ll realize that only special emails with good (and targeted) opportunities will be getting that blogger’s attention, let alone a reply.

Many brands simply start out with the I’m-not-paying mentality…but once they understand the going-rates, then they rearrange their budget.

This isn’t always possible for all brands.  Some brands are in super-bootstrap mode and payment isn’t an option.  So I’d like to mention that even without a budget, you can still get coverage on some of these mid-sized blogs…you’ll just need to put in more work.  We’ve seen many bloggers do pro-bono work, but if you’re going to go that route, get ready to do a lot more outreach because your response rate will be significantly lower.

And, when doing your outreach, you need to be aware that if a blogger decides to work with you for free (despite her typical rates being much higher), you should know what a huge favor you’re getting, and acknowledge this.  Because, as you can see above, these bloggers with a large following have worked extremely hard to grow their audiences, and the amount of time that they put into their blog is huge.  Way higher than what most people expect.  Getting free coverage when others are paying is huge.  So let them know your appreciation.  And that you understand what a huge favor it is.

One exception to that above statement is when blogger-agents are brought into the mix because agents do a pretty good job of weeding out people who they don’t think will pay.

And while I’m sure it’s not completely unheard of, not too many of them allow pro-bono work to pass through the gates.  Agents get paid a percentage of what the blogger is charging.  And if a blogger is handing out free work, then the agent doesn’t get paid either.  This is more of a speculative opinion though, and if I’m wrong here, I would love to get a little more insight into this in the comments!

(SIDENOTE : How do you know if a blogger has an agent? Most bloggers mention that agent on their Contact or Collaborations page.  They will usually request that collaboration requests go to the agent’s email instead of theirs.)

 

A Little Commentary on Angry Brands Who Refuse to Pay

A little side story: I did some freelance design work for a startup a few years ago.  They were in business for about four months before they decided to call it quits.  And I remember suggesting influencer marketing to the CEO when he was telling me that he was throwing in the towel.  He instantly got all bent out of shape and rambled off his hatred for blogging…“All these damn mommy bloggers…no one does free coverage.  Why would I pay for a blog post?”

 

It struck me as odd that the whole payment-issue would get him so worked up.  I remember thinking: if these blogger’s were charging, it might be worth a few experiments to at least see if collaborations with them brought good results.  Especially because he didn’t have any problem paying for Google Ads.  But when bloggers ask for money…watch out.

And now that I’m working with customers every day who are new to this type of marketing, I see that many people get just as angry as this guy did…some get way angrier.  I spoke to this truly irate man who owns a high-end men’s store online.  He was dropping F-bombs right, left, and center…and I’m sure after our call, he had to go lie down or take blood-pressure pills or something.

Another founder that I spoke to this past Friday (who is launching a jewelry brand) told me a long story about how they’ve tried 2 different PR agencies, and how she literally has nothing to show for the thousands of dollars that she spent.  When I brought up bloggers.  She said, “No way!  They all charge, and they don’t guarantee any results.”  Which is an odd thing to gripe about, considering that’s the exact same scenario that she encountered with the two PR agencies who brought no results…

Except, bloggers don’t usually charge unless they’re generating results for other brands.  AND, the bloggers who she would need to target would only be a fraction of the cost of what those PR agencies charged her…  so it seems like it would at least be worth an experiment.  Instead, she’s planning on finding a third PR agency.  Maybe the third-time will be the charm…  who knows.

 

Anyway.  Many people get worked up about paying bloggers.  And after talking to enough angry people, I think I have it figured out.  These brands feel like their product is truly awesome! And why should they PAY a blogger to ACT like they like it…that blogger should like it because it’s great!

And while that makes total sense…the two reasons I discussed above are the reasons why this logic doesn’t hold water:

Time / Effort

and

Supply / Demand.

The reason you want to work with these bloggers is because they’re not a bunch of sellouts who talk about any old product that comes their way.  They only work with brands that they love! And they only endorse products that they think will truly resonate with their audience who trusts their guidance.

Paying a super-relevant and quality blogger to endorse your product does not make your product any less awesome.  Getting anyone to cover your product is great validation! Regardless of whether or not money is involved.  Payment is going to be a factor when supply and demand has kicked in.

 

Analogies!

In case you’re not on the same page yet, here is a fun analogy-story to help you process the idea (assuming you’re one of those angry brand-owners that I was discussing above).

I went to Portfolio Center, a graphic design school. Every week we’d have a two-hour seminar with a designer that was famous (or at least kind of famous) who would come and present their work.  Well, one of the speakers was huge!!  Paula Scher came in and was talking about how she designed the Citibank logo.  She did it on the back of a napkin.  And the client was mad that she charged x number of thousands of dollars for a 15 minute sketch.  And she said she was shocked by this.  Because in her mind, they’re not paying for that 15 minutes.  They’re paying for the last 30+ years of her experience that allowed her to do brilliant work like that in 15 minutes.

With bloggers, you’re not just paying for the hours that it takes them to put together your post. You’re paying them for the years that they’ve spent cultivating, nurturing, and growing their very targeted audience.

 

 

Ooo, oo, ooh!  I have another one.  Why are Super Bowl ads so expensive?  If no one cared about the Super Bowl those ads would sell for the same rate that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reruns get. In 2018, about 103 million people watched Super Bowl LII. It’s more national holiday than sporting event.

Paying for a huge blogger with millions of followers is the equivalent of Bud Light shelling out cash each year for the Super Bowl spot.

Perhaps that’s a stretch…

 

The Bottom (Blogger) Line

In the end, you need to make your own decision about whether or not to pay a blogger.  If you simply can’t get past the payment thing (whether it be for budgetary constraints or just merely out of principle), then try your luck with finding bloggers who don’t charge.

Once those campaigns are live, check to see how much time you spent and if your returns were worth the amount of time and effort put in, plus the cost of gifted products.  The key to doing influencer marketing on a super small budget is being creative!!  And there are ways to do this with money-constraints!  We’ve done it ourselves with a seriously tight budget!

Lastly, once you figure out where you land on the payment debate, your next step will be to define the strategy for your first campaigns… as well as creative ways to kickstart this marketing channel.  And I will be sharing some great insights on measuring ROI, how to create campaigns that tie back to your ROI, and lastly, how to optimize those campaigns once you have some analytics to measure. Stay tuned!

 

Updated July 2018

Influencer marketing ROI is so important to understand before you get started with campaigns because it defines your success. In fact, it’s probably the one thing brands struggle with the most. Unfortunately, selecting the blogger with the highest follower count doesn’t always guarantee success. You need to be more strategic than that.

Influencer marketing campaigns take a lot of strategizing, experimenting, and optimization as you go along. In this post, we’ll give you key takeaways for getting started with your first campaigns, how to develop your strategy, how much to budget, how to select bloggers, and what influencer marketing ROI to expect. Let’s do this!

What ROI Can I Expect With Influencer Marketing?

 

 

We’re big fans of influencer marketing (i.e. advertising via bloggers or social influencers). First and foremost, working with influencers gives you, as a brand, the much needed validation from the movers-and-shakers within your space. This is huge because consumers won’t just take your word for it when you tell them that YOUR brand is totally awesome and that they should buy YOUR products.  When you tell them anything about YOUR product, it will always sound biased.

Because it is.

And literally everyone out there has been burned by a brand who lies about the quality of their product.  Now, instead of just believing what brands have to say, consumers do their own research by going online, in search of UNbiased opinions from real people, just like them. Adweek reports that 47% of Millennials and 36% of Baby Boomers trust user-generated content over content created by brands. You can grab tons of stats on social media and influencer marketing (we penned 111 of them right here) and the conclusions will be the same: People rely on digital content and social media to help them make buying decisions:

• 37% of consumers use social media as their go-to before making a purchase

• 74% of C-level and executive-level buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions

• Half of Pinterest users have made a purchase after seeing a Promoted Pin

• 34% of consumers don’t even mind if they’re reading sponsored content, as long as the content is useful

 According to the PwC Total Retail Survey 2016, 45% of respondents said that user-generated content like reviews, comments, and customer feedback influences their shopping behavior.

Just to get you caught up, this is the second post in a series of posts that we’ve written, dealing with Blogger Payments, ROI Expectations, How to Set Up Your First Campaign, Optimizing Your Strategy, and more.  If you’re totally new to influencer marketing and you missed our previous post, you should probably read that first.

To give you some context, I’m one of the founders of an influencer marketing platform called The Shelf.  We work with a lot of small brands and startups, many of whom are totally new to this type of marketing.  And after speaking with tons of small brands over the last few months, we’ve noticed a few common misconceptions that cause brands to have a rocky start with influencer marketing.

In this post I’m going to walk you through a step-by-step “influencer marketing kick-off strategy”, so that you’ll know exactly what to do when you roll out your first campaign.

 

 

What can you expect in terms of Initial ROI?

When you get started, a great way to think about Influencer Marketing is to compare it to Google Adwords (or any other popular marketing channel) as there are a number of similarities.

1. The first similarity is ROI expectations. When we talk to our customers about their gameplan, the first thing we dive into is their ROI expectations and goals, which, we’ve seen, vary widely depending on the customer. It’s helpful to first understand the ROI of their OTHER marketing efforts (e.g. Google Ads, retargeting, Outbrain, social ads, etc.) Realistically speaking, there shouldn’t be a huge gap between your current cost-to-acquire and the goals that you’re aiming for with your influencer marketing campaigns.

2. The second similarity is the process a brand goes through when jump-starting a new marketing channel. Most new marketing efforts require a little bit of experimentation before you’re able to validate that the ROI is going to be enough to warrant continued investment. One of our personal examples is with Adwords. We started dabbling in this about nine months ago. We started out very slowly and found that after spending 20 dollars every day for one week we had one brand sign up and pay $100. So we actually managed to break even right from the get-go. That customer who we acquired has been on the platform now for eight months, so the $100 investment in Google Adwords really paid off…we’ve made $800 (and counting) from that brand. Despite our initial good luck with Adwords, after a few more weeks we realized that our lucky first week was more of a fluke. Our cost-per-acquisition shot up after that. And we’ve since concluded that we really sort of suck at Adwords. Over the last nine months, we were never able to turn those numbers around. I think at this point we just about break even with our Adword spend. But that isn’t an ROI to really be proud of.

3. That brings me to the third similarity. Google doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the ROI you’re shooting for with Adwords. All they guarantee is that you will be paying a certain amount of money for every click. Very few marketing channels will come with an ROI guarantee. All you can do is set goals for yourself…run experiments, analyze the results, and then optimize. The same goes for influencer marketing. There are no guarantees… but with a sound strategy, you’ll be able to make the ROI really count!

Even though influencer marketing is similar to all of the other forms of marketing, we’ve noticed that many people don’t treat it like a typical marketing channel.  Expectations for influencer marketing ROI tend to be much MUCH higher for some reason.  Additionally, we’ve seen that many of our customers have really high budgets for Adwords, social ads, pr events, etc., even if those channels are still in the experimentation phase yet the budget for influencer marketing is significantly smaller.  I’m not totally sure why that is.

I can draw on one extreme example that happened a few months ago.  I spoke with a founder who was selling eclectic-hipster-esque pants for men.  He mentioned that up until now, they had only tried Facebook ads for marketing these hip-and-funky pants. And for every customer who put a pair of pants in the cart, it cost them $80 in Facebook ads.  80 DOLLARS!  Plus, he wasn’t even tracking real purchases.  That $80 was just to get someone to put an item in the cart!!  Crazy, right?

Well, that founder then put us in touch with his marketing director because he wanted to explore influencer marketing as a new acquisition channel. The marketing guy was a little nutty…and he was very adamant about the ROI that he would expect if he were to use our platform for influencer marketing.  He wanted a 10X improvement over his embarrassing Facebook returns.  In all honesty, I’m sure that that ROI was totally possible, but our company doesn’t actually make promises on ROI because we’re a self-serve platform (hence the low price).  Anyway, that marketing guy was totally rude, so we wished him good luck with his hipster-pants and $80 Facebook ads…and then we peaced out.

I’m not really sure why ROI expectations for influencer marketing are so much higher than other marketing channels.  But my guess would be that with influencer marketing you’re not working with some huge corporation like Google or Facebook.  You’re dealing with individual bloggers.  And to top that off, most brands are under the impression that bloggers are LOOKING for content to blog about, so when the brand offers to send free products, they’re under the impression that they’re doing that blogger a favor.  But that isn’t really the case when a blogger has a decent-sized following (and we’ve covered the pricing expectations pretty extensively in this post if you’d like to read up on why bloggers charge).  You should make sure you have a handle on the payment thing before proceeding.

We usually try to encourage new customers to set their INITIAL ROI goals to something similar as the results that they are achieving via other marketing channels, like Adwords and social ads.  If you approach influencer marketing with proper expectations, you’ll begin to see the true value of this type of advertising…you just need to get past the experimental stage.  Almost everyone we’ve worked with is able to get their influencer marketing efforts to the point where they’re outperforming all of their other marketing channels.  Influencer marketing is great!!  It just takes a little more work and creativity to get it to that stage.

 

Start slowly.  Experiment.  Optimize.

As we touched on above, influencer marketing is like any other form of paid advertising, it’s just more trustworthy.  As Rustin Banks says, “Influencer marketing content tends to be more helpful and informative than other types of advertising.”  But here’s the similarity…just like any other form of advertising, influencer marketing is a gamble.  It can be completely hit-or-miss.  Sometimes you’ll work with a blogger who will send you so many purchases that you’re LITERALLY swimming in cash.  But then other times you might work with a blogger who seems like a very targeted bet and your expectations will fall short.  With this being the case,  it’s a good idea to begin your influencer marketing experiments similar to the way you start with Google Adwords.  Initial Adword experiments are nothing more than trial and error…followed by periodic optimizations, over the course of a few months.  Because of this ramp-up period and learning curve, most people start using Adwords with very small, scattered campaigns.  Essentially, the spray-and-pray method.  Or, “throwing noodles at the wall to see what sticks”.  You’ll basically experiment with a few campaigns.  You’ll monitor the results, and then you’ll adjust.  Rinse.  Repeat.

 

The same goes for influencer marketing.  You need to do a decent handful of initial campaigns in order to test out a few variables.  In these initial campaigns, you might work with a few small bloggers, some mid-sized bloggers, a handful of bloggers with heavy engagement, some who charge, some who are free…you just need to spread out and test the waters in as many ways as possible.  As long as you choose bloggers whose audiences matches your target demographic, you’ll most likely see some pretty decent ROI from your initial experiment.  AND, as you continue working with influencers, you’ll find yourself refining your strategy, and improving your ROI with each set of campaigns.

The worst thing you could do is put all of your eggs in one basket right away (by paying one blogger $5000) and then hoping for the best.  Run this first experiment with multiple bloggers…and just get your feet wet.  (You’d never run just one campaign on Google Adwords and chunk 5000 dollars into it on its first day, would you?)  Influencer marketing requires that same kind of caution.  Then, once you feel confident in your ability to pick out the right blogger for this $5000 investment, go for it!  Bloggers who charge that much are ABLE to charge that much because they’re typically worth it.  Brands wouldn’t be paying them that much if they were losing money on the deal.

Before moving on, let’s just review a few key points.

The goals of your first set of campaigns are going to be different from the campaigns that you’ll run later.  This first set of campaigns has very specific purposes:

1. First, there’s a pretty hefty learning curve with influencer marketing, so your first set of campaigns should teach you the ropes: how to target the RIGHT bloggers that will really drive high ROI…what outreach emails will be successful...what the going-rates are for blogger collaborations…how to streamline your process, etc.

2. Influencer marketing is hit-or-miss. What works for one brand, might not work for yours. So you need to experiment with a range of bloggers, some small, some medium, some large, some with super engaged Instagram followings, some with tons of blog comments, etc. This first set of campaigns is all about that AB testing.

3. After you run campaigns on a variety of blogger types, you then need to analyze the results. What worked? What didn’t work? Where can you improve? Did all blogger types work out in terms of ROI? If not, which types will you target next time, and which ones will you not pursue?

4. Getting a decent ROI is also important. While it’s not your top priority during this first set of campaigns, it would be great if you can get enough ROI to at least break even. If you are very strategic in your planning, this should be more than possible!

 

Sample strategy for marketers who have never run campaigns

There are many variables that will factor into this initial strategy: budget, time constraints, campaign objectives, and brand type…so stay tuned for another blog post that breaks down how your strategy will vary based on these variables.

For now, to keep things simple, I’m going to walk through an example of what your first-time strategy might look like if you’re a small-ish brand with a budget of $1000-$2000.

Budgeting

First things first, you need to need to figure out your budget for these blogger campaigns.

One thing that many brands forget to consider is labor costs.  Who is going to be setting up these campaigns?  You?  An intern?  An employee?  If you’re paying someone to do this, you’ll definitely need to allot money for their paycheck because this isn’t a quick process.  SO, I’d like to take this opportunity to do a quick plug for our platform.    If you are planning on paying someone to do the setup, you should use a site like ours, The Shelf.  We shorten this process significantly, and we help you find far more TARGETED people than you would manually because we have 200,000 bloggers listed along with a kick-ass search to help you narrow down to the most targeted set.  And, if you want to look at it from a cost-benefit analysis, our platform will be cheaper than your employee or intern.

Everyone will handle this labor issue differently, so let’s ignore labor costs for now.  For this example strategy, you’re going to be setting up 10 campaigns and your budget of $1000-2000 is reserved for the cost of the actual campaigns.    Since you’re treating these first campaigns as an experiment, you’re going to pick out blogs of varying sizes:  a few small, a few mid-sized, and 1-2 larger bloggers.  Therefore, your budget will not be divided up evenly between these 10 bloggers.

The way that blog-size is defined will vary from one brand to the next.  If you’re a small brand, you might define a large blogger as someone who is charging $500 per post (because that’s a pretty hefty investment for a small brand).  The term “large” is relative.  Your “large” blogs will probably be considered “small” blogs to a large global brand.

Why do you want to experiment with blogs of different sizes?  Well, this goes back to the misconceptions that many brands have when they are new to influencer marketing.  We cover this quite a bit in our previous post, but in short, many brands come in with the notion of “I only want to work with bloggers who don’t charge.”  Then these brands run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to set up 30 campaigns with very new bloggers, only to discover that only a few of those campaigns actually generate an ROI of any sort.  When brands begin experimenting with bloggers who charge, that’s when interesting stuff really starts to happen.  BUT, you seriously shouldn’t take my word for it.  You should do this initial experiment to see which blogs perform well and which do not.  You might find that the two larger bloggers who you work with wind up sending you 95% of your traffic.  OR you might find that it’s the hyper-targeted mid-sized bloggers who do really well for you.  Your results are going to vary a lot depending on your brand and your specific goals…so it’s best to be thorough with your AB testing right from the get-go.  It will save you so much time, money, and energy in the long-run!

Understanding How Bloggers Come Up With Rates

One thing that makes budgeting difficult is the fact that blogger’s don’t typically broadcast their rates (you have to request them).  And blogger rates vary a LOT!  According to Ajaz Nanji of MarketingProfs, about 60% of bloggers charge fees to work with brands or publish sponsored content. Fees can range anywhere from $25 to $500, depending on the marketing activity (giveaway, review, online event, posting sponsored content or blogging on the brand’s behalf).

In our own experience, we’ve seen that certain verticals have significantly higher rates than others.  Fashion bloggers are generally more expensive than other verticals.  So if you’re in fashion, be prepared for those higher rates.  If you’re in food, or travel, rates are a little cheaper (generally speaking).  If you’re in marketing, or business…we’ve seen that there are many bloggers who don’t charge anything.

Second, bloggers set their own rates.  Many are very fair about this and base their rates off of market-value.  But there are others who drastically overcharge.  And many who don’t realize their own worth and therefore undercharge.  Since bloggers set their own rates, it’s difficult for brands to target effectively.  As an added annoyance, it’s really difficult to know whether or not the rate that you get quoted is actually fair unless you’ve been doing influencer marketing for a long time.  So it just requires extra time from you to understand what’s fair and whether or not your investment will likely pay off.

Conducting Blogger Rate Research

Since bloggers are so secretive about their rates (and often quote on a case-by-case basis), figuring out how to target the bloggers within your price range will usually turn into an annoying little project.  But the good news is that you’ll only need to do it once.  As you start your outreach, you’ll want to cast a wide net.  Find bloggers that cover a wide spectrum of social-following-sizes.  And send them an email asking them if they’d be interested in collaborating with you…For the ones who respond, figure out what their rates are.  Most have a media kit they can send along to you with pricing information or base rates.  Some bloggers will be way outside of your price range.  Many won’t respond at all, so you might need to keep at this activity for awhile until you have enough data to really understand the “going-rate”.

As you progress with your outreach, you’ll notice trends.  If you look at metrics like blog traffic, blog post engagement (comment counts), social followers on each of their networks, and engagement on social posts, you’ll start to see that certain thresholds will indicate a certain price range.

These trends might look something like this:

• Bloggers with a social following of less than 2000 followers might charge around $100 or nothing at all.

• Bloggers with 15-30 comments might charge around $300.

• Bloggers with 50+ comments might be well over $500. Some cross into the thousands.

• Bloggers with more than a million followers are probably out of your league.

• Bloggers with more than 50,000 followers on a social platform typically work with agents and charge over $1000.

But there can be tons of outliers…for example: a blogger that does professional photography and editing might charge you more for their time even if their follower count isn’t skyrocketing…in this case, you might even be getting two professionals for the price of one (blogger and photographer). Or perhaps you stumble across a blogger who has a really small social following and charges more than you’d expect. It might be that the followers she DOES have are die-hard groupies of her blog and whenever that blogger mentions a product, her 1000 followers immediately ‘add to cart’. So, if a blogger’s rate seems outside the ‘norm’ it might make sense to dig a little deeper. There might be a good reason for the charge.

Again, the trends I’ve listed above are going to vary WIDELY so don’t base your assumptions on the ones I’ve outlined!!!  Depending on your particular vertical, as well as the bloggers who you are targeting, your results will be unique to your own outreach.  So do your research.  And just keep track of these metrics so that you can identify trends like those listed above.  These trends will help you target more effectively as you continue your outreach.  *Many newer brands will come at this with follower requirements already sort of mapped out.  For example…you might be inclined to pass over any blogger who has less than 20,000 followers on any of the social networks.  But this can be shortsighted.  You could be overlooking quality people…and you might be setting yourself up for failure.  Instead, cast a wide net at first, until you have a firm grasp of what you’re looking for.  Once you’ve gathered data on the space, as well as the going rates, you’ll be able to really hone in on the bloggers that will make the most sense for your budget and campaign goals.

Blogger Selection and Outreach

When you start setting up your 10 campaigns, you’ll quickly discover that bloggers aren’t the most responsive bunch.  Most brands experience response rates of around 1 in 10 (on average).

Knowing that response rates are low, it’s a good idea to start out with a pretty large list of targets.  And the word “targets” is key!  It’s super important to make sure that your chosen bloggers are the right match for your brand, from a demographic standpoint.  If you’re a high-end maternity store, you’re not going to want to work with a punky teen whose favorite brand is Nasty Gal, would you?  Her audience would not be receptive to your products at all.  You can read up more on targeting in our next post.

With the average response rate of 1 in 10, you can estimate that you’ll be sending out 100 emails when you’re setting up those 10 campaigns.  It’s important to NOT send out an email blast to all 100 bloggers at once.  Setting up this first set of campaigns is a great time to learn and refine your influencer marketing skills, so pace yourself.  And be observant. One thing that many people forget to do is AB test their outreach emails.  As with any emails, certain subject lines will just resonate better.  The same goes for the actual messages.  So test these out.  Try some longer emails, some shorter ones, some with a product shot, some with a vague and inspirational subject line, etc.  You can also check out another one of our posts about Outreach Do’s and Don’ts here.  It was written by an actual blogger about her experiences and preferences when it comes to brands contacting her.

As you get responses back, you’ll start making your selections, and these selections will be made according to how you break down your budget…so it’s really pretty easy.   Using our example budget of $1-2K, you’ll be setting up some campaigns with a few smaller bloggers who don’t charge you anything, then you’ll select a bunch of mid-sized bloggers (charging between $50-$200 per post), and then, with the remainder of the budget, you’ll select one or two larger bloggers (who might charge $400-$500).   Again, breaking these bloggers down into groups will ensure that you thoroughly test out your options…because it’s important to figure out what groups to concentrate on (based on the ROI from these first campaigns).

Final To-Dos

Depending on your goals, you’ll need to figure out how to structure your campaigns.  We have another post here that talks about how to get creative with these campaigns…you can do sponsored posts, giveaways, social media endorsements, etc.  So check that out if you’d like to experiment further. But if you’re really just wanting to keep things simple for this first round, just ask the bloggers who you’re working with for their creative recommendations.  Let them know what ROI you’d like to achieve…and I’m sure they can give you ideas on how to get the most bang for your buck!  They are the experts when it comes to their blog and their audience.

Lastly, after you’ve decided on details, you’ll pay them and send out your product.  Once the post goes up, you’ll need to monitor and analyze the results.  And that’s one of the most important parts of this whole process.  These results are going to dictate what your next set of campaigns will look like.  And even after a small experiment like this, you’ll have meaningful results on which to base your next moves.

 

Concluding Thoughts

Influencer marketing has a pretty steep learning curve.  And the first experiment is always going to make you feel like a fish out of water.

 

But if you are strategic with your first set of campaigns, you can overcome that learning curve in one shot.  And you’ll be ready to hit the ground running with your next set!  After that, it’s time to optimize, optimize, optimize, which is the topic of our next post!

If you’re getting ready to run your first campaign, you should definitely read through the first post in this series of articles.  We cover everything you need to know about why bloggers charge for sponsored posts and product placements.  And stay tuned for more to follow.

 

It may seem like Halloween is a holiday that will really only benefit snack companies and brands like Costume City or Spencer’s Gifts, but that’s not the case!

If you think about it, Halloween is the one day a year when droves of people go gallivanting into the night posed as anyone other than who they really are. So, your marketing should follow suit.

If you’re marketing a brand that is anything but Halloweeny, it’s time to think outside the box. Believe it or not, this particular holiday is giving you the opportunity to really stand out. You won’t be fighting every other brand in your space for customer attention (at least not the way you will in the next couple of weeks).

There are all sorts of marketing tactics available for you to use – banner ads (super-popular with Internet users back in 1998), billboard/subway ads (a nice, cheap option whenever you want to blend in with the doldrum of everyday life on the L train), social media, paid social, Google ads, and the list goes on. You’re probably aware of the basics, and maybe even employing some of these mediums in your current marketing efforts.

Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is an option we don’t see many brands utilizing during Halloween. But Halloween is the perfect event to tap into the creativity that only influencers know how to bring to the table.

So… while the first few days of October have come and gone, it’s not too late to do some last-minute influencer marketing for Halloween. You just need the right strategy. If you’re not feeling up to the challenge, you can always consider outsourcing your campaigns to a partner who’s able to execute quickly, effectively, and creatively.

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What we cover in this Influencer Marketing post about Halloween

This post will walk you through the two major stages of influencer marketing:

PART 1 – Strategy: This is everything that happens before your campaign starts, plus some crazy-creative ideas for you to try out in your own campaigns.

PART 2 – Execution: Everything you need to roll out your campaign in a way that will generate the highest possible ROI.

So, let’s get to it.

PART 1 : A Whole Bunch of Strategy Possibilities

We’ve run hundreds of influencer marketing campaigns over the years, and strategy has proven time and again to be the most important part of your campaign.

Your strategy reaches well beyond whatever theme you choose. It sets the tone, as well as the outcome, of your entire influencer marketing campaign.

Here’s the first set of questions you want your team to answer to help shape your campaign.

• Who exactly is your target audience? Are there other, less obvious, audiences you can target that will be just as receptive (and potentially much easier and cheaper to reach)?

• What types of posts will get your target demographic excited?

• What types of posts will have the ability to stand out amongst an influencer’s feed?

• Who are the influencers that you need to target? Who currently has the attention and trust of your target demographic?

• Which social networks do they spend the most time on?

The above list of starter questions will help us build the foundation of your campaign. You can use this same list to start building any influencer marketing campaigns you run in the future.

Now, with a holiday like Halloween, developing the right strategy is a bit more complex than just putting your wares in front of customers because Christmas is upon us and they’re already shopping. Plus, most brands sell products that are not readily associated with Halloween purchases. If that’s you, you must be strategic about how to be interesting, creative, and engaging without looking like a just another sponsored post.

You shouldn’t be fretting right now. If you are, stop it. This is a pretty exciting problem to solve. And developing more intricate strategies like this, is one of the things that we really pride ourselves in.

We always think outside-of-the-box.

Probably because we hate boxes…

And the office rescue-pug is literally terrified of them. No joke.

For brands with non-Halloween products, we want to offer a short list of influencer marketing options for you to consider. Each of these options are meant to integrate your products into Halloween posts without them feeling inorganic and “sponsored”.

Strategy #1: Make your products cool by association

People who wear costumes will don certain clothing items and accessories that aren’t really Halloween-specific. For example, most people aren’t buying shoes for the sole purpose of completing their Halloween ensemble. Aside from weddings, no one is really trying to buy shoes that only have a lifespan of one night.

Look at the picture below by @hieucow. She has taken a pair of strappy sandals and paired them with a kick-ass costume. The shoes instantly become as enchanting as her costume.

This method of integrating your products is a relatively easy option, and would be applicable to almost any fashion, shoe, or accessory – even bag brands… for toting around all that candy.

The only part of this strategy that will become time consuming is the process required when selecting your influencers. You need to select influencers who not only match your brand image, but who are also planning to wear a costume that will really make your products pop. If you’re a brand selling sexy dresses, you don’t really want to be working with an influencer who has decided it would be funny to dress like Bojack Horseman, right?

Thing is – we’re pushing the Halloween deadline. Millennials all over the country are already combing their social feeds and eyeing a product or two on Amazon to find the perfect inspiration for an epic Halloween 2017 costume. You need to make sure you have access to tons and tons of perfectly matched influencers, who are also planning a suitable costume. And you’ll also need to make sure you have the manpower to find and reach out to everyone in order to perform this amazing feat of matchmaking in October… for an October campaign.

We’ve got you covered.

Strategy #2: Atypical Product Integration

We see a lot of brands working with DIY Influencers as well as creators lately. It’s an interesting approach because this group of influencers is especially good at showing their audiences unique and effective use cases for products they would normally never pair together.

If you were to utilize this particular tactic, your goal would be to showcase your non-Halloween products in a way that makes them an absolute must-have for a specific Halloween-related DIY project. So, you want to enlist influencers who have demonstrated the ability to effectively nail this type of campaign in the past, then challenge them to incorporate your products into something Halloween-themed.

Check out the example above by @aww.sam. When you think of Halloween pumpkins, you probably visualize a big orange pumpkin with the traditional face carved into it. These pumpkins however don’t look anything like that image you just pictured in your head. These are painted in punchy colors and decorated in jewelry and pins. They have a modern flair that most people would never be able to dream up if tasked with decorating pumpkins in a creative way.

Be warned: Influencers who would crush it in a project like this are hard to find. But when you find one, they’ll do all the heavy lifting. You’ll simply give them the challenge and the supplies and they’ll handle the rest.

You can use Strategy #2 for many different products. Decor is sort of the obvious choice, but we saw a TON of amazing costumes last year that influencers made just by using everyday items. When you go the DIY route, the possibilities are endless.

The above costume created by @studiodiy is a prime example of how an influencer can take a cool dress and simply alter it a bit by adhering balloons and a label to create a bubblegum costume.

Adorbs.

These types of DIY costumes are very popular around this time of the year. Last year @studiodiy encouraged their audience to use the hashtag #studiodiyincostume if they have a post featuring a costume that was made using their costume-making tutorials. More than 1400 people submitted photos, like the one below by @kathrynmichel.

This is a fabulous way to get your non-Halloween products (like the dress, the shoes, and even the pink balloons) shared with the world.

Another cool example of this approach can be seen in party-planning and the post below by @abeautifulmess. A Halloween dessert that is decorated with DIY cake toppers. There is nothing particularly special about the cake… other than the fact that it’s a BOSS idea for a Halloween party. If you want THIS spooky cake at your party, you need the supplies featured in the picture to replicate it.

In the next example by @jamiemba, you can see the same approach being used in this cocktail recipe. For a liquor company or glassware company, something like this would be perfect. This influencer’s post takes a normal recipe and incorporates the dry ice to create a spooky looking drink that would be a killer feature to have at any Halloween party.

Strategy #3: The Unsung Hero

The Unsung Hero is very similar to the example above. The difference is, the products featured here are not going to be in the limelight as much. The Unsung Hero approach takes your product and makes it more of a foundational element incorporated within a DIY/how-to style post.

Think of it like underwear. Underwear is important, but it’s not really a clothing item that people put on display for all to see.

At least not most people.

In the cookie example above by @workingmommag (as well as the bubblegum costume that’s further above) the unsung hero product could be the company who sells the fabric glue that adheres the embellishments to the dress. The glue isn’t shown off within the photo, but it’s an integral product needed to complete the ensemble. Whenever you can make your post, picture, or tutorial compelling, the products being featured, as well as those unsung hero products that make the outcomes possible, will do well.

Another example is a makeup brand that sells foundation. If this brand were to enlist the help of makeup artists who specialize in costume makeup like the example below by @paulinhasampaio, the foundation would not even be visible by the end of the tutorial, but… if it’s presented as a necessary product required to make the makeup stay on properly, it becomes a must-have for anyone wanting to replicate the look.

Get it?

Strategy #4: Holiday Backdrops

Many brands who do holiday advertising hire influencers to create a festive backdrop in which to place their products. Take for example the Izze post featured below by @studiodiy. The drink is simply placed within a Halloween party context in order to promote it as a go-to product for your Halloween party planning.

While this approach is a bit on the nose, there is something to be said for simplicity. A campaign like this would be very easy to implement and your influencer targeting strategy wouldn’t have to be as sophisticated, compared to some of the other concepts we’ve talked about.

Take a look at the post below by @thestylesafari. The post itself isn’t positioning that watch as a must-have Halloween accessory. It’s merely showcasing it within a festive backdrop.

Admittedly, this one is also not an earth-shattering, game-changer of a concept. But the post itself is really cute, and when featured in the right influencer’s Instagram feed, this post would most likely catch the attention of your intended audience because it’s bright and eye-catching. Your audience will see your watch. That’s what’s important.

Strategy #5: Magical backdrops

A variation of the above “festive backdrop” approach would be to target influencers who have a history of posing within magical-looking settings. And the most likely candidates for this theme would be travel influencers because of the variety of amazing settings to which they have access. Check out the below example by @alisonsadventures. A photo like that would really stand out in a feed, especially for a brand who then reposts on their own feed.

Orchestrating a campaign like this might take a little more upfront planning as well as large pool of influencers, because the posts will need to coincide with locations (and the influencer’s travel plans) that are also a good fit for your brand and product.

Strategy #6: Killer Humor

We’ve seen a lot of brands showcase a “procrastinator” theme wherein influencers put together concepts that make them look like they were just slack with their Halloween costumes like the below photo by @chrisellelim where she’s even admitted that she’s not much of a costume person in her post. These are relatively easy for the influencers to create and they can usually generate a chuckle or two from their followers.

Of course, humorous campaigns aren’t the best option for all brands. But certain ones – like the company selling sheet masks in the next example by @kristengracelam  – can really capitalize on this holiday because influencers are able to create posts about their product in a way that organically made it a beautiful fit for Halloween.

And because of this Halloween tie-in, the post just seems less sponsored than it would if it were to show up within the influencers feed any other day of the week.

Weird products, like those sheet masks, are not the only ones that can benefit from a more humorous campaign… they’re just the easier option. Other products can certainly have a humorous campaign concept around which the influencers must build their posts. The concepts are going to be a little less obvious, but with the right partner to come up with the ideas, your campaigns can really stand out in an influencer’s feed and generate lots of engagement.

In the post below by @runwayonthego, the influencer uses a pretty clever costume idea by dressing up as a pink loofa. And the shoes in the picture are a nice way to promote a brand without being overly branded.

Strategy #7: The Cute-factor

We see time and time again that photos with kids in them typically generate better engagement. People love cute kids. So, try to find influencers who have kids… and get them on a damn porch! (Everyone with kids does porch pictures… not sure why. Porches + kids = happiness, like the post below by @mckinli.)

If you can combine your kid posts with dogs… kudos to you like the next post by @thriftsandthreads.

Dogs + kids are a killer combination for jumpstarting engagement.

Segue to Part 2

Part 2 of this post isn’t quite as riveting as the Part 1, so I’d like to do a quick bit of shameless self-promotion if that’s cool.

We are The Shelf. We’ve been doing influencer marketing for the last 6 years and we’ve run hundreds of campaigns for some of the largest brands out there. (You can check out a few of those clients as well as our offerings here.)

We’d love to be your secret weapon this holiday season! We will design a campaign for your brand that will knock everyone’s orange socks off!

In a nutshell, we’re different from other companies/agencies because we let data guide each step of the campaigns we run. And yes, I know that most influencer marketing companies talk about data too. The difference between us and them is we’re not lying. We use data that matters (e.g., are influencers buying traffic and followers, is Instagram the best platform for your product or should we use Pinterest?)

If you’d like to talk to us about getting a custom proposal, we’d be happy to show you how our data helps us build more creative, more effective, more profitable campaigns. We can even take a look at your past campaigns and perform an analysis.

As I was saying in Part 1 of this post, strategy is key. We rock at strategy. So, get in touch!

Now, to continue on, let’s talk about the logistics of your campaigns.

PART 2 : ROI-guided Logistics

Logistics are never fun, but there’s no reason why they can’t be ALMOST fun… or at least easy.

As most marketers know, influencer marketing is effective but also requires non-trivial effort to run an effective campaign. There’s no auto-pilot.

No turnkey solution.

No “buy a zillion followers and all your worries are over” plan.

If you want your campaigns to bring in crazy-good ROI, you need to make sure they are properly planned and executed by experienced and successful professionals.

The entire process is tedious. There are many pitfalls that can make your campaign go awry, so it’s super-important that you have a solid game plan for ensuring your team gets quality results.

Once your strategy is solidified, the next step is to hire influencers.

First, find the RIGHT people to work with.

This is a pretty key component. You’re not just looking for influencers who meet a certain follower size. You need influencers who are the walking poster-children for your brand. They need to actually BE your target customer.

And in addition to finding the proper matches from a branding perspective, you need to make sure that these influencers have the ability to develop incredibly creative content and who have the bandwidth to execute plans quickly. The posts they put together for you should not be run-of-the-mill posts that simply blend into the rest of their feed.

The goal is always to woo their followers with your posts… which you can’t do if their followers swiped right past your sponsored post. You need to stop them in their tracks.

Maximize your budget

One of the biggest complaints we hear from our clients is that they didn’t get very much bang for their buck. At the end of the day, the success of your campaign is determined by a few important metrics:

• How many people saw your posts

• How closely those people matched your intended target audience

• How much they engaged with your post or brand

• How many purchases came about as a result of the sponsored post

The key to maximizing your budget is:

• Working with the right influencers (because this is directly tied to how well your posts are going to perform)

• Working with the right number of influencers

• Avoiding influencers who have “bought” followers

• Asking influencer partners to create posts on platforms where they are most effective

Forget about the idea of there being a magic bullet, a one-size-fits-all influencer marketing campaign that you can have someone create one time and use over and over again. They don’t exist. And if they did, McDonald’s would have discovered it 50 years ago and saved us the trouble of having to endure the Lent-inspired Hula burger fiasco.

 Each influencer is as an individual with his/her own unique set of skills, specialties, quirks, and network-specific clout.

You can chat with us to learn more about this, and/or any of these steps.

Get your final influencer selections hired (and don’t forget to use contracts)

When we chat with our customers, we are always surprised to find how many of them have not been using contracts.

Contracts are important!!

In the earlier days of our campaigns, we, too, didn’t use contracts. And we were burned enough times to learn that they are a necessity.

One example of a contract-less-campaign-mishap happened on a campaign that we ran for a brand that sells pantyhose and accessories.

We sent the influencer products. She committed to everything over email. We paid her $600 bucks. And she created two Instagram posts, neither of which contained the product. One of her pictures was of her kids in a playground. The other one was of a Starbucks cup that she held up in front of a Christmas tree.

Both posts contained the disclaimer that they were sponsored by our client, though no one would have ever guessed why when looking at her content.

It was one of the most ridiculous things I’d ever seen. But this person (with the world’s worst work ethic) taught us the need for contracts. And since then, we have faithfully used contracts and we haven’t had any trouble.

In addition to making sure people don’t behave that way, contracts are also good for:

• Ensuring you won’t get sued when reposting their content.

• Ensuring that you won’t be held liable for any mishap that might happen while they are putting together your posts… like getting a weird rash from your hand cream… or whatever else; mishaps happen

• Ensuring influencers are properly disclosing the sponsorship (read more about FTC requirements here)

• And making sure that rates aren’t jacked up after the posts go up. (We’ve had this happen before too.)

Contracts are sort of a pain because they must be very customized to influencer marketing. They will not be your standard independent contractor contracts. Ours was constantly evolving for the first year or so as we rolled out more and more campaigns, but it’s gotten to a point where we’re really pleased with it.

In all seriousness, influencers like contracts too. It gives them protection against brands backing out of deals after content has been created.

Ensure your requirements are met

Influencers are typically working on many campaigns at the same time, so expecting them to remember each and every tiny detail of the campaign is unrealistic. To make sure that your campaigns go up without a hitch, you need someone to monitor the campaign’s progress on a very regular basis… and to communicate deliverables, FTC disclosures, tracking requirements, scheduling, shipments/logistics… etc. And all of those reminders should coincide with the influencer’s personal posting schedules. There will be a lot of back and forth.

Runtime Optimizations

This is an important step in the campaign process and – oddly enough – we see most brands/agencies skipping it all together. If you wait until the end of the campaign to check out your results, you’re way too late.

Don’t make this mistake.

You can think of optimizations in the same way that you would optimize an AdWords campaign. You’ll want to monitor posts daily to ensure that no tweaks in strategy are required.

Case in point: I’ve been seeing a certain beauty cream product a lot lately in the feeds of huge influencers. (I won’t name the brand because I’m nice.) I noticed each and every post that has gone up for their campaign is receiving around a quarter of the typical engagements expected for the participating influencers, based on the amounts they usually receive… which tells me a few things.

First, the overly-sponsored feel that these posts have are probably causing the influencer’s followers to automatically ignore the posts. Second, a post that’s running too frequently is a sign of a flawed strategy created by someone who probably doesn’t know any better.

I’m 100% positive that this brand is outsourcing their work to an in-experienced agency. The setup and structure of the campaign have all the typical agency signatures. But if the agency in charge of running this campaign was on its game, a pivot should have already happened.

The data from the first few posts should have told them that they are under-performing by a factor of 4X. And the saddest thing about this campaign is, it’s been running for the last 6 months or so, AND the influencers who are participating are from the most expensive set of people on the internet.

(If the brand being discussed sounds like it might be your brand… get in touch. We know how to fix this for you!)

Analytics and Reporting

Last but not least, as soon as the posts start to go live, you need heavy-duty tracking in place. Some of the KPIs (key performance indicators) that we look at are the number of impressions, number of engagements (super important), number of clicks, amount of UGC produced, and which influencers/posts/platforms are performing the best/worse compared to our expectations. All of this data is important for the runtime optimizations discussed above, as well as shaping the strategy of your future campaigns.

P.S. If you want to read more about Halloween

Conclusion

Influencer marketing works, but only when done with the right strategy (backed by data).  The campaigns we run for our clients typically over-deliver by 3x above what past campaigns yielded. Visit us at TheShelf.com to chat and learn more about how we can help you launch your kickass Halloween Campaign (and/or any other campaign… because despite what this post would lead you to believe, we’re not that obsessed with Halloween). We just really like it.

P.S. If you want to read more about Halloween… you can check out our handy Halloween infographic.

It’s Halloween and We’re Cashing in on Sales Like Pirates

Trick or treat, friends! It’s that time of year again when everyone launches into a frenzy of costume planning, pumpkin carving, and gooley party decor prepping. If you think Halloween is just reserved for brands that sell costumes and party decor though, think again. Halloween is THE holiday to get creative and everyone is looking for innovative DIY ideas to make their Halloween a hit. Time to cash in on Halloween sales like a pirate!

Your Guide to Halloween Marketing In 2016: Infographic

 

Did this fun infographic tickle your gooley Halloween fancy? And if so, did it tickle it so much that you feel inclined to share it on your own blog? If so, here’s a handy code-snippet for you to use. Just stick it into an html block on your post, and voila.

</p><br /><div style=”clear:both”><a href=”http://www.theshelf.com/the-blog/halloween-infographic”><img src=”https://s3.amazonaws.com/theshelf-email-marketing-images/blog_graphics/halloween-infographic/halloween-infographic-the-shelf.jpg” title=”Trick Or Treat Your Way Into Halloween Sales Like A Pirate: Infographic” border=”0″ /></a></div><br /><div>Courtesy of: <a style=”text-decoration:underline; color:#11d3c8;” href=”http://www.theshelf.com/the-blog/halloween-infographic”>The Shelf</a></div><br /><p>

And here is a little header image if you need one! It’s sized to fit nicely into social media posts as well. You can drag it to your desktop, or just copy the url of the image.

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And last but not least, the references for this lovely set of spooky stats… AND a series of “min-fographics” for you to use in case you don’t want the entire thing.

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A lot of money is spent on Halloween. — NRF

$8.4B is going to be spent on Halloween this year.
$1.5B increase in spending over the previous year.
$82.93 is the average expected spend for each US consumer (up from $74.34 last year).
171M Americans are planning to partake in Halloween.

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4 Main categories get the largest share of the spend. — NRF

$3.1B is spent on COSTUMES accounting for 67% of shoppers.
$2.5B is spent on CANDY accounting for 94.3% of shoppers.
$2.4B is spent on DECORATIONS accounting for 70% of shoppers.
$390M is spent on GREETING CARDS accounting for 35.4% of shoppers.

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Costumes win this contest every year. — NRF

(Chart showing the breakdown of spend for the average consumer.)

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People are creatures of habit when it comes to costume decisions. — NRF

Adult Costumes (35+)

1. Witch
2. Pirate
3. Political (Trump, Clinton, etc.)
4. Vampire
5. Batman Character
6. Animal (Cat, Dog, Bunny, etc.)
7. DC Superhero (Superman, Wonder Woman, excl. Batman) / Star Wars Character
8. Ghost / Zombie
9. Scary Costume / Mask
10. Marvel Superhero (Iron Man, Hulk, Spider-Man, etc.)

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Children’s Costumes

1. Action / Superhero
2. Princess
3. Animal (Cat, Dog, Lion, Monkey, etc.)
4. Batman Character
5. Star Wars Character
6. Witch / DC Superhero (excl. Batman)
7. Frozen Character (Anna, Elsa, Olaf)
8. Marvel Superhero (excl. Spider-Man)
9. Zombie
10. Spider-Man

Adult Costumes (18-34)

1. Batman Character (Batman, Harley Quinn, The Joker, etc.)
2. Witch
3. Animal (Cat, Dog, Bunny, etc.)
4. Marvel Superhero (Deadpool, Spider-Man, etc.) / DC Superhero (Wonderwoman, Superman, excl. Batman)
5. Vampire
6. Video Game Character
7. Slasher Movie Villain (Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, etc.)
8. Pirate
9. Star Wars Character
10. Zombie

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Pet Costumes

1. Pumpkin
2. Hot Dog
3. Bumble Bee
4. Lion / Star Wars Character
5. Devil
6. Batman Character
7. Witch
8. Superman
9. Action / Superhero
10. Cat

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The majority of purchases are made at discount stores. — NRF

(Pie chart of where purchases are happening.)

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Grab-bag of tips and Tricks

17% of people use Pinterest to find costume inspiration, up 133% since 2012. — NRF
27M Pinterest users pinned Halloween content last year. — Pinterest
273M ideas were pinned  for Halloween last year. — Pinterest
40% of people on Pinterest plan for Halloween several months in advance. — Pinterest
72% of smartphone shoppers research an item before purchasing it. — Nielsen
40% of people said they’ve purchased an item online after seeing it used by an influencer on Instagram, Twitter, Vine or YouTube. — Annalect
36¢ of every dollar spent in a brick and mortar store is influenced by digital. — Deloitte
86% of women consumers agree with the following statement: “Social media content has become a chief source of online research when I’m thinking about making a purchase.” — Influence Central

(Pie chart breakdown of what people are doing on Halloween.) — NRF
(Hack the Hoodie details) — Today

In honor of the most fashionable week of the year, brands and bloggers alike jump at the opportunity to be involved in some shape or form. Truth be told, Fashion Week is ripe with kick-ass opportunities for brands of all shapes and sizes. You just have to know how to work this week to your advantage.

And…for the sake of clarity, let me tell you who will most likely find this post interesting:

Group #1

Fashion Week aficionados who are attending/presenting at Fashion Week this year… who want to up their game in influencer marketing.

Group #2

Fashion brands who love the idea of Fashion Week, but feel as though it’s out of their league. Not to worry; I’ve got your back.

Group #3

Fashion brands who are totally clueless about Fashion Week. It’s time to catch up, guys! You might be missing out on epic opportunities.

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How To Do Influencer Marketing During Fashion Week

 

 

Let’s jump in with a quick history of Fashion Week.

And…If you’re already a self-proclaimed expert on “F-Week” – that’s what we insiders call Fashion Week – you can probably skip the history lesson.

I’m kidding. No one calls it F-Week.

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Before there was Fashion Week.

Hokay so…you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Paris was the forerunner in fashion. The French were the first to invent the concept of “the high-fashion house” with their brand : House of Worth, founded in 1858.

The French called this fun new high-fashion concept “haute couture”. And with it, a very exclusive scene began to emerge. Top secret fashion shows were being held to lure in clients who had deep (and fashionable) pockets. These secret fashion shows were called “défilés de mode,” a French term translated to mean “parade of fashion” because of the single-file line that the models would stand in while showcasing the newest designer duds.

via GIPHY

Fashion shows made their debut in the US in 1903. And by the 1920s, they were pretty much a mainstream thing, typically being held in department stores as one-off events where a designer would showcase his or her collection.

Then, in 1943, Eleanor Lambert (a very disruptive fashion aficionado) decided to lump all of these shows together into a one-week span because the one-off nature of the shows was turning into a scheduling nightmare.

This eventually lead to Fashion Week as we know it today.

And that pretty much brings us up to speed on the high points.

The Logistics of Fashion Week

When is it?

Today, there are hundreds of Fashion Weeks going on all over the world. The most well-known and heavily publicized Fashion Weeks are known as the “Big Four”, happening in the fashion capitals of the world: New York, London, Milan, and Paris.

Fashion Week is a bi-annual event for each of these cities, and the weeks are essentially staggered, one after another, so that the die-hard fashion nuts don’t have to choose between them. This, in effect, becomes known as Fashion Month.

Here is what the schedule looks like for those who might be inclined to participate in an intercontinental Fashion Week Hop. #stamina

• New York : Sep 8 – Sep 15 2016… Feb 9 – Feb 17 2017… Sep 7 – Sep 15 2017…

• London : Sep 16 – Sep 20 2016… Feb 17 – Feb 21 2017… Sep 15 – Sep 19 2017

• Milan : Sep 21 – Sep 27 2016… Feb 22 – Feb 28 2017… Sep 20 – Sep 27 2017

• Paris : Sep 27 – Oct 5 2016… Mar 1 – Mar 8 2017… Sep 28 – Oct 5 2017

How Much Does Fashion Week Cost?

An article on Fashionista walked through the cost-breakdown of Fashion Week and found that the average runway show will cost a brand $200,000 + any fees associated with celebrity appearances.

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This is above and beyond the marketing budget for many brands out there. So we’ll jump into some out-of-box ways to participate in Fashion Week that are more cost-effective in just a sec. But first, here’s that runway-show-cost breakdown…

• Venues range from $15,000 to $60,000.

• Stylists (who are less in demand) will cost around $10,000 for the week. Top-tier stylists could be as much as $8,000 per day.

• Production runs $10,000 – $20,000.

• PR costs range from $5,000 to around $15,000.

• Hair and Makeup don’t usually cost anything (yay), because beauty companies usually pay to be the sponsor of a particular brand (allowing brands to make back some of their money).

• Models come at a range of costs. They start at around $150 per person (for smaller brands) and go up to $800 – $1,000 (for bigger brands).

• Celebrities appearances can run $100,000 a pop for A-listers.

• Livestreaming is typically $20,000 – $50,000.

Larger brands typically spend far more than an average-sized brand. The president of Marc Jacobs told the New York Times that their 2011 show cost at least $1M.

Extravagance ain’t cheap, yo.

what do brands TRADITIONALLY do at fashion week?

Via Sarah Styles Seattle ‘s post on NY Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2016

I would venture to guess that when most people hear the words “Fashion Week” they conjure up images of tall, thin, expressionless people taking long strides down runways wearing interesting design choices (anybody remember Zoolander?)

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Anyway, most brands will present their new lines in one of two ways – either on the runway (see above), or in a presentation.

A lot of people aren’t even aware of presentations because the runway show has become synonymous with Fashion Week. And this is partially true because, back-in-the-day, presentations were considered to be the low-budget option. But, presentations have quite a few perks over the typical runway, which has lead larger designers like Faustine Steinmetz, DVF, and Ralph Lauren to begin experimenting with them. Presentations really allow these brands to raise the bar in terms of creativity, because this type of setup gives them command over the entire space and experience.

Presentations typically last for a couple of hours, during which models stand around a room, allowing fashion influencers and editors to get up close and personal with the designs. Attendees can even talk to the designers about their new lines, snap pictures, and really examine the new collections. Plus, the photos that come out of a presentation tend to be of much higher quality because the models aren’t strutting down the runway at dangerous speeds…which is a huge perk in this Age-of-Instagram.

A really fun example was Nanette Lepore’s presentation for Fashion Week SS 16, which was covered pretty extensively over on Caroline Volz’s Style Squad. “Lepore cleared out her Broom street shop for a dance party/fashion presentation/photoshoot hybrid. Partygoers sipped on cute cans of wine with black and white striped straws, and danced to a house music DJ.”

Nanette Lepore’s Presentation covered by Caroline Volz on Style Squad .

A slightly more normal approach to the presentation can be seen in the Banana Republic Presentation for Fall 2016. See below. It was covered really nicely by Velvet & Vino.

Velvet & Vino : Banana Republic Presentation : Fall 2016

If you’re craving more inspiration, you can head over to Fashionista. They have tons of photos documenting the secret doings that happen within the big bright tents.

How Fashion Week and the Fashion Industry Are Evolving

social media is disrupting the status quo

Bloggers, vloggers, and social media influencers have become a much more prevalent fixture during Fashion Week. And they don’t just sit around. They are busy doing what they do best – posting content to social media about the shows.

Innocent enough, but this small shift in how information is delivered to those of us who do not have VIP status has caused such a disruption that fashion insiders are saying that Fashion Week has run its course.

Why?

Timing. In the fashion world, there are essentially two seasons per year – Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter. Brands will usually showcase their upcoming collections six months before those collections are actually available for purchase.

With the influx of social media stars posting the runway in real-time, the whole world can see these new lines way before they are ready for the exposure (six months before they hit stores). That’s enough time for manufacturers (who like to play dirty) to replicate the designs and put them on the market. By the time the original items hit the stores, the designs are months old, as far as the general public is concerned.

I recently read an article in the New York Times called “How Smartphones Are Killing Off the Fashion Show“.

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In the article, Scott Galloway (founder and chairman of the digital consultancy L2), said, “Social media is the laxative of the fashion system. It makes everyone digest everything much faster: trends, product discovery.”

And while the lag-time between the debut of new collections and the public availability of those collections is causing a stir in the fashion community, I think there’s a very positive side effect that’s happening…it’s introducing a renewed vigor and creativity into an industry event that’s grown stale.

A number of brands have started experimenting with showcasing collections that are available immediately after they debut at Fashion Week. Rebecca Minkoff was one of the first major brands to showcase “on-season” clothes during Fashion Week.

Burberry followed suit soon after. Tom Ford…same deal. In fact, he’ll be showing both men’s and women’s collections for Fall 2016 during the September Fashion Week, after skipping over their February 2016 show all together.

Other brands have chosen to deviate from the Fashion Week tradition to create innovative experiences that fall outside of the borders defining the standard location.

During the February 2016 Fashion Week, Diane von Furstenberg created her own, very unique experience, showcasing her collections from within her Meatpacking District headquarters in New York. She invited guests to drop in and view creative vignettes, all featuring top models who were basically acting out real-life, choreographed sequences while wearing pieces from von Furstenberg’s newest collection.

The exhibit combined art and theatre with her collection, in a party-like setting in which guests could mingle and chat up von Furstenberg and her team. Plus, this more intimate style of presentation allowed guests to get up-close and personal with her designs.

Other designers choose to go even more rogue. Misha Nanoo presented her entire line exclusively on Instagram, using a special handle: @mishanonoo_show.

A number of brands weren’t down with the devil-may-care approach though. Take Nanoo, for example. They opted instead for the more dialed-back option of putting together online presentations designed specifically for Instagram, which allowed them to tell their own story, rather than relying on the blurry Instagram shots posted by show-goers.

As Von Furstenberg put it, “Everyone drank the Kool-Aid for too long, but it’s just not working anymore. We are in a moment of complete confusion between what was and what will be. Everyone has to learn new rules.”

Indeed. Wise words.

Needless to say, this upheaval has opened the door for lots of brands to capitalize on Fashion Week without having to shell out tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in show expenses to participate.

Let’s look at some examples so that you have some inspiration for your own Fashion Week conquests.

For the seventh year in a row, the Nolcha Fashion Show on Pier 59 in Chelsea made room for independent designers to present their designs using the same setup of a traditional runway show but at a fraction of the cost.

There are also a number of a brands and designers hosting free events outside of the designated Fashion Week area that anyone can attend.

• TRESemmé set up their Runway Studio in Tribeca for anyone to book an appointment to get their hair styled into catwalk-esque styles.

• Actress and fashion blogger Katie Cassidy of TomBoyKC.com hosted a cat fashion show to promote pet adoption. Attendees could actually adopt kitties after her Fresh Step Feline Fashion Lounge and Adoption event.

• Triumph Hotels hosted a Fashion Sketch event during this upcoming Fashion Week. Their hospitality chain partnered with Instagram influencer, Laura Kay who sketched style-selfies.

Instagram influencer and renowned fashion illustrator, Laura Kay : @diarysketcheslk

What these examples show us is that there’s excitement in the air and plenty to do during Fashion Week. And the uptick in social sharing is making this formidable event even more interesting. The shift from brand-driven conversations over to consumer-driven conversations is noticeable throughout the entire fashion industry, not just this one event.

“The market is more consumer-led than it has ever been,” says Yasmin Sewell, consultant and co-founder of fashion brand être cécile. “For so long, the power has been with the press, but these days the customer can make or break your brand. There are a whole wave of brands that may get no support from major publications but who have managed to self-create huge hype and demand for their product through digital platforms and their global online following.”

This evolution in the way people shop and discover products will begin to level the playing field between huge brands and the emerging designers. This is the perfect segue over to the final section of this post…tapping into the power of influencers

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

So, as I was discussing above, a lot of Fashion Week events and activities are actually taking place outside of the tent walls. This has created a scene that is much more inviting to the un-invited.

And that, in turn, has caused more and more people to flock towards the Fashion Week vicinity to participate in the fun, the majority of whom are influencers.

There was an article, The Circus of Fashion that appeared in the New York Times a few years back.

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One interesting point that was made was that “The fuss around the shows now seems as important as what goes on inside the carefully guarded tents.”

This couldn’t be more true. Droves of fashion influencers go to Fashion Week with no intention of actually “doing Fashion Week” in the traditional sense. Most aren’t invited to the runway shows, but that’s totally fine now due to the evolution that we were talking about earlier.

During any given Fashion Week, if you take a few minutes to peruse the myriad of social posts that are hashtagged with the various versions of #fashionweek, you will quickly figure out that the vast majority of those posts have nothing to do with a particular show and everything to do with what’s happening on the street. It’s where the best fashion show happens after all.

This creates a beautiful opportunity for fashion and non-fashion brands of all sizes to get in on the tradition of Fashion Week.

So, congratulations! If participating in Fashion Week has always been just a bit beyond your reach, consider this your official invitation to partake.

I’ve seen brands drum up the most amazing ideas to leverage influencers at Fashion Week. And I’m going to share a slew of those ideas with you right now to get your creative juices flowing. Whether you’re catching this post before or after the big week, there are Fashion Weeks every six months, so you can work this into your marketing game plan for the next go-round with plenty of time to spare.

 1. OUTFIT CHANGES

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Many influencers will swap out their outfits multiple times through the day. And the reason for this is Fashion Week is the place to be seen and showcase brands. There are hoards of street photographers running around, which is great exposure for influencers in the fashion space…which, in turn, makes a beautiful opportunity for brand collaborations.

Some influencers wear items straight off the runway from the show they’re attending, which generates tons of exposure for the brand. Take Tommy Hilfiger, for example. The street style scene outside his show is the most exciting playground you’ve ever stepped foot on. BUT as a brand, there are other far less expensive ways to participate too. You could skip the show expenses and pay an influencer to wear your clothing while they’re attending Fashion Week, have them post about you, play off fashion week hashtags, and see pretty significant returns.

Check out the awesome pictures below by Sarah Styles Seattle. It’s easy to see how photos like this would inspire tons of people to check out your brand. The outfit combination is edgy and cool while still feminine. I myself want to buy every single item she has on. Outfit of the Day (OOTD) posts are a beautiful way to market your duds. Combine this type of post with Fashion Week and you’ll have a winning combination. By virtue of the long-term search optimization capabilities, you’ll be able to grab audience attention much easier and for far longer. This will allow your brand’s name to be associated with Fashion Week, regardless of whether or not you’re presenting or even attending, for that matter.

Sarah Styles Seattle : Blog post about NYFW Day 2’s outfit.

• Here’s another example of an OOTD post over on Kelly Go Lightly’s blog. Her photos are lovely, and the setting has nothing to do with Fashion Week tents, or runway shows. She marked the items at the bottom of her post as “c/o” which means “courtesy of”. So, those brands gifted her those products which she then posted about during Fashion Week.

• Then there’s Fashion Jackson. She featured a few gifted products within an outfit that she wore to NY Fashion Week. Her photos are huge and gorgeous, which really brings these items to life.

2. AUTHENTIC & ENGAGING SPONSORED POSTS

Sponsored posts can be run-of-the-mill and boring. Not at all organic. Even inauthentic. And often times, they don’t provide brands with the traction needed to engage their audience. This is the primary reason bloggers tend to reel back from doing sponsored posts.

So, when you’re working with an influencer on a sponsored post, it’s a good idea to get creative with it and make the content more than just an overt advertisement for your products.

• A nice example of this was put together by Lulu’s in collaboration with Adriana Gastélum of Fake Leather. The post was a Fashion Week Survival Guide where she featured five big tips, each punctuated with beautiful photography and lots of fun products. She wore a dress, belt, and bag from Lulu’s (plus one outfit change into a leather dress, also from Lulu’s), but the overall focus of the post was not branded. The beautiful photographs were enough to inspire her audience in a very organic way.

Adriana Gastélum of Fake Leather ‘s Fashion Week Survival Guide

• Another fun themed post is the Fashion Week challenge that T.J.Maxx ran with The Budget Babe. Her post sounded very personal and relatable. She explained how they challenged her to find all of her NY Fashion Week accessories at T.J.Maxx, and then went into her philosophy on dressing “high-low”… as well as a rundown on the different purchases she made (a Rag & Bone bag, Coach ankle boots, and Rebecca Minkoff jewelry). I’d say, Mission accomplished, with that post. Who the heck knew you could find brands like that at T.J.Maxx?

3. CREATIVE PRODUCT PLACEMENT

TRESemmé is owning the creative product placement strategy. The brand has the Runway Studio in Tribeca that I mentioned earlier. TRESemmé is also collaborating with high profile influencers to ramp up exposure. They did a few collaborations with Rach Parcell from Pink Peonies which you can see here and here. The company also worked with Julia Engel from Gal Meets Glam. Lastly, here’s another cool example with McKENNA BLEU.

Pink Peonies covering her Fashion Week collaboration with TRESemmé.

• A creative approach toward product placement can be seen in a series of Smartwater posts, who recruited a select group of fashion bloggers to incorporate Smartwater and the importance of hydration into the hustle and bustle of their Fashion Week days. Check out this post by The Fashionably Broke where she features the bottle in various on-the-go scenes. This particular post speaks to a point that we constantly preach to our clients. It’s the idea of targeting less obvious bloggers. We have an entire post about how to get creative with your targeting where we encourage brands to explore working with influencers who have audiences that are not completely bombarded with products exactly like the one you’re selling.

 

4. BEHIND THE SCENES

If you’re hosting an event, backstage access and a sneak peak can be a good opportunity to generate great exposure and content.

• Rebecca Vallance invited Katya from Style Sprinter to actually work backstage. This allowed her produce all sorts of social media posts including one on Periscope where she shared the experience live with her audience. She got to get up-close-and-personal with the celebrity stylist, Paul Norton, from Joico and his #HairJoi team, while sharing tips from his team on how to repeat runway style hair-dos. She was also given the DL on runway makeup from the Lead makeup artist for MAC Cosmetics, Chantel Miller. This was just another beautiful opportuntiy to share with her audience. She produced elaborate, intimate, and informative posts for this project and I’m sure the brand was thrilled with the results.

And that’s it! How to work with influencers during Fashion Week CAN be accessible for brands of any size. Do you have any fun ways to work with influencers during the most fashionable week of the year? Please share in the comments!