THE IMPACT OF INFLUENCERS & HOW TO ENGAGE THEM

Gaining trust for your brand can be challenging. Consumer trust in companies has fallen to its lowest level since 2017, according to Qualtrics XM Institute. Marketing problems like this aren't new. Nike partnered with basketball star Michael Jordan for decades to build consumer trust. Digital marketing budgets can be significantly impacted by celebrity endorsements, however.

“In the digital world, a new type of celebrity has emerged who’s more knowledgeable about products and how best to use them,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta, who teaches the online course Digital Marketing Strategy.

Influencer marketing is the collaboration between influencers and brands to promote products or services on digital channels, typically to increase brand awareness, website traffic, and sales. Unlike celebrity endorsements, influencer marketing is a form of earned media—public exposure through word of mouth, customer reviews, social media mentions, or media coverage—and can significantly sway consumers’ decisions.

“Unlike paid and owned media, earned media originates organically outside the company,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. For example, if your company sells sustainable fashion, an influencer who promotes luxury goods likely isn’t a good fit because that industry is commonly associated with negative environmental impacts.

“Some influencers buy fake followers, views, or likes,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. Not only can it build trust between the influencer's audience and your brand but enhances their endorsement’s credibility. Influencers who genuinely resonate with your brand are more likely to encourage their audiences to purchase your products organically and retain authority on social media.

In Digital Marketing Strategy, influencer, blogger, and podcaster Erica Ligenza shares how she vets inquiring brands. “If I'm testing it, and I already know, ‘All right, I like this,’ and I know I can really, honestly recommend this, I probably am organically starting to share it myself already to prime my audience for when they see that ad,” Ligenza says in the course.

“The vetting process is also a two-way street, where you’re asking for their goals as an influencer and being able to offer helpful insight to them,” Ligenza says in Digital Marketing Strategy. For example, if your goal is to enhance your marketing efforts’ long-term return on investment (ROI), your influencers can primarily focus on evergreen blog articles or YouTube videos, which have longer shelf lives than short-form, temporary content like Instagram Stories.

In Digital Marketing Strategy, Maggie Malek, CEO of modern brand lab MMI Agency, shares how she evaluates influencer productivity. “One of the things that we look for when we hire social influencers is that they create a ton of content on their own, outside of just branded content,” Malek says in the course.

That kind of approach can ensure influencers continue engaging their audiences and don’t deviate from the content cadence and quality that make them valuable partners. “If you look at someone's news feed, and all of their content is branded, likely, they’ll have very few authentic followers because they're just in it for the brand paycheck,” Malek says in the course.

One metric you can focus on is impressions—often used interchangeably with “reach”—to track the number of times users view your brand-related content and estimate audience size across digital channels. Asking questions like “How did you learn about us?” can provide insight into where customers started their journeys with your brand.

Marketing metrics that help measure customer engagement include: In Digital Marketing Strategy, Ligenza warns about discrepancies during the vetting process. “From a strategic standpoint, I like to recommend to brands that they’re taking into consideration the nature of the algorithms,” Ligenza says in Digital Marketing Strategy.

In Digital Marketing Strategy, Malek discusses how MMI Agency employs affiliate links—unique URLs for sharing recommendations and monitoring website traffic or sales—to gauge influencers’ effectiveness. “We give each influencer custom links so we can see exactly how many clicks they drive,” Malek says in the course.

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