Influence Marketing for CEO's

Stéphane Bouillet

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9782322196920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Publicité

This book will reveal why influence marketing is THE type of media that has been growing the most in the last 5 years as well as how to measure the impact of your campaigns on consumers.You will be able to know if your teams and agencies are really reaching your growth targets. You will also be able to find a common language with your influence manager to respond to your challenges/targets as a CEO, managing director or marketing director.Perhaps you are not a CEO, but you work in the influence marketing team? This book is also for you: it will help you to improve how you measure influence and highlight your achievements and expertise, to your CEO.In short, this is a book for everyone who wants to incorporate influence marketing into their strategy and measure the true business impacts.

Chapter 1: Understanding the consumer. What results can you expect from Influence Marketing regarding the psychology and needs of the consumer.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

It goes without saying, but it is helpful to be reminded- just because we have seen an influencer showing off the impressive latest SUV Jaguar e-Pace, that doesn’t mean that we are going to rush to buy it.

Like all types of advertising, this method of communication is in line with what we will call ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ of the consumer.

I start by getting to know the brand, the product or the service… then I begin to like it… and it is only when I actually need it (perhaps the advertising has accelerated the need for it) that I am going to buy it. Most of the time, I am reassured that I am making a good purchase (better quality, more ethical, most attractive quality/price ratio).

It is a much simpler representation of the ‘AIDA’ model.

Level	AIDA MODEL^1
COGNITIVE STAGE	Awareness
AFFECTIVE STAGE	Interest Desire
CONATIVE STAGE	Action

Just like ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ which demonstrates that higher needs may only be taken into account when the primary needs are met, when we can only buy a product when we are aware of its existence and when we are convinced that it will fulfill this need.

We can therefore only sell a product when the consumer knows about it… hence the importance of the need to develop the brands notoriety (or have a distributor look after this).

The huge advantage of influence marketing is that it can intervene at all of these stages. It allows products/services to become known, liked and bought… (and to reassure you in your purchase).

There are few communication levers that are able to intervene at all stages of the consumers ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’.

• TV advertising, radio, cinema or billboards will mainly help increase awareness of the product.
• Google Ads will intervene mostly at the last stage (driving sales).
• Cashback will only act at the very last stage (mainly on the improvement of the conversion rate).

Only social ads and influence marketing can intervene at these 3 stages. This is also what Facebook aims to do by placing adverts at the bottom of the page ‘Your friend Florence Dupont also likes the electric scooter from eLaser’. The objective is for this peer validation to play a role in your purchasing and therefore intervene at the 3 stages: getting your product known, liked (peer validation) and bought. Mark Zuckerberg said, himself : “People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising!”. This should give you a better understanding of how Facebook tries to insert adverts into your close circle of friends to make it more effective… as a reminder Facebook represents 20% of the advertising market world wide, with more than 100 billion dollars in revenue.

Some influence marketing figures

To demonstrate the impact of influence marketing (and word of mouth in general), here are a few recent figures related to the behavior of consumers and communication professionals:

• The influence marketing market is expected to represent more than 20 billion dollars in 2022 (more than radio).
• 94% of marketing professionals recognize influence marketing as effective (Hubspot).
• 92% of consumers now trust content published by a person more than by a brand (Hubspot).
• Influence marketing involves the creation of authentic content around a brand, according to 89% of marketing professionals (Hubspot).
• 40% of consumers use ad-blocking technology. Source: Global Web Index (N.B: it makes digital advertising ‘non native’, which is unknown to 40% of internet users. In addition, with the announced end of third party cookies, it is also the end of classical digital advertising).
• 80% of consumers have already made a purchase following the recommendation of an influencer. Source: Rakuten Marketing.
• 89% of marketing professionals believe the return on investment of influence marketing to be superior or equal to that of other levers. Source: Mediakix.
• 85% of companies have used influence marketing to increase their brand awareness. 71 % use it to attract new audiences, and 64% to generate more sales. Source: Mediakix (N.B. : here we find the 3 stages of “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”, explained above).
• “To measure and improve the return on investment” is said to be the number 1 challenge of influence marketing. Source: Mediakix (N.B. : hence the interest of this book).
• 34% of professionals measure their campaign’s success according to reach and impressions. 35% measure it according to engagement and clicks. 31% measure according to sales generated. Source: InfluencerMarketingHub.
• 78% of professionals have announced that they would consider the Earned Media Value (or advertising equivalent) a good measurement of return on investment of their influencer campaigns. Source: InfluencerMarketingHub (N.B. : this is good but we will explore even further in this book).

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¹ Source : Kotler & Dubois

Why does Influence Marketing work, and why don’t you understand it?

Are you a CEO or marketing director over 35 years old? If so, we are alike (I’m 46 with a 17 year old daughter and 21 year old son...), and just like you I struggle to watch an influencer’s video and take an interest in their content. Even if some of their content is simply genius, very professional and is scripted like a Tarantino film, 95% of influence content is not my cup of tea or generation.

“I don’t understand why this video is a worldwide hit…” ok this is a slight exaggeration, but let’s just say that I prefer to read a newspaper than watch the latest video by PewDiePie.

Well then why, after 10 years as a consultant at Capgemini for large corporations on the French stock market and a marketing director for SME’s, do I work in influence marketing?

This is what happened: at the end of 2011, with my brother, Sébastien Bouillet, our startup “Gamoniac” was launched, a sort of Netflix for video games. A youtuber contacted us on Twitter to say that our concept was genius and that he wanted to talk about it on his social media channels. With one single tweet, he generated so much traffic that he caused our server to crash.

We needed to be sure of what had happened. A few months later we asked him to create a video game contest to recruit gamers (video entitled: Diablox9 joue au Père Noël - 30.000 € de lots à gagner avec Gamoniac). Result: almost 110k people entered the contest in just a few hours.

We had discovered marketing gold: the power of youtubers.

All of this, by accident. A few months later we decided to create Influence4You and recruit young graduates who understood and were passionate about influence marketing (the average age being 28 years old) and we sold our video game trading site to concentrate 100% on influence marketing.

I was not trained to work in influence marketing by a burning passion for influencer content (even if I do admire their creativity and sometimes extraordinary content), but rather by the immense impact (which I’ve experienced first hand) that influence marketing can have for brands.

Just like myself, you are aware that 40+ year olds are not the target audience of most influencers and you are having difficulty understanding it yourself… but you do recognize that it is a key lever to reach generation Y and Z.

You don’t need to appreciate influencer content to understand that it works, because influencers know how to talk to their communities.

By providing the key messages to influencers, they will be able to get them across to their audience far better than any CEO, marketing director or advertising agency.

What does work, is peer-to-peer communication… and you are not considered a peer. This is why you do not understand influence marketing, but despite this, influence marketing must become one of your key communication levers because, as this book will show you, the results are really there and measurable.

Concrete examples of influence marketing strategies linked to « Maslow’s hierarchy of needs »

A few months ago, we published the book ‘Influence4You- the secrets of influence marketing- 87 ideas for your influence campaigns’. For each idea, we indicated the extent to which it met the objectives of ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ in the context of influence: get your product known, liked, then bought.

Here are a few examples of influence marketing mechanisms taken from our first book:

Getting your product known: campaign examples

All influence campaigns serve to remind the consumer abou...