The Age of Influence

The Power of Influencers to Elevate Your Brand

Neal Schaffer

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781400216376
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

The Age of Influence is an essential guide for marketing professionals and business owners who want to create and implement a highly effective, sustainable influencer marketing plan in order for their brands to succeed.

We are amid an unprecedented digital transformation and tapping into this change is vital to any brand in today's climate. Social media has democratized authority and influence, and information is created and consumed in ways that are constantly evolving.

Internationally-recognized social media marketing expert Neal Schaffer explains how that shift plays a significant role in online marketing in the Influencer Era. Influencer marketing is about establishing relationships, turning fans into influencers, and leveraging that influence to share your message in a credible and authentic way.

In The Age of Influence, Schaffer teaches entrepreneurs, marketing executives, and cutting-edge agencies how to:

• Identify,?approach, and engage the right influencers for their brand or product.
• Determine?what resources to put behind influencer campaigns.
• Manage the business side of influencer marketing, including tools that will help?measure ROI.
• Develop?their brand's social media voice to become an influencer in its own right.

This book is the definitive guide to addressing the issues disrupting marketing trends, including declining television viewership, growing social media audiences, effectively spreading their message digitally, and increasing usage of ad-blocking technology.

PART ONE

WHY INFLUENCER MARKETING?

Before we plunge into advice on how to leverage influencer marketing, we need to fully understand the paradigm shift occurring in mass communications that is enhancing the value of word-of-mouth marketing through influencers. Establishing this baseline understanding will help bring you up-to-speed as to how I see the potential that influencer marketing has for every business.

This all begins by understanding the digital climate of today.

The very essence of how messages are spread has shifted. Engaging with the masses has changed. Brands are already leveraging influencers to achieve marketing objectives. Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing methods of spreading a message about a brand—and for good reason.

The ROI from influencer marketing is clear. In one survey, nearly 90 percent of all marketers found ROI from influencer marketing comparable to or better than other marketing channels (see Figure 1.1).¹ Another case study showed ROI on influencer marketing to be as high as eleven times the return on traditional digital marketing options such as banner ads.²

Figure 1.1

With strong social media platforms globally and ubiquitous smartphones that can easily access them, everyone could be a publisher if they wanted. Everyone could have a platform, an audience, or community—including businesses. At the same time, while consumers now steer away from traditional advertising messaging, with 74 percent of consumers using one or more strategies to avoid advertising all together, they are influenced by the online media they see from people they follow and trust.³ This trust is tied to the emergence of online influencers, which has led to rapid growth in influencer marketing (see Figure 1.2). The older methods of engaging with celebrities don’t translate well to the new personality of influencers.

As the world catches on to the significant returns from influencer marketing, spending on influencers increases. The market for influencer marketing on Instagram alone is estimated to grow from less than $1 billion in 2015 to as high as $16 billion in 2020 (see Figure 1.3).⁴

Figure 1.2

As a percentage of global advertising spending, $16 billion is still a small amount—but it may prove to be only the tip of the iceberg in terms of spending on influencer marketing.

Figure 1.3

1

THE ORIGINS OF INFLUENCE IN THE MODERN WORLD

While influencer marketing has become a popular buzzword in today’s marketing circles, the fundamental concept has been prevalent in marketing throughout history. Tapping into the power of someone with authority, an audience, and followers to spread one’s message is the foundation of marketing. The ways people consume their messaging and the ways those who hold influence communicate have changed over time. The present state of digital media has transformed the ways people communicate and the ways your message can be heard. Influencer marketing encompasses strategies to engage people with your message in a more trusted manner with a longer term perspective.

THE HISTORY OF INFLUENCER MARKETING

The concept of leveraging celebrities or those with influence to endorse or promote a product has been fundamental for centuries. In the 1760s, Josiah Wedgwood impressed the Queen of Great Britain, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, enough with his new form of earthenware that she gave him permission to call it Queenware, making it the first documented endorsement.¹ The approval of the royal family certainly helped Wedgwood establish itself as a brand of choice.

When John Jaques and Nathaniel Cook designed a new set of chess pieces in 1849, they approached the English chess master Howard Staunton to write about the set in his newspaper column.² Having a current chess master endorse the chessmen in his column would be a coup in spreading the news about their new design. It went even better than planned: Staunton was so impressed with the pieces he not only covered and endorsed them but derided other designs. Eventually this early celebrity endorsement broadened, to the point where Staunton signed the sets as they were sold and received a royalty from each sale. The pieces are still the standard used in competition chess today.

In the late 1800s, companies began to print trade cards to include with their products. For instance, famous actors such as James Lewis and Mrs. G. W. Gilbert were shown in one of their best-known stage roles—but holding a bottle of Ayer’s Sarsaparilla.³

British-American actress Lillie Langtry was linked to multiple brands including Pears Soap.⁴ Mark Twain lent his name to cigars and other tobacco goods.⁵

THE RISE OF MASS MEDIA AND INFLUENCER MARKETING

The twentieth century rise of mass media including radio and television allowed for all marketing, including celebrity endorsements, to become much more widespread. Tobacco companies were early adopters of the format with James Stewart and Ronald Reagan endorsing brands like Chesterfields.⁶ Athletes like Babe Ruth also endorsed tobacco products.⁷ Alfred Hitchcock endorsed Western Union telegrams for swift communication from on-set.⁸

One of the most visible product endorsements, and one that undoubtedly changed the approach to sports endorsements, was the partnership between Nike and Michael Jordan. Nike had a stronghold on the track and field shoe market but were strangers to the basketball market when they signed Michael Jordan in 1984. The visibility of Jordan and his on-court accomplishments helped Nike grow to the brand we know today. Jordan’s position and devotion to his role as the face of Nike reached something of a watershed moment during the 1992 Olympics. The Team USA uniforms were sponsored by Reebok. Jordan felt that he shouldn’t stand on the dais to receive the gold medal while wearing a competitor’s logo. Instead, he went into the crowd before the medal ceremony and asked fans for flags from the USA to drape over his shoulder, obscuring the Reebok logo.⁹

The Jordan signature shoe changed the playing field for sports brands in the early 1980s. Before then, most NBA players wore the same Chuck Taylor All-Star shoe no matter how big of a player they were, from Bill Russell to Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson to Julius Erving. Now close to twenty active NBA players have signature shoe lines. Even non-athletes have signature shoes, such as Kanye West designing sneakers with both Nike and Adidas.¹⁰

PEOPLE TRUST PEOPLE

People trust people—that’s the principle at work here. Humans are social beings. We communicate with people, even when it’s online and digital. We trust people over messages from companies, corporations, or brands. Nielsen finds the most powerful and relied-on source of trust comes from people, with 92 percent of people likely to trust a recommendation from a friend.¹¹ The next most-trusted source (70 percent) is consumer reviews online, another form of listening to a trusted person. Editorials by editors, authors, or journalists were the third most trusted source.

For brands, garnering trust means winning business.

The Edelman Trust Barometer clearly spells out the importance of trust and its impact on our purchasing decisions as consumers.¹² When consumers were asked about their deciding factor for doing business with a brand, trusting the brands was the fifth popular response after key product attributes such as quality, convenience, value, and ingredients.

How does a brand best gain the trust of consumers in a digital-first world? Celebrity endorsements were the traditional choice because they make it easier to align your brand with elements of the celebrity’s image and their popularity. The glamor and power of the celebrity’s identity and brand transfers to the product. It’s success and class by association. It’s easy to trust a current chess master on the best kinds of chessmen. It’s why Nike had a $1.6 million increase in the golf market because of its ties to Tiger Woods, despite a scandal that caused other sponsors to drop him.¹³ Jordan’s continuing celebrity and brand as an all-time basketball great means Nike continues to release Jordan shoes and sell astronomical numbers despite the fact Jordan hasn’t played an NBA game since 2003.

Celebrity power lasts because it’s based on people with authority. This is where influencer marketing enters the picture and is beginning to compete with celebrity endorsements for marketing budgets. Edelman Trust Barometer looked at the 18–to–34 predominately millennial demographic and found that not only was relatability to a given influencer twice as important to their popularity or celebrity status, but also a whopping 63 percent trusted what influencers said about products more than what brands say about themselves.

It should then come as no surprise that in a more recent study, 82 percent of consumers said they were very likely to follow the recommendation of an influencer they follow, which shows that trust translates digitally.¹⁴ Twitter has even reported that users trust influencers nearly as much as their own friends.¹⁵

Clearly the ancient concept of trust combined with advances in digital technology has brought upon an incredible transformation of how we decide who to do business with and who influences us in our purchasing decisions.

HOW THE INTERNET CHANGED INFLUENCE

We’ve seen the internet change how people communicate and get information. Specific knowledge is now gained with great speed, and communication happens at an unprecedented rate. Over the last decade, social media has fundamentally changed how people communicate, streamlining social interaction while lowering barriers between everyday people. Smartphones mean online access from anywhere at any time of the day, not just at home or in the office. The ease of content creation, publication, and distribution has democratized fame modeling, and hundreds of thousands of influencers have emerged. Celebrity status isn’t required. A person can claim status as an Instagram celebrity simply because they have thousands of followers.

At the same time, studies show certain groups of consumers trust celebrity endorsements less than before.¹⁶ Celebrity endorsements won’t go away or fade completely—they’ve been a tentpole of influencer marketing for over a century. Some of the skepticism comes from celebrities not aligning with their own identity and the engagement clearly being an ad. Celebrity influencers have received backlash, also, for when the endorsement comes across as not natural. In the case of the Fyre Festival, the influencers were paid for their promotion of the festival without disclosing that their posts were ads.¹⁷ The spectacular failure of the event reflected back on the influencers whose credibility then took a hit. The skepticism came from the impersonal, transactional nature of the engagement.

Minority groups in particular are becoming wary ...