Belle or Beast: Are Your Influencers Driving or Diving Brand Growth?

The Netflix docuseries, The Search For Instagram’s Worst Con Artist, tracks the rise and fall of Belle Gibson, an Australian diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given only four months to live but who miraculously survived for years claiming it was due to her healthy diet and lifestyle. As her popularity (and net worth) soared as an influencer, she became a hero to other people living with critical illness. Except every part of Gibson’s story was based on lies.

There are now millions of social media superstars talking about everything from fashion, beauty, health and wellness, lifestyle, interiors and gaming. A valued piece of the marketing puzzle, brands seek to reach, engage and, ultimately, boost sales by being a meaningful part of the conversations that influencers have with their followers.  As a result, spend on influencer marketing is rocketing. The global influencer marketing market has more than tripled since 2019 and is estimated (by Statista) to reach a record spend of US $39.3 billion by 2025.

Evaluating the potential of such partnerships and then measuring how they help drive or erode brand growth can be a challenge. Insights professionals and marketers want to effectively pinpoint the value they are deriving from micro-users, celebrities, TikTokers, YouTubers or social tastemakers in their influencer network.  

Asking these five key questions will help you to understand how the buyer journey – from awareness through to where they have the strongest pull in the sales funnel and right up to the point of purchase – is being impacted. 

Are Your Objectives Clear? 

Decide the goal of your partnerships. If your aim is to increase brand awareness, potentially a change in feelings and perceptions of your brand, ultimately to drive sales. Ultimately your influencer partnerships should drive some sort of action or behavior. 

Does the Influencer Connect You to the Right Audience? 

It’s important to ensure that the influencer’s audience are the same as your target audience or you could be wasting valuable time and budget.

Finding influencers who will create stickiness for your brand through their authenticity as a regular person could be a more effective partnership than celebrity influencers with millions of followers for example, particularly if your brand isn’t being used authentically as part of their daily routine. 

At the same time don’t ignore the potential risks of the association that some brand partnerships could bring. Brands need to avoid being associated with influencers like Belle Gibson and their wrongdoings.

Are you Achieving a Meaningful Emotional Engagement? 

A crucial pillar of your desired action will be to ensure that the influencer’s communications make consumers feel something.

While working with an influencer can be one step removed because it relies on the influencer’s ability to evoke these emotions for your brand, it is also a powerful brand endorsement that can supercharge emotional connections.

When the brand is completely aligned with that group or community of followers you can gain a loyal following of consumers who are passionate in how they talk about your or recommend you, that your brand can move from an endorsement to something the community of followers try and even use regularly.

Do Your Values Align? 

Your brand needs to fit seamlessly within the values of the influencer as well as the content they share and the stories they’re telling. 

While most influencers are pretty good at being real, there is a fine line between partnerships that are authentic and forced. The last thing you want is for consumers to feel that they are being sold to.  The influencer has to make people think about the brand by conveying meaningful brand benefits in a relevant way to them.

For example, would an endorsement for the online pet store Chewy be better coming from a random celebrity with a dog, or an influencer known for being passionate about rescuing animals and making them feel cared for medically or loved?  Ideally, the influencer’s values should align with Chewy’s offering of affordable alternatives to pet medication and their mission to get supplies to you quickly and send you flowers when a pet is lost due to illness or accident.

Done right, a recommendation or affiliation from an influencer could be as impactful as a friend recommending a brand to you. 

Are you Changing Behavior? 

Look back to the original desired outcomes. If the goal was to increase sales then use of promo-codes, discounts and direct calls to action should be visible in both short-and long-term sales figures.

You might also want to measure the impact that influencers had on amplifying other marketing communications. Were any retail channels more positively impacted than others? Was there a particular influencer or single influencer post that drove more interest, awareness or sales?

Unpacking how these content creators and community engagers impact reach and effectiveness compared to other marketing and brand activities is essential, but it’s not always easily identifiable.

Metrics such as: an increased number of followers; a rise in positive sentiment or other KPIs in your brand tracking; or even more positive mentions in social conversations; all work together to show impact. 

Linguistics analysis can also be expanded to incorporate additional metrics such as a map and size of social media chatter about relevant topics. With this you can deep dive into themes that have surfaced pre and post influencer engagement.   

Choosing the right metrics to measure against your objectives will ensure that you can continue to refine and improve the way that influencers support your brand growth objectives.