An ad-exchange for micro influencers?
How to track the ROI of marketing spend with these entrepreneurs.
By now we all know that effective marketing is a game changer in any internet-related industry (as well as the biggest sinkhole for investment). If your competitors’ customer acquisition cost is US$3, while yours is at US$0.6, you stand a huge advantage by being about to acquire 5x number of customers with the same cost.
With internet and mobile – more channels opened up. Sure Facebook and Google give you the best tracking and best quality customers, but to win the consumers (especially when you are the underdog facing strong competitors), you need much more than that.
More and more methods has been deployed in order to increase branding and help companies to perform. Agencies flourish to help brands and companies which are perplexed with this ever-changing landscape.
In this new digital era, world business (and often political) leaders are fighting to get access to data and traffic by acquiring social media platforms. Why? Deep understanding of psychology behavior is a critical game changer.
These are the reasons why entrepreneurs and investors put their effort and resources (including money) into the business model of creating social influence.
World Leaders on Social Media
Key Leaders has always been a way to inspire, if not change, people’s lives. The epitome of perfect world leaders stories are shown on the companies as follows: Jack Ma with Alibaba, Steve Jobs with Apple, Bill Gates with Microsoft.
Having a such great effect on a macro perspective, it bring new ideas for this new digital era. Marketers are seizing the opportunity to connect with the individuals, or rather, among the individuals.
Nothing is lost, everything is transformed.
From hunter-gatherer times, word of mouth (WoM) has always been the way to create/influence someone’s opinion. As consumers are experiencing new notion of relationships with social media, WoM is transformed as well.
For example, social media apps use terms including “Match someone”, “Gain followers”, “New connection” or “Add as a friend” to describe a digital relationship. That’s what some B2C business models want to do right? Going from Online to Offline to convert.
New endorsement strategy: influencers
Marketers see the opportunity of fast networking trend and had to design a new strategy to perform. That happened when micro Influencer/blogger popularity came about.
We are going from Macro to Micro endorsement in order to create a deep connections between Influencers and his audience on a daily basis. This is understandable and if you were a brand manager you would try different channel to increase your performance.
One of my closest friends recently got approached with by social media agency, and asked to take some Instagram picture of him with a luxury bag. Imagine?
Receiving a bag worth $1000 for 3000 followers, that show the value of the traffic he created.
Social Media Agency found the new gold
Brands gained interest with influencer strategy because of the low cost of acquisition and the quality of the organic audience. Therefore, agencies are trying to find best influencers by designing accurate algorithms with data.
In Advertisement industry, the main challenge is to connect Advertiser / Brand with suitable Publishers/ Influencers in order to achieve a goal: branding, performance.
From Hiip in Vietnam to Takumi in Europe and Paid in New York City, influencer platforms are raising significant amount of cash to pursue this model.
Which is interesting, because not long ago, the agency model has been seen as a service business that can’t scale, therefore not loved by the VCs.
However, this notion has changed with the current investments. Ultimately, influencer agencies, as the middle men in the digital native age, could become more data driven, results-oriented, automated and therefore, scalable.
The data they gain would be invaluable as well.
Imagine my friend’s post of the luxury bag, moving forwards such relationships can be tracked, measured, and optimised – pretty much like how we do with Facebook or Google AdWords nowadays.
Momentum Works is paying close attentions on emerging markets, and the emerging trends. We realise that there are many ways to do growth – beyond the conventional Facebook, Google and last generation ad-exchanges.
Perhaps it is time for an ad-exchange for micro influencers?
Thanks for reading The Low Down, insight and inside knowledge from the team at Momentum Works. If you’d like to get in touch with us about any issues discussed in our blog, please drop us an email at hello@mworks.asia and let us know how we can help.