Announcing the Next Evolution of Influencer Marketing: Organic Influencers
When we talk about influencer marketing, people tend to immediately think of influencers in the traditional sense: celebrities or people who are known for having massive followings on social media; the Kim Kardashians and Kylie Jenners of the world.
‘Influencers,’ as we think of them today, are closer to reality TV stars than they are to your average consumer. While they might have tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions, of followers that can provide the attention factor marketers constantly strive for, it turns out they’re not as influential as you’d think.
A recent Stackla study surveying over 1,500 consumers across the U.S., UK and Australia found that people were nearly 10x more likely to make a purchase after seeing a peer’s social post than that of a traditional social media influencer.
Today’s largest group of consumers, Millennials and Gen Z, are savvy enough to know that celebrities and people with massive followings get paid to promote products, whereas posts from other everyday customers are viewed by consumers as inherently more trusted and authentic. And authenticity is king.
In fact, 90 percent of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support. Not to mention that recently revealed fakes, frauds and scandals, like the now infamous Fyre Festival, have greatly diminished consumer and brand trust in influencers.
This could be one reason why numerous studies show that on average engagement rates steadily decline the more followers someone has. And when you think of how much money brands pay traditional influencers per post — anywhere from $250 to $1 million in some cases — the economics start becoming very lopsided.
Upon examining these converging trends, we here at Stackla see the influencer industry as a whole shifting towards more nano influencers and everyday consumers, because the problem with traditional influencer marketing is that it focuses on the wrong type of ‘influencers’.
Instead of wasting tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on a handful of posts from a few people who have a lot of followers (but not a lot of genuine engagement), we believe brands would be better served to focus on engaging and motivating the multitudes of real advocates who already create tons of great, influential visual content about their brands.
This is why we’re excited to announce the release of Organic Influencers.
The Next Evolution of Influencer Marketing
Our new Organic Influencers solution is built to help brands turn their organic advocates into influencers. With Organic Influencers, you can easily find, engage, motivate and reward your best brand advocates to build loyal communities and rich libraries of authentic, high-quality content that delivers real ROI.
Here’s how it works:
Discover & Connect With Your Best Creators
Organic Influencers helps you easily find, rank and sort all the people who are organically creating content about your brand, then gives you a seamless way to directly reach out and invite them to your influencer or advocate community. This is all done in a centralized dashboard, enabling you to manage all your advocate interactions and content rights in one place.
Distribute Content Briefs
Once people have agreed to join your influencer community, Organic Influencers enables you to develop and distribute customizable creative briefs to advocates via our private creator portal.
Through this creator portal, which is also fully-customizable for brands, you can outline for your community exactly what kind of content you’d like them to create — complete with brand guidelines and mood boards for structure and inspiration.
Upon joining the community, all advocates will be agreeing to your brand’s specific Terms and Conditions. Therefore any content submitted to your brand via creative briefs will be automatically rights approved and sent directly to your Stackla Asset Manager.
Need a particular type of visual gallery for a timely campaign launch, event or product release? You can even set time limits for when they need to submit content for each specific brief.
Reward & Incentivize Advocates
It is through the creator portal that your advocates will receive every creative brief your brand invites them to participate in. In order to help motivate your influencer community to continually produce and share the kind of content your brand is seeking, Organic Influencers allows you to attach your choice of rewards and incentives to each creative brief. Upon accepting content submitted by an advocate, that person will automatically gain access to whatever reward was attached to that specific brief.
For example, if you shared a creative brief with your influencer community looking for content featuring your hiking backpack in nature, you could set a 2-week time limit on that creative brief and offer a 50 percent off coupon for a pair of hiking boots to anyone whose content you accept. Once your brand has approved the photo John Smith submitted from his Yosemite hike wearing your brand’s backpack, he’ll receive the coupon you designated for that creative brief. You get authentic, high-quality content, he gets a great deal on his next purchase as well as the opportunity to see his image featured throughout your marketing. Plus, the more merchandise he owns from your brand, the more opportunities he’ll have to produce new, relevant content in exchange for continued rewards. Win, win.
Scale the Reach of Your Advocates’ Influence
Once you have a bunch of authentic, relevant and rights-approved visuals coming in from your community, Stackla enables you to put that content to work far beyond social media. The seamless scalability of this high-quality, influential content is what really sets Organic Influencers apart from other influencer marketing platforms.
More traditional influencer platforms and programs tend to facilitate the creation, payment, timing and sharing of a small number of posts from someone who typically has a large following on one of the top social networks — mainly Instagram and/or YouTube. Because influencer marketing campaigns tend to predominantly live on the third-party channels the influencer content was originally shared on (i.e. Instagram and YouTube), brands often miss out on the opportunity to leverage that content across the rest of their omni-channel mix of owned and paid touchpoints (unless they’ve negotiated additional payment for the licensing of said content).
As part of Stackla’s enterprise-grade platform, Organic Influencers can be fully integrated into your marketing stack, making it quick and easy to publish that content out across all your key channels — from your website and commerce pages to your emails and digital ads.
Organic Influencers allows you to take a proactive approach to UGC while helping you put this content to work across all your marketing channels so you can ultimately tie real content to real revenue — driving ROI while you strengthen customer loyalty.
By harnessing the combined authentic influence and engagement of your everyday customers who are already creating content about your brand, you can achieve more sustainable and scalable brand awareness as well as content creation and performance while simultaneously developing deeper relationships with your customers.
If you want to start turning your advocates into influencers and let their passion fuel your promotion, fill out the form below to request a demo of Organic Influencers. If you’re already a customer, talk to your Customer Success Manager.
