An army of lovers: the surprising new stars of influencer marketing

influencer army

Once a function of PR, but now very much embedded within everyone's marketing strategies, influencer marketing is the biggest game in town.

But are marketers focusing too much of their time and budgets on the low-return / high-effort superstars at the top of the influencer pyramid to the detriment of the thousands of smaller - but exponentially more influential - voices further down? And, if so, how can that kind of scale possibly be managed?

We explore the future of influencer marketing, and take a look at the technology that's helping marketers do exactly that.

The internet was supposed to save us from marketing bunkum. Gone were the days of super-expensive creative, plastered over billboards and magazines and televisions with nebulous impact. This was a new dawn, where everything was measurable, where scale kept prices down and where campaigns could be tweaked or switched in a heartbeat.

Then the internet broke.

Ad-blockers went all ad-blocky and blocked all the ads, leaving the field clear for giants like Facebook and Google to scoff up all the scale and inflate their prices accordingly. And the interweaving of customer-service with social meant that people were far more likely to respond to a sponsored post

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Une Armée de Fans: Les Influenceurs Marketing sont les surprenantes nouvelles stars

influencer army

Auparavant chasse gardée des RP, les influenceurs marketing sont aujourd’hui bien implantés dans les stratégies marketing.

Mais les marketers concentrent-ils trop de temps et d’argent sur les superstars au sommet de la pyramide des influenceurs pour un faible rendement mais un important budget ? Au détriment de milliers de plus petits influenceurs néanmoins exponentiellement bien plus inspirationnels ? Et si ceux-là sont plus prometteurs comment gérer un tel volume d’individus aussi dispersés et difficile d’accès ?

Nous explorons ci-après l’avenir des influenceurs marketing, et nous intéressons à la technologie, qui accompagne les marketers dans cette démarche.

Internet était censé nous sauver des “foutaises” marketing. Adieu l’époque des créa hors de prix placardées dans des milliers de magazines, ou spots TV à l’impact nébuleux. C’était une nouvelle ère, où tout était mesurable, où l’économie d’échelle maintenait des prix bas et ou les campagnes pouvaient êtres ajustées ou remplacées en un claquement de doigts.

Puis Internet a laché.

Les ad-blockers ont commencé à bloquer toutes les publicités, laissant le champs libre aux géants Facebook et Google pour s’emparer de l’économie et augmenter leurs prix en fonction. Aussi la sollicitation des services clients via

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What influences the influencers?

Right. Elephant in the room time. You know those influencers you're getting to plug your products? It's not your brand they're attracted to - it's your wallets.

Your big, bulging wallets, as it turns out. Now that influencer marketing is the fastest-growing method of customer acquisition, it's become a big-money game. Twenty-five percent of brands are spending over half a million dollars on it every year. Five percent are spending over $5m. That translates to about 200 bucks for every half-arsed "Hey, guys - check out this amazing thing I've discovered" and ten grand for every "I just spent a day testing the latest doo-dah from thingumabob."

And here's the thing: it's not their fault. Bloggers gotta eat, tweeters gotta tweet. The problem isn't so much that those all-important influencers have finally woken up to the value of their influence (given that 3% of influential individuals generate 90% of impact online, did you really think they wouldn't charge for that?), the problem is that the tools you've given them - and their audiences - are woefully unfit for purpose.

I'll explain. Like any fun thing worth talking about, there's three people involved when it comes to influencer marketing. There's you,

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