The Upside down: 2 frameworks to have one powerful Influencer strategy
So many platforms, tools, and talents! Pulling off an influencer campaign can be quite a complex undertaking. Especially, selecting and contracting the right influencers comes along as an overwhelming challenge at first sight. You don’t want to put your time and budget behind a campaign that is not bringing in the results that you need to succeed with your release.
You are not alone in this! Did you know that 23% of your fellow marketers stated that it was very challenging to find the right influencers, and 62% say they have medium difficulty? There are two frameworks that I find quite useful to simplify the selection process you do inhouse, come up with the decision if you should work with an agency or influencer platform and end up with an impactful influencer campaign.
Applying the marketing funnel
If it’s not in your bigger picture when fleshing out your plan, circle back to the marketing funnel. I prefer the simplified modern marketing funnel quite a bit, with the four funnel phases being awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty from top to bottom. The critical question here is the why — why are you planning an influencer campaign, and what is it you want to achieve? Whether it is awareness or conversion will have a considerable impact on the influencers you pick, the budget you spend, and the KPIs to measure.
Understanding the Pyramid of Influencers
Now, let me put the 2nd framework side-by-side with the funnel. Interestingly, it’s the Upside down — a pyramid. Starting from the broad bottom, you have the Nano-Influencers, which are basically your power users, your community. Most of them will have a rather small social following. Still, if you have read one of my older blogs about community marketing, you’ll know that I believe in catering to them the best way possible. They form the foundation of brand advocacy and your first line of influencers when it comes to conversion.
Right above them sit the so-called Micro-Influencers or emerging influencers, the term I like better for talents who start at 1,000 followers up to 10,000 followers. Typically, they have achieved certain visibility and pull lots of engagement from their fans. They have, in the case of Twitch, achieved affiliate status, which is allowing them to monetize their content.
One level up, you have the up-and-coming influencers, often opinion leaders in a specific topic or genre with a rapidly growing fan-base. Sometimes they are referred to as the rising stars, who have gathered a significant number of engaged fans in the 5 to 6 digits range. Often, it’s still possible to reach out to them for a campaign without a middle-man in the form of agents or MCNs.
This kind of accessibility is typically not true anymore when it comes to the macro-influencers in the higher 6-digit follower bucket ranging up to even 1 million or slightly above it. I mean, it’s not a problem at all to go through their management or agent. But sure, it will mean that you have reached the tier where cost is becoming a lot more relevant as a factor.
Finally, on the top of the pyramid beyond the 1 Million subs/fans, you have the celebs and mega-influencers with a vast reach, quite professional business setup, and also some substantial fees to be considered in your plan.
Putting the influencer framework in action
Now, it’s time to blend both frameworks into each other to achieve the original goal: making the selection process of influencers more simple. It’s kind of a decision matrix.
1) Selecting Influencers for Awareness
What you typically want as an outcome when you leverage Influencer Marketing for brand awareness translates to this statement from your target audience: “Hey. I’ve heard about this game.” So, what I will typically do to achieve this desired outcome is focusing on reach in a broad audience. Achieving reach can work through a very small number of mega influencers. Due to their vast fan-base, they will get you many eyeballs for your brand and compared with classic advertising with a quite better ROI, which studies found to be up to 8-times higher. ROI meaning in the light of brand awareness, of course. The KPIs you have to monitor are reach, views, and engagement to some extent. But working with the likes of Ninja, Pewdiepie, and comparable influencers is not for everyone and every budget.
An alternative strategy is tackling a whole group of relevant influencers from the macro-influencer segment — preferably 4 to 8 to equal the reach of 1–2 celebs.
- Minus: this means definitely more work and management for you, and there will be audience overlaps, so it’s not simply 1+1.
- Plus: this strategy comes with the bonus of higher engagement per influencer and is also pushing your campaign closer to the consideration phase of the funnel.
2) Selecting Influencers for Consideration
In a chat between two of your potential consumers, the consideration will sound something like this: “I’ve checked this game out, and it looks pretty cool. I think I might give it a shot.” You have reached the stage of relevancy, and that’s also the thing to laser-focus on with your influencer activities for consideration. In the segment of the Macro-influencers and rising stars, you’ll find the ones that have decent reach but, at the same time, an engaged fan-base with clear interest. The content these talents put out is also very relevant to their own community.
It’s a bit like with affinity targeting in advertising: not too granular, but it still leaves out the audience, who will not find your content relevant. As much you will not believe that it’s very likely to convert them to players later on. Research if these influencers are covering your genre or your competitor’s game with a relevant frequency and check the engagement numbers they are pulling off. As you still will put some relevant budget behind it, you don’t want to waste it on low engagement KPIs. Also, with a good selection, you can have a secondary focus on conversions, be it a newsletter-signup, joining your discord server, or in the best case, wishlisting/pre-ordering your title. Did you know that influencers with a following in the range of 50 to 250k deliver a 20% better ROI compared to the top segment? It may be a little more work to identify and sign them, but it can absolutely pay off in engagement and click numbers. The two are also the KPIs to prioritize in this segment.
3) Selecting Influencers for Conversion
Speaking of the ultimate end-boss of marketing — when it comes to conversions, emerging influencers are the weapon of choice. They have a highly passionate and highly targeted audience. If you consider that 82% of consumers say they are more likely to make a purchase because of a recommendation of a friend or someone they feel close to, the brand advocacy or word-of-mouth comes entirely into play with micro-influencers. Statistics find them driving 60% higher engagement rates than the top talents, while many of them will stream, let’s play, or post your content in exchange for free access, being part of early product versions and similar services. That’s a lot less costly than engaging with the celebs and mega-influencer. The market is shifting there already. For every mega influencer in a campaign, there were 10 emerging influencers used in 2019. This looked way different in 2016 when the ratio was still 1:3. (Creator IQ Influencer Benchmark Report)
At the same time, it also comes with much more research work, emails back and forth, and managing the campaign, while it’s live. You might want to consider engaging an agency or working with an influencer platform to do the heavy lifting. It can get quite tedious otherwise: say you would want to spend $5k on a micro-influencer activation, but then there’s the time you have to put into coming up with a final list of say 25 talents to work with. It’s not crazy to estimate that you will need to put in 8 hours of research and 3 to 4x the time to deal with all the emails or chat messages from the intro to briefings, assets and finally access to your product that you have to sent back and forth until your campaign can finally take off. And after all, the chain of communications will start all over when it comes to collecting all the results and building the final report. Which of your influencers had the best engagement rates, who was driving the most sales? Now the good thing is that they will produce content that feels very authentic, and because of the trust, you gain with their followers, ultimately result in good conversion numbers.
That’s quite a bit to consider when you start with influencers. Also, there are a lot more details in ensuring a smooth campaign execution I couldn’t cover here. But it’s a good ground to start from without getting overwhelmed. Let me give you the tl:dr wrap up here:
- When you start working on your influencer selection, think about where in the marketing funnel your campaign sits and if you want to achieve reach, engagement or conversions
- Map the funnel stage with the Influencer pyramid to make a first decision for what type of influencers to look for
- If the top tier talents are not for you, you can still deliver a brand awareness campaign with influencers
- The workload gets more the further you move to the bottom of your funnel and the influencer pyramid. Consider working with an agency or influencer platform
- Measure the right KPIs, depending on the goal of your influencer campaign.
