How Influencers Can Influence Advertisers
3 category metrics they care about and how you can hone in on them
Aspiring influencers and startups have a lot in common.
We lack considerable resources, awareness, money, and spend our time trying to convince people we have value despite the fact 95% of us will fail and move back in with our parents.
Where the comparison is even more relevant is in our aspirations to acquire funding.
Startups look for investors. Influencers look for brands/advertisers to partner with.
For influencers, adopting a more mathematical/quantitative approach can be the difference between becoming the next Tesla or having 100 useless T-Shirts from your failed startup.
The first thing to keep in mind when creators or influencers are looking to leverage their attention/following to strike brand deals is that eyeballs matter. The amount of people you can reach and reach consistently is paramount. But that might not be a secret to most.
Things are shifting though and brands are very good at sifting through the mud to find the gems.
This means the metrics they care about are changing and for good reason.
Empty bought follower counts or unengaged and non-purchasing audiences are not valuable in their eyes.
Let’s break down the 3 categories that matter the most and can be the biggest pieces of leverage if you perform well in them:
- Average reach, engagement rates, and follower count
- Content consistency in tone, publishing frequency, and success
- Actual sales or willingness of your segment to buy
The first category: Average reach, engagement rates, and follower count.
Pretty straightforward but brands want some quantitative data around your content.
Fair enough.
Reach, engagement rate, and follower count are 3 of the quantitative metrics that matter because they hone in on your actual engaged audience in relation to how many followers you have.
You can pump these numbers up using all the standard content marketing best practices:
- Engaging introductions (a hook)
- Dynamic tone and proper storytelling with archs and story developments. (think Casey Neistat and how he constructs each vlog as a mini-movie with an intro, climax, dilemma, resolution).
- Calls-to-action and fan participation
- Production quality, audio
The second category: Content consistency in tone, publishing frequency, and success.
This category has to do with the actual content that you are producing. Do you have a distinguishable brand?
Do you publish content on a regular schedule and have you been doing so for a long time?
And how successful is your content on average?
Do you routinely have 1 video go viral then produce flops for the next 19 videos? A risky proposition for the brand to work with you if your content quality is sporadic.
Be consistent in your content creation, establish a tone/brand that distinguishes you and create things that follow the same skeleton of your successful content.
The third category: sales
All of this goes out the window if you can prove that you actually push merch and products to your audience.
Your fans can be arm-less, blind, and deaf but if you are peddling goods to them, you can land brand deals.
Conversion rates are something to track early on and make sure you have proper attribution set up from the get-go so you can track all your sales from different platforms and channels.
This gives you a massive advantage as you can provide brands with channel-specific conversion expectations and even better, content-specific conversion expectations.
Was it the prank videos that have had the highest conversions or the cringe ASMR eating videos that drove your fans to buy?
If you rely on affiliate marketing, your affiliate provider or platform usually provides reports on the efficacy of the various links you have around the internet.
Conclusion
Brands want to mitigate risk and maximize the return on their investment.
- Me
Give them an easy way to accomplish this by quantifying your effectiveness as a financial asset.
Turn yourself into a scrappy startup looking to bring in new investors.
Show them upside, quantify your value, and buy a couple of ping pong tables to show you’re modern and a great workplace for fresh graduates who don’t know better.
But in all seriousness, track everything. Test content forms. Optimize. Have clear calls to action. Peddle fitness tea. Profit.
Throw me a follow on Twitter and LinkedIn for more of this type of stuff.
