Vaibhav Odhekar, Managing Director - India and the Middle East at AnyMind Group, explains how the new AnyTag platform helps address the many challenges of the influencer marketing space.
How has Covid-19 impacted marketeers operating in the influencer marketing industry?
We recently launched a report on the state of influencer marketing in Asia, covering ten markets including Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. In it, we analyzed 1,300 influencer marketing campaigns from September 2019 to August 2020, and when Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, we saw a drastic increase in influencer marketing campaigns with a focus on branding and cause marketing (using influencers to raise awareness about personal hygiene, social distancing, and supporting causes around Covid-19). What’s more encouraging, though, is that influencer marketing campaigns on the AnyTag platform actually increased during the period of March 2020 to August 2020.
We are seeing similar trends in the MENA region, with marketeers increasingly looking at influencer marketing this year. There was a big focus for influencer marketing from FMCG and consumer packaged goods brands, and many brands also used this opportunity to leverage influencer marketing to showcase their products in an “at-home” setting.
What about influencers themselves?
Apart from a large shift towards influencers producing content from their homes, we also saw shifts in the type of content influencers produced - with a greater focus on lifestyle, fitness, and humor compared to before the pandemic.
Somewhat similar, influencers in MENA were hit with the reality of having to create more content to maintain engagement and followers, leading to shifts in both platforms and content. A majority of fashion influencers started making funny TikTok videos with their families or incorporating fashion and lifestyle trends on this platform. Travel influencers also saw a shift of content from YouTube vlogs to Instagram and TikTok to showcase their cooking content and workouts. On the other hand, fitness influencers were highly sought after on Instagram, with content about home-workouts populating feeds.
What kind of issues are marketeers facing when collaborating with influencers?
One of the most common occurrences is marketeers not having enough insight or data into influencers, leading them to appoint the wrong influencers, and ultimately lean towards deeming influencer marketing as “not effective.”
Another common challenge is in managing large-scale influencer marketing campaigns manually. Having to manage tens or even hundreds of influencers for a single campaign is extremely time-consuming and we haven’t even touched the part about tracking and reporting yet. Now, imagine multiplying this by region or area.
At the same time, identifying the right objectives and measuring these objectives with the right KPIs can also be a challenge for those starting out (and even some who have run successive campaigns). Measuring the reach of a campaign, or how many people saw the content, uses pretty straightforward metrics like views or engagement, but what happens when we go lower down the funnel?
If we’re talking about interest or resonance, metrics like post saves and post shares can take precedence (engagement can be an indicator here, but it’s a long shot), whilst clicks and actions should be used for bottom-funnel influencer marketing campaigns.
What are the limitations on measuring influencer marketing campaigns' ROI?
It’s common to find marketeers still trying to tie their influencer marketing activities to business results. In the past, decisions around measurement for influencer marketing was based on gut feel and trying to tie metrics like engagement/engagement rate to the amount of revenue generated from an influencer marketing campaign.
Additionally, if an influencer marketing campaign is run on multiple social media platforms from the same influencer, how can a marketeer attribute a particular post or influencer to this uplift in product sales? This often resulted in a mix of social media, site analytics, and CRM being used to measure the ROI (if the marketeer knows how to stitch them together).
How does the AnyTag platform work? What technology is being used?
We created the AnyTag platform to make it easy for marketeers to discover influencers and activate, manage, track, and attribute influencer marketing activity within a single platform. In June this year, we added a social media analytics module to the AnyTag platform, enabling marketeers to measure the impact of influencer marketing campaigns on their own social media and create lookalike audiences from follower data on a brand’s own social media account to match the followers of an influencer.
For influencer marketing, we have two key modules on AnyTag (apart from our social media analytics): marketplace and engagement.
Marketplace: This is predominantly populated by nano-influencers and micro-influencers (range of followers from 1,000 to 100,000). Marketeers can create campaigns for influencers to join, establish campaign briefs and details, manage and approve influencer-generated content for campaigns, and track campaign results. Marketeers also have greater control over their budget including setting the maximum budget for a campaign and per influencer, whilst measuring against metrics for engagement, views, clicks and actions (or conversion).
Engagement: We offer this module for those who are looking at macro-influencers or top stars (range of followers from anywhere between 100,000 to more than a million). Our influencer operations teams will play a part in the negotiations with influencers, and the selection, tracking and reporting are done through the platform.
How does it aim to address these issues?
Let’s approach them one at a time.
Insight into influencer data: With AnyTag connected to influencers through our mobile app for influencers, marketeers can get insight into data such as follower demographics and sentiment, posting insights for optimal post performance, follower growth (to sift out inorganic growth), and the type of posts that resonate the most with an influencer’s followers. Additionally, a brand’s past campaign performance of influencers is also captured on the platform, allowing users to understand which influencers truly resonate. These insights can be used independently or together with the social media analytics module, providing even deeper insight into the most effective influencer marketing strategy.
Managing large-scale campaigns manually: Apart from running campaigns with tens of influencers in a certain market through our marketplace or engagement modules, AnyTag also provides marketeers with access for influencer marketing campaigns in all major markets in Asia. We’re looking to grow this to include the GCC region but at the same time, we’re opening up opportunities for influencers in GCC to work with brands from Asia. All briefs, tracking, post approvals, and influencer management are done through the platform. There is also a minor but very useful feature for brand marketeers or agencies: the ability to download automatically-populated campaign reports in PowerPoint, Google Slides, or CSV formats in less than two minutes, depending on the number of influencers selected (campaigns with hundreds of influencers can take a couple of minutes).
The right objectives, KPIs, and attribution to business results: We have teams of local influencer marketing experts in each of our operating markets that work with influencers on a daily basis and sign them up to our platform. They also provide our customers with consultation on strategy, best practices for each market and across markets. Additionally, apart from usual metrics like costing by post, follower, likes, views, shares, and comments, AnyTag also provides marketeers with the ability to track clicks and conversions on a landing page, which is especially useful for lower-funnel influencer marketing campaigns.
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