If you’re looking to boost engagement and authentically relate to your audience, read on for our guide on how to use memes, gifs, and emoji in your marketing!

Using Memes in Marketing

What is a Meme?

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of “meme” is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Memes usually leverage satire, social commentary, or nostalgia, meaning a high-quality meme is both funny and insightful. Because memes can also be rude or offensive, marketers must walk a fine line when experimenting with meme marketing. Memes are an extremely low-cost way to create engaging content that attracts a following, particularly on Twitter. On Twitter, brands are able to approach messaging in a very casual manner and funny content often gets shared widely, which is effectively free marketing. Memes have also started to be used with more regularity on Instagram, with brands like Recess really pushing the envelope.

Marketers & Brands Who’ve Used Memes Well

On Instagram:

Recess

Recess is one of the most absurd brands on Instagram, building up a truly unique personality and brand story using a lush pastel color palette that seems to evoke the “bliss” the drink itself claims to produce. Responding to the coronavirus effectively as a brand was complicated but Recess managed to lean into the dire situation with highly relatable quarantine memes featuring Tiger King, a comically stretched tandem bike, and an expanded logo adding “ion” to spell Recession.

Recess shines in the daring and hilarious personality they’ve crafted on Instagram, effectively bringing each unique flavor to life. The majority of the content features cans personified among different cultural reference points, memes, and various backdrops or scenes. The “starter pack” meme is a series of multi-panel photo sets usually meant to illustrate the archetype of a celebrity, company or subculture through a recommended selection of fashion articles, multimedia and other consumer products, similar to steal her look fashion guides. Recess cleverly used this format for its flavors to hilarious effect.

Gucci

If anyone asks me what I think of Gucci, I think of them as a classy and traditional Italian leather brand. However, back in 2017, the brand took on a more modern approach for one of their campaigns. Promoting their new watches, Gucci recreated the classic Arthur fist meme on Instagram. This post broke Gucci out of their traditional bubble, making them a more “down to earth” brand.

BarkBox

Aside from having a separate dedicated meme account or a single meme campaign, some brands such as @BarkBox have entirely transformed their Instagram account to a meme account. BarkBox is a monthly subscription service providing dog products, services, and experiences. Instead of having just cute dog pictures with their products on their feed, the team at BarkBox decided to make their Instagram account more fun and relatable for their followers.

For many brands, such as BarkBox, their content can be repetitive. People don’t want to keep seeing ads. This unique way of marketing leaves a stronger impression for a potential mid- or bottom-funnel audience who might be interested in the brand in the future.

On Twitter:

Popeyes

Thinking back to 2019, one of the things I remember is how crazy people went after the Viral Popeyes Chicken Sandwich. Instead of it being a brand initiative, the meme movement was actually started by the audience first. Since everyone was talking about it, whether in real life or through social media, more people want to try it and see the hype themselves. The Crispy Chicken Sandwich sold out across the country, and Popeyes got an estimated $65 million in free advertising.

Interestingly enough, after seeing the potential free advertising it could obtain from followers, Popeyes seemed to hone in on meme trends more regularly. When the infamous $120,000 banana duct-taped to a wall art by Maurizio Cattelan at Art Basel Miami became a meme, Popeyes (along with many other brands) followed up with their own variation, a crispy chicken sandwich taped to a wall.

Marketers Who Didn’t Use Memes Well..

Michael Bloomberg

During his 2020 presidential campaign Mike Bloomberg’s team contacted some of the biggest meme accounts on Instagram to post sponsored content to promote his run. Just scrolling through the comments on a few of the posts, however, things didn’t go as planned…

One thing to keep in mind when it comes to meme marketing: people want to see organic and fun content instead of forced advertising. Bloomberg’s innovative political campaign also pushed for a new set of rules for Instagram. Just hours after those memes surfaced on Instagram, the company changed its advertising rules to require political campaigns’ sponsored posts from influencers to use its Branded Content Ads tool that adds a disclosure label of “Paid Partnership.” #oops

Using humor and memes is not as easy as borrowing inspiration from some strong copy on a competitors website. Being funny requires unsurprisingly, someone is actually funny. When brands try to use memes or humor and miss the mark it can come off as cringy and off putting. If you want to make sure your meme isn’t offensive or off-base, check out the Twitter handle Brands Saying Bae for some poorly executed marketing memes.

How to Create Memes for your brand

If you plan to use memes in your marketing campaigns, make sure you choose something that will not make you seem out of touch or that has been widely unpopular some time. You can use sites like KnowYourMeme.com or Meme Generator to find more information on the most popular memes out there. Or our favorite option, Kapwing, the company building “Adobe for the Meme Generation.” Kapwing is a collaborative multimedia editing suite that includes a meme maker, subtitler, trimmer, looper, filters, and more.

There are some memes that have longer lifecycles than others, but others that grow very stale quickly. You should try to avoid posting viral content continuously just to be funny. Like any joke, it’s all in the delivery.

Alternatively, if you have talented graphic designers on the team you can whip up some original meme content that customers will likely appreciate a little more. By remixing ideas from current cultural moments or memes you can really plug your brand into the minds of consumers as being “cool” and “fresh”.

Using Gifs in Marketing

What is a Gif?

Gifs are defined as “a lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images.” In other words, gifs allows for a series of images or a clip of a video to be endlessly looped. Gifs can hold attention and generate engagement better than static images because of the dynamic movement. They are especially useful for sprucing up emails or stories.

Marketers & Brands Who’ve Used Gifs Well

In Email:

Kate Spade

This gif is successful because movements keep the eye moving, highlighting the helpful features of each product in succession, without feeling too scattered or overwhelming. In this example, the gif is helpful because it lets actions speak louder than words; the gif tells the story visually, rather than verbally explaining the multi-functionality of each product individually.

Lyft

This gif within one of Lyft’s emails similarly lets the image tell the story. The iPhone mock up easily allows the user to imagine the user experience of the product in their own hand. The succession of images also effectively conveys how quick and seamless the process of calling a car is, and quells any confusion about how it works.

Boden

This gif by Boden enhances the messaging of the sale almost by literally showing the action of “running out.” Even though the gif doesn’t show a physical product Boden sells, the viewer can tie the physical sensation to the intellectual concept. It also effectively shows that today has the biggest reward by showing the movement on the biggest cup, but there are two other small options.

One thing to consider when using gifs in emails is that gifs increase email loaded weight, which leads to slower download speed, which can in turn lead to a lower engagement.

On Instagram:

Another great use of gifs in marketing of Insta Stories. Gifs are naturally eye-catching and draw attention to a certain area of the screen. Instagram stories allows for interactive CTA’s like “swipe up”, “link in bio”, “giveaway” to add more life to common directives or compel users to keep tapping through the stories, as in this example from Buffy:

Another way to use gifs on Instagram is to create custom gifs for your brand and add them to the Stories library. This allows for increased brand awareness, as users can search your brand in Instagram Story Stickers and use branded gifs (images of products, slogans, or the logo) in the content they create. A perfect use case of this is with Ritual, who created their own gifs, including a moving pill and slogans like “Take your Vitamins.”

There are not many failed examples of gifs (they are an easy win!), but some things to keep in mind when you using gifs:

• They should contain simple, isolated movements that are easy for the eye to follow
• Stray away from text heavy content and keep it more visually-focused
• Stay consistent with your branding: using themed colors, adding logos where applicable, etc.

Using Emojis in Marketing

What is an Emoji?

By definition, an emoji is “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc.” The emoticon has its origin in email back in 1982 as a way for computer scientists to express sentiment within text that could be read in different connotations. Decades later, we have hundreds of emojis within reach on our keyboards, serving the same purpose: to make content seem more animated and conversational. It’s no surprise that businesses have thought creatively on how to use emojis to speak to their audiences, but how successful are these attempts at relatability? Do they blur the line between informality and professionalism? The research shows that there are several benefits to using emojis in marketing and that using them well increases user interaction across several platforms.

Emoji Usage Statistics

Studies show that using emojis positively impacts the following metrics:

• 25.4% increase in engagement rate on Twitter
• 57% increase in likes on Facebook
• 33% increase in comments on Facebook
• 56% increase in open rate in email
• Push notifications with emojis saw 85% increase in open rates and a 9% bump in conversions

3 Ways Using Emojis Can Help Your Messaging

Boosts Memory

A study discovered that participants who received messages with emojis scored higher on memory tests than those who received the same messages without emojis. These results suggest that using emojis can make a message more memorable for the recipients. The additional context the emoji provides about the subject matter reinforces the words which strengthen the memory. Emojis are also a form of chunking, the psychological process in which the mind divides large pieces of information into smaller units (chunks) that are easier to retain in memory. Whereas it may take several words to convey a certain concept, emoji can do so in just one character.

Saves Space

As mentioned in the previous point, emojis do the work of several words in a single character. This helps your messaging because several email and social media interfaces have character limits that will cut off a title in mobile or certain desktop views. This means a user may not view the entirety of your message, and will, therefore, be less likely to engage with it. Emojis can grab their attention and allow for a more complete subject line in fewer words.

Seems Friendlier

In the aforementioned study on emojis, researchers found that participants who chatted online with an expert who used emojis rated the expert as both friendlier and more competent, compared to participants who chatted with an expert who did not use emojis. This is helpful to consider when designing website chatbots, and replying back to comments on Instagram or Facebook: adding a dash of emoji personality makes the user feel like they are talking to a real human. Emojis are fun and relatable — everyone can understand them, so why not use them in your marketing and customer interactions.

3 Tips on How To Use Emojis in Marketing

Cater to Your Audience

As with every marketing practice, the most important thing is to know your audience. If your company is an older or traditionally formal industry, like finance or law, the use of casual language can take away from your brand’s reputation. If your company has a younger audience, use of emojis could boost brand reputation because it matches the way they communicate. Some practical guiding questions when deciding what to use are: How does your audience normally speak? What do they expect from the companies they interact with? Is there an emoji that makes sense alongside your message?

Match the Subject & Sentiment

The most natural way to use emojis is to pick one that aligns with the concept you are talking about. For example, Pottery Barn uses the watch emoji to remind users that time is ticking for their latest furniture sale:

Similarly, Tynker uses the yellow school bus emoji for a Back to School promo:

In these examples, the emoji grabs the reader’s attention and gives a sense of the subject matter immediately. A tactic you can use is running split tests with emails, trying different emojis with different sets of subscribers and seeing which convey the message best. To help you get the best of your email campaigns, check out this list of popular subject line emojis.

Check the User Experience by Email Provider

Lastly, consider that each email provider displays text differently. In the chart below, all of the email clients with the green check mark display emoji without problems, which includes most of the big email clients like Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail. Outlook.com and iPhone/iPad sometimes translate the symbols into the word “emoji.” Be mindful that when using newer emojis released from IOS updates, any users who haven’t also updated IOS will not be able to view the picture. Outlook 2003 doesn’t support emoji at all. In these instances, a ▢ will show up.

Additionally, consider that each provider styles emojis slightly differently to be consistent with their formatting. When viewing your email on a mobile device, the emoji display is based on what the device supports. Mobile devices also change the style of the emoji to align with the look and feel of their interface.

How NOT to Use Emojis in Marketing

Practice Moderation

The purpose of emojis is to enhance your messaging. Be sure to not go so overboard with emoji use that what you are trying to say ends up more difficult to understand. Note this example below of Chevy doing a press release in all emojis that gets lost in translation. It was meant to be a fun decoding challenge, but keep in mind that on social media, users tend to scroll and skim- anything too effortful or time consuming will lose their attention.

It was meant to be a fun decoding challenge, but keep in mind that on social media, users tend to scroll and skim- anything too effortful or time consuming will lose their attention.

Wrap Up

Memes, emojis, and GIFs are cheap (almost free) and easy tools for marketers to spice up their campaigns. In an effort to seem more personable and increase engagement, brands are utilizing those tools for more of their social marketing. However, before publishing those campaigns, marketers should definitely understand the true meanings behind certain references, and not overuse some of those new trends.

At NoGood, we aim to drive massive growth using minimal spend [often utilizing memes and emojis] with our team of client-facing executors across all platforms.

Authors: Claudia Yuan & Lex Willis

Updated by: Alek Prus

The post Marketing with Memes, Gifs, & Emojis: The Definitive 2024 Guide appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

What Are Persona Psychographics?

Psychographics categorize consumers by qualitative psychological factors, such as their personality, interests, and values. These metrics are powerful for marketing because they help marketers enter the brain of their consumers and understand the reasoning for these consumers affinities. Thus, psychographics play a crucial role in target marketing for business: the same product can appeal to people from seemingly radically different demographics, and vice versa, people from seemingly similar demographics can have radically different sentiments toward a given product. The qualitative measures of psychographics help unveil the reasoning behind the quantitative measures marketing tends to focus on. Psychographic segmentation can focus on:

• Personality
• Attitude
• Personal values
• Lifestyle
• Social class
• AIOs (Activities, Interests, Opinions)

Why Do Persona Psychographics Matter?

The typical customer persona consists of the marketer’s ideal consumer title, with some demographics and basic information on the consumer including age, income, and profession. Then, marketers will typically loosely connect how that persona interacts with their product or brand. This system leads to targeting that is vaguely shooting in the dark and far from a bullseye. As Forbes states, these personas are not useless, just created incorrectly- many business owners and marketers don’t correctly implement it in their marketing because this type of consumer persona is missing key elements.

People don’t buy products or services for the sake of it. They are exchanging their money for an effect- hoping the result will give them a feeling, status, security, solution to a problem, etc.- that they couldn’t achieve on their own. It’s not just about what, say, a 24-35-year-old homeowner in Chicago making $50-100K who likes wellness does, but rather, what makes them do it? Is it because they crave the community fostered in wellness clubs? Or because wellness gives them more energy for other aspects of their life? Is it because they are natural trend-followers of whatever is buzzing at the moment? Most marketers have it backward: consumers make decisions off of emotions and values, not because they belong to a demographic subset, and are expected to behave a certain way. Why go after the effect without considering first the cause?

This is why psychographic are crucial for any brand or service. Data is important, but without the story behind the data, the numbers only help you in a limited capacity. Behavioral data and demographics speak to correlation- what people who belong to a certain population subset are often seen doing- but psychographics speak to causation- why they are doing this; when you know the “why”, you can create strategy around “how” you can be the one to fulfill their “why.”

3 Companies Who’ve Used Personal Psychographics Well

Apple

When Steve Jobs was introducing the iPod, he didn’t simply say “Here is our shiny new product” and list the capabilities. He made it personal: “Imagine having 1,000 songs in your pocket”. People were intrigued by the feeling of infinite possibility, a core value in American technology. They could imagine the efficiency upgrade from swapping out a limited 10-20 song CD manually in a walkman or fumbling with a bulky mp3 to having all their favorites in one compact digital place. Consumers could visualize the instant social appeal of being able to walk around with this innovative device, showing their friends and seeing their awed reaction.

That is the level of thinking with which Apple has always driven their technology, targeting what their products could do for their audiences in terms of lifestyle, values, social class. Apple’s integration of high utility and pleasing, simple design in their products help the modern consumer go about their day with ease and entertainment. Now, when a new model is released for an iPhone or MacBook, consumers rush to be one of the first to have it, knowing being up to date with the latest Apple device is an indicator of social status.

StreetEasy

Of all the struggles New Yorkers face, trying to find an apartment is one that all could unanimously relate to. StreetEasy understood that consumer pain point and not only delivered a product as a solution, but created their famous series of OOH ads hitting on those pain points in a humorously relatable way. In a sea of subway ads, theirs stood out to consumers and marketers because they perfectly capture the psychographics of New Yorkers: people who value the separation of their day and night life, put up with subpar roommates for the sake of bigger space and amenities, love the perks of outdoor spaces, but not the noise and fake friends that come with it. The specific, nail-on-the-head references make the consumer feel like they can trust StreetEasy because the brand shows that it genuinely understands the people it services.

TikTok

TikTok’s rapid growth and social media dominance in a short 2 years raised eyebrows everywhere. How did this new platform show up on the scene seemingly out of nowhere and rise to fame with over 1 billion downloads? By understanding that though Gen-Z and Millennials are close in demographics, they are wildly different in psychographics; Millennials are to Instagram what Gen-Z is to TikTok. Instagram encapsulated the attitudes of Millennials: a generation focused on self, and moreover, the portrayal of self to the world in a perfect, enviable way. The highly filtered and curated nature doesn’t appeal as strongly to Gen-Z’s, who value finding community and portraying themselves in a creative and authentic way. Cue TikTok, as a platform less about looks or status, and more about personality and inventiveness. TikTok presents an equilibrated playing field where users can connect over anything from similar humor and viral challenges to personal style, and form tribes. While Instagram engagement was declining, TikTok got ahead by understanding the personality and values of who Instagram was losing and cultivating the perfect space for those users.

3 AI Tools For Gathering Psychographic Data

While the importance of psychographics is evident, the way to capture them into personas has not always been as clear. In the past, marketers could only rely on cumbersome methods, such as focus groups, surveys, and research studies, and manually pull out the insights. Today, however, there are several AI tools that can automatically aggregate this kind of data for you in one click. Here are three of the strongest tools for building psychographic insights:

Personality Insights by IBM Watson

One great tool for gathering psychographic data is Personality Insights by IBM Watson. In their own words, this service “applies linguistic analytics and personality theory to infer attributes from a person’s unstructured text”. You input a body of text written by the person whose personality you’re interested in, containing words about everyday experiences, thoughts, and responses. The tool can word with as few as 100 words, but the more content, the stronger the analysis. The output returns in a summary of their personality, needs, and value. For example, an analysis of Oprah’s Twitter yields these results:

Brand Catalyst by MRI-Simmons

Powered by Smart Search, one of the most comprehensive consumer intelligence search engines, this insights platform allows marketers to mine through thousands of consumer behaviors in seconds, helping clients accelerate the development of brand-consumer messaging, cross-channel marketing, and media planning tactics. MRI-Simmons boasts a comprehensive view of the American consumer with 60,000 Consumer Elements, over 600 attitudes, opinions, and segmentation from over 500 product categories and over 8,000 brands. This wealth of data is what enables the advanced predictive models Brand Catalyst uses to identify potential prospects and their characteristics. The tool also has “Explorer” (discover what resonates with consumers of a defined brand), “Reporter” (quickly understand similarities and differences between brand personas), and “Creator” (automate the clustering of a persona into segments to test differentiated offering and messaging) functions to fit whatever your psychographic needs are.

Demographics Pro

Despite the name, Demographics Pro proves to go beyond the basic demographics of age, location, and income. This platform offers robust social listening insights on trends and activity across platforms, and more specifically, which audiences engage in which campaigns or topics to improve marketing implementation and strategy. Their tools verify your assumed audience characteristics and affinities and compare to competitors to find opportunities for reaching untapped audiences. Their audience profiles include factors such as what users do in their spare time, their greatest influences, and the brands they focus on the most.

10 Psychographic Questions to Ask About Your Consumers:

Lastly, the key of psychographics is tapping into your ideal consumer’s heart and mind- how they are feeling and thinking- and then meeting them there. The following questions are a great starting place for understanding your consumer psychographically:

• What problems have they been experiencing in their life?
• What are they hoping for?
• What have they tried that hasn’t worked for them in the past?
• How do they view themselves?
• Who are their inspirations?
• What do they expect from the brands or services they use?
• What kind of lifestyle do they have?
• What kind of lifestyle do they want? If different from the answer above, how can your brand or service bring them closer?
• How much do social and status factors affect them?

In answering these questions, you will ensure that you are not projecting what your brand wants and hoping the people you target will catch onto it, but instead, offer what your target consumers want and need and watch them attract to how you can serve them unlike anyone else.

The Takeaway

Psychographics are less obvious than geographic, demographic, and behavioral measures, and require digging beyond the surface, but they are just as helpful for understanding target markets. The study of people’s attitudes and interests, often studied in conjunction with typical demographic data allows for a more complete understanding of audiences. Luckily, there are an abundance of AI tools available to do this work for you. The better you understand your audience, the better you can market to them, which leads to better campaigns and saved time, money, and energy- everything a marketer could want.

This article was meant to illustrate creating persona psychographics using AI, but there is much more involved with refining your ideal audience segments. So if you are a small to medium-sized business generating $3M+ in annual revenue, looking for an agency to take the hard work off your plate – feel free to reach out to our team for a consultation and see how we can grow your business using psychographics.

The post How To Build Persona Psychographics Using AI appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

How do you decide a fair compensation amount for a post before knowing how it will perform? How do you attribute those performance metrics back to brand health and success? Cue the rise of performance-based influencer marketing. Here is everything you need to know for strategically partnering with influencers in a way that guarantees results.

How Does Performance-Based Influencer Marketing Work

The essence of performance-based influencer marketing is that the influencer’s results determine the degree of her or his compensation. Depending on the purpose of the activation, “results” come in a variety of performance metrics:

Benchmarks of success for your key performance metrics depend on a variety of parameters- influencer marketing budget, quality of creative content creation, size of audience, other performance campaigns running, etc.- but in general, if your influencer campaign was a success, you will see significant upticks in the relevant data corresponding to the time of the activation.

Types of Performance-Based Influencer Partnerships: 

The first is affiliate marketing, in which a brand provides influencers with a particular link or code to include within their high-quality content shared with their audience that will drive customers to a desired action. The brand can clearly track activity generated from that specific link or code and pays the influencer according to the amount of traction gained. If the intended ideal customer action were actual sales, the payout could be a certain amount per sale, a percentage of the overall sales, a percentage for the first 100 sales with a lower rate for everything after, and so on. Thus, the guesswork is taken out of how much “value” the relationships with influencers bring to the brand, and the compensation model expectations are both fair and clear. 

On the other hand, a brand could do a paid campaign, in which the potential influencer is paid a flat fee upfront and potentially more post-campaign, depending on performance marketing metrics. A brand could request an influencer’s engagement rate or results from a previous marketing campaign as validation that she or he has an active audience and that working with this public figure has and will yield results. CPMs differ, but the industry average is around $10. For example, an influencer with $100,000 would have a rate of $1,000 a post. The brand can still provide its favorite influencer with individualized links or codes to share and may opt to reward an additional percentage per sale, search clicks, etc., in response to the results. In this performance-based model, the value the influencer brings is predicted beforehand and can be verified after.  

Pros and Cons of Performance-Based Influencer Marketing 

The Strengths

This model addresses the pain points of traditional influencer marketing while retaining the benefits. Instead of hiring a professional photographer to produce eye-grabbing assets, the influencer does the work of creating quality content for you at a cheaper rate. As consumers have a growing aversion to performance advertising bombardment and quickly skip or swipe past ads, the familiar, less intrusive look of an influencer’s lifestyle post slows them down. If chosen correctly, the influencer can expand your brand’s reach to an ideal community. Furthermore, the strongest influencers amass loyal followers who genuinely trust her or his judgment and are more likely to consider their recommendation for a product in mind or service because it feels like a friend’s referral. 

Using performance-based influencers, in particular, lowers the risk of wasted budget in trying out an influencer marketing strategy. You can ensure that you are not over or undervaluing the influencer for their work. In the past, influencers could just flash a high follower count as proof that they were worth a given strategic partnership (or higher price tag). Now, requesting performance metrics helps weed out partnerships that would be smoke and mirrors- flashy content without real conversion or drive in revenue growth. Followers and post volumes are vanity metrics – they don’t tell you if the audience is actually bought in. Post engagement rates  (calculated as average engagements/followers) show that many of their followers are actively following.

The Challenges

Likes and comments don’t necessarily equate to conversion. Some users may follow a public figure simply for aesthetics – they like the influencer’s look or find them entertaining- so they will happily double-tap or share but be more reluctant to hand over their information or credit card. This is where requesting a sample of previous work and the results achieved may be beneficial. That said, what works for one company or brand isn’t guaranteed to work for another, especially across different industries.

In general, the Influencer empire is on the decline, with engagement rates hovering at an all-time low. The way consumers became worn out by constant ads, consumers are again getting fatigued with #SponCon. The unending stream of sponsored posts gives each post a little less weight. Most consumers understand the incentive behind sponsored posts is a paycheck, not always a sincere love of the brand. This beckons a question of balance: you want an influencer who is comfortable promoting brands, but if every post is marked by #ad, your brand may seem like a drop in the sea.

Four Things to Consider Before Starting Influencer Marketing

Do Your Research

Before your brand reaches out to an influencer, first make sure the partnership fits both parties. Facebook, Instagram, and almost every other influencer channel have audience insights tools that will show metrics about location, age, and interests. Have a clear grasp on who your brand’s current target customers are- as well as your competitors- and request a similar audit of the influencer’s audience demographics to ensure they overlap.

There are also tools, such as Demographics Pro, that aggregate a more in-depth audience analysis from every channel for both brands and influencers. If your company is multifaceted, with several main products or claims, use AI tools like these to cluster your audience and create segments. Consider which segments are the highest priority or have yielded the best results in organic and paid.

Purpose over Popularity

It goes without saying that in performance-based influencer marketing, quality wins over quantity. Micro-influencers, public figures who have between 10K to 100K followers, often don’t have celebrity status but a stronger connection to their audience because their content caters to a particular niche. If your purpose is to reach a specific customer persona, you will find success pairing with a micro-influencer who delivers content fine-tuned for that persona.

A step further, if there is a specific geographic region or establishment highly dense with your ideal customer, this may be an opportunity to leverage nano-influencers. These are figures with under 10K followers who tend to have a local, in-person influence, such as a community leader, highly ranked member of a company or school, local pastor, etc. The real-life connection they have to their network extending beyond the screen gives their voice an authentic authority that will convert.

Reason with Reach

It is still possible for the lower end of macro-influencers, defined by 100K or more followers, to have a community aligned on a niche topic, which could be a great partnership for growing your brand. Due to the higher following, content from a macro-influencer naturally garners a larger number of impressions, expanding your brand’s awareness. If you were to do a paid campaign with a base rate, an influencer with 200K followers would generally charge more than a 12K influencer because of that added value. However, their engagement rates tend to be lower than those of micro-influencers, who tend to have a broader and more varied audience type. In this example, if the 12k influencer has an engagement rate of 20% while the 200K hovers at 1%, the smaller figure is actually reaching more people. 

A savvy influencer strategy would be to mix and match, leaning toward more partnerships with micro-influencers but maintaining a proportion of macro-influencers to reap the best of both worlds. Additionally, If your company has multiple key value propositions and audience segments- for example, a food brand that is both vegan and sustainably sourced– you can try employing some vegan community influencers and some who focus on responsibly sourced nutrition. You could then win loyalist consumers for both and compare the response key metrics to see which angle is strongest for your brand. 

Strengthen your story through Stories

While most companies direct attention to the influencer’s in-feed post, Instagram or Facebook stories are a critical piece of the performance puzzle. Vickie Segar, founder of influencer agency Village Marketing, remarks, “There’s way more trackability with Instagram Stories than with the feed, and that’s simply because you can [put links and have people] swipe up.”

She added that, in general, companies have recently put more emphasis on tracking stories, but with her clients, they’re doing 90% Instagram Stories and 5%-10% Instagram feeds, with some moving entirely to Instagram Stories. Stories performance is more clear-cut than post-performance, and it’s easier for a user to directly swipe up to a landing page than to tap a link in the bio. Additionally, influencers can repost their post onto their story to doubly expose their followers and catch those who wouldn’t see it in the feed.

Moreover, users tend to be more engaged story-viewers than feed-scrollers. Instagram has even experimented with a “stories-first” model after tracking that several users were spending more time tapping through Stories up top than scrolling down their newsfeeds. The stories experience is more dynamic with the ability to add gifs, stickers, geotags, music, ask questions, reply directly to messages, and more, giving the influencer more ways to be creative in grabbing the potential consumer’s attention.

Instagram or Facebook Story videos allow for additional context, as influencers can talk through why they love your brand or demonstrate visually how they use it in a way that feels more relatable and can be less “polished” than a static post. As you outline content expectations with an influencer, be sure to include guidelines for stories to enhance the promotion.

The Takeaway

As influencers have transitioned from experimental marketing to indispensable players in brand promotion, the paradigm shift toward performance-based influencer marketing is undeniable. This transformative approach, hinging on key performance indicators such as clickthrough rates and conversion rates, has redefined compensation structures, fostering transparency and equity. The two primary models, affiliate marketing and paid campaigns, offer distinct yet viable paths for brands.

Despite the industry grappling with declining engagement rates and influencer fatigue, the strategic selection of influencers based on meticulous research and purpose-driven partnerships can yield significant returns. Integrating Instagram and Facebook Stories emerges as a pivotal strategy for enhanced engagement and trackability. In the ever-evolving landscape of influencer marketing, strategic planning and a focus on performance-based metrics are crucial for brands seeking a valuable return on investment in 2024.

So, if you are a small to medium-sized business generating $3M+ in annual revenue and looking for an agency to take the hard work off your plate, feel free to reach out to our team for a consultation.

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