Your Guide to the Business of Mother’s Day

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Moms are getting more and more monetary love each year.

There are 2 billion-ish mothers around the world, and more than 80 million in the U.S. alone.

Mother’s Day makes its rounds in more than 50 countries around the world, and this year, 84 percent of Americans are planning to celebrate. Spending on Mom will reach $35.7 billion in the U.S. this year, making Mother’s Day the second most celebrated holiday after the winter holidays, and the fourth biggest spending holiday, after the Back-to-College, Back-to-School, and winter holiday shopping seasons. 

Shoppers are buying gifts for more than just their own moms.

If there’s such a thing as the Mother’s Day spirit, shoppers certainly have it because they don’t limit their gift-giving to their own moms. 57% of Mother’s Day shoppers will, in fact, be hunting down unique gifts for their mothers and stepmothers. But…

23% of celebrants are shopping for their wives

12% are shopping for daughters

8% shop for other relatives

9% will hit the stores searching for something for their sister

8% will get a gift for Grandma

8% will get something for a friend, and

2% will gift something to a godmother

We’re spending a liiiiiiittle less on dads though.

And you know how we said $35.7 billion would be spent on Mother’s Day this year? Well, that’s more than $245 per celebrant while Father’s Day spending will average about $70 to $80 less per person.

A few of the more interesting shopping trends…

Since last year, 35% of Mother’s Day shoppers were planning to gift their moms subscription boxes. This year, personal services are all the rage, with 34% planning to give Mom the gift of self-care. Another popular category right now is special outings, with 6 in 10 shoppers planning to take Mom out for the day.

Half of people are shopping in-store, too. Capitalize on the procrastinators!

In the last few days before Mother’s Day, in-store shoppers will be heading out to buy gifts. Don’t miss an opportunity to market to them. They may be buying gifts in stores, but they’re doing a bunch of research online, too. So don’t forget to target shoppers with paid ads, Reels, Pinterest, and other platforms where consumers love to find cool ideas for Mom.

Here’s how to grab the attention of those last-minute shoppers…

PPC Campaigns: Mother’s Day clicks don’t start rolling in until the last week, so reserve enough budget for that last big push. Include keywords to target stepmoms, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, wives, friends, and daughters. — Search Engine Journal

Ads: The highest conversions are in clothing and accessories. Ensure you’re reaching the right audience in your vertical by including Mother’s Day-specific CTA’s.

User-Generated Content: Feature UGC of influencers (or consumers) directly on your site and social media. UGC is highly effective in driving conversions and is a great way to showcase new styles and products.

Pinterest: Pinterest is the top-ranking social network for Mother’s Day searches. Out of 65% of the 275 keywords, Pinterest ranks in positions 1-5 on search engines. Enlist influential mommy bloggers to curate gift guides with their favorite gift items from your brand. — Your Digital Retail

Instagram Takeover: Run an Instagram takeover with an influential mommy blogger leading up to or during Mother’s Day. Allow her to curate her favorite mommy gift items from your brand and run a giveaway at the end to get engagement flowing on your account.

The post [INFOGRAPHIC] The 2023 Guide to the Business of Mother’s Day Spending and Trends appeared first on The Shelf Full-Service Influencer Marketing.

Working with bloggers can be a somewhat daunting task if you’ve never done it before. I know this from experience. In fact, the rabbit hole that is influencer marketing is what pivoted our original business model from being a fashion shopping app to being a robust influencer platform.

I know there are a TON of articles out there about WHY you should work with bloggers but there isn’t a whole lot of detailed info about HOW to set up your first campaign from start to finish.  I know this because even in 2019, 75% of the brands that use our platform experience the SAME pitfalls that we fell into when we first ventured into influencer marketing and working with bloggers in 2014(ish).

It was a total effing headache!

So, in this post, I want to tell you the fundamentals of working with influencers that I learned, not from running an influencer marketing firm, but from trying to run a damned campaign BEFORE we ever started connecting brands with influencers.

Six BIG Epiphanies I Had About Working with Bloggers and Rolling Out That First Influencer Campaign

So First, a Little Background on My Pre-Shelf Awesomeness

I’m the Co-Founder of The Shelf, an influencer marketing platform.  Most people don’t know this about us, but around 2014(ish), our platform made a pretty significant pivot into where we are today. Prior to this pivot, The Shelf was a smart-shopping app that sent sale-alerts to people as soon as the products they liked were discounted.

When we decided to start marketing our app, we tried Google AdWords, social ads, social media, and a bunch of other tactics to help market our app. But none of the typical techniques showed any sign of being effective.

Then, one day, I had a small epiphany.  

(And this epiphany also requires a little more backstory… sorry!)  

Before The Shelf, my mother and I had a little quilt business that we started together.  Yes, I know.  Totally cool!  Quilts + my mom = POPULARITY.

We had a blog for our little quilt business and every six months we would participate in a quilters’ blog-hop, where about 20 quilters would each send traffic to one another. This was the greatest thing in the world for us! Because our rinky-dink blog wasn’t overly popular, the blog-hop allowed us to piggy-back on top of other people’s audiences and gain new traffic. The other thing that was really, really great about these blog-hops were the giveaways. Each participating blogger would host a giveaway on their blog, and this always did wonders for us! We’d get 600+ comments on each of our posts!

My First Epiphany Was to Work with Bloggers and Give Stuff Away

Based on that experience, my plan to promote our shopping app via bloggers began to hatch.

First, we needed to find bloggers who were bigger than us and get them to promote our content.

Second, we needed to do giveaways! From our experience, those got results!

At this point, my idea wasn’t overly developed. This fact became abundantly clear during our first attempt at influencer marketing when I got a friend of mine to host our first giveaway on her rather large quilt blog (key word being “quilt”).

Needless to say, our shopping app didn’t resonate quite so well with her audience. We had THREE people join our site because we bribed them with a $100 gift card to a fabric store. (Our price per user was a not-so-great $33.)

It wasn’t overly obvious to me what I’d done wrong though. My conclusion was that this initial blogger must not have been popular enough. So I contacted a much bigger blogger friend of mine also in quilts about doing a post about our fashion app.  

Surprise surprise! This post didn’t do too well either. While we did get people to join our site in order to enter that giveaway, they wound up hating our app. It was just too untargeted. Further, quite a few of them sent us mean emails, demanding that we remove their email addresses.  

Who knew quilters could be such a feisty little bunch?

Epiphany #2 : A Little Bit of Relevance Goes a Long Way

In hindsight, my mistake with the quilters is about as dumb as it gets. That audience was not even close to being our correct demographic. We had a fashion app! We needed fashion bloggers.  

But I didn’t know any fashion bloggers!

So off to Google I went to search for “fashion bloggers”.    

Surprisingly enough, typing in broad queries like that DOES in fact get you results.   I found a slew of “top 20” or “top 50” or “top-whatever” lists.  

After that easy Google search, I began breaking these lists down, blog by blog, finding contact info and pasting all of that into a spreadsheet, after which I pretty much mass blasted these celebrity-level bloggers with my “opportunity of a lifetime: partnering with The Shelf” messages.

Finding contact details took longer than you’d think though. And no one got back to me.  

In fact, my first 50 outreach emails received no responses at all. That rather sad result transitioned me quite nicely over to my third realization.

Epiphany #3 : Don’t Go for the “Kim Kardashians” of the Blogosphere”

Kim Kardashian? Okay, this was in 2014, back before the hubby and kids. But… you get my point. If you line up bloggers on a spectrum of influence, some of them have become so influential that they have reached the status of being mini-celebrities.  

Would a celebrity go with you to the prom? No, probably not. They’re busy going to the prom with other celebrities.  

The same applies in this case. Celebrity bloggers are off galavanting around with celebrity brands. Not some no-name startup, like The Shelf.  

This isn’t a bad thing. Just because a blogger isn’t an enormous celebrity with a global following does not mean that they don’t have influence.  

After realizing that we were aiming a little too high, we decided to shoot for people getting around 15-30 comments per post.  

But that’s where we got stuck. Finding this elusive 2nd-tier group of bloggers was quite a bit more challenging than scanning “top 50 lists.” No one was publishing lists of up-and-comers. I started to embark on a multi-day project of sifting through blogrolls and aggregation sites like Bloglovin.  Once I found a blogger who looked like a good fit for us, I’d add her to a spreadsheet and then I’d start sifting through her blogroll, assuming she had one, trying to find more matches.  

This task proved to be way WAY more time-consuming than I’d expected. The part that took the most time was FINDING the right bloggers for our app. Now that I had realized the importance of relevance, I became neurotic about finding the right matches. For our fashion app that helped people save money, we decided to look for fashion bloggers who were price-conscious. For every 10 bloggers that I’d come across who matched our engagement criteria, only 1 or 2 of them would also be price-conscious.  

I worked on this for days. It got to be really embarrassing when I’d report to my Co-Founder each day that after 4 hours I was only able to reach out to around 10 people.   

I wish I could say that things started moving a little better at this point. But there was one more light bulb that needed to go off.  

I was spending tons of time narrowing down the right bloggers. But I wasn’t spending any time on my emails. I was sending them all the same basic template.  And even though I myself knew why I had selected a particular blogger (as opposed to the 50 others that I had deemed irrelevant), I wasn’t telling the blogger about my rationale.  

And no wants to feel like they’re at the receiving end of a mass-email blast.

Epiphany #4 : Cold-Emailing is Lame (but it sure does work when it’s done right)

This should really be pretty obvious. But I admit, it wasn’t obvious to us right away. I finally arrived at this conclusion after quite a bit of A/B testing. I tested out long emails, short emails, personalized emails, emails that mention payment in the title…literally every variation in the book.   In the end, I found that my winning combination was to focus on personalization. Short. And with a subtle implication of compensation mentioned within the my message  The email subject that did the best was somewhat vague, but also intriguing: “Collaboration Idea.”  

Powerful, right?  

This winning combination is going to vary for everyone. But the point is, don’t just settle on the first thing you write and then blast that out to a list of 100 people. Try variations. And personalize everything! Try to put yourself in their position: What sort of email would YOU want to receive?  What kind of email would really get you excited?

After weeks of working on this influencer marketing project, my first big break came in the form of a price-conscious fashion blogger named Kimberly, who maintained a blog at Penny Pincher Fashion. 

She will always be my favorite blogger.  She was the first person to give us a chance, and the results of the giveaway I did on her blog were so fantastic, I knew I was onto something!  Those results gave me the incentive to keep going with blogger campaigns, because honestly, things were looking pretty bleak with only the quilter posts under my belt thus far.

Epiphany #5 : Name-Dropping Helps

Up until Kimberly’s post, our hit rate was 1 in 80 (!) – as terrible and embarrassing as that is.

That being said, we’d learned a lot by that point. Moving forward, we were armed with all of that knowledge and now we had a link to that great post put together by a reputable blogger.  From that point on, all of my outreach emails included a link to her post and this worked wonders.  Our hit rate became closer to 1 in 10. And this gave us the momentum we needed to line up our next two posts.

Epiphany #6 : Paying Bloggers is NOT a Bad Thing

There are many brands out there who passionately refuse to pay bloggers.  

We were never one of those brands.  At that point, I was so darn glad to get someone to respond to my emails I was more than willing to shell out some cash.  But that’s not to say I wasn’t extremely cautious with how we spent our money.  At this particular stage of our company, my partner and I had both been working for a full year without salary so we watched every dollar spent.

I think it was this extreme cautiousness with our money that allowed the rest of my epiphanies to come in rapid succession.  From that point on, I’m happy to report that I wasn’t learning my lessons the hard way anymore.  

During our influencer marketing efforts, we ran a total of 5 campaigns, not including the two quilt posts. Of those 5 posts, there was only one that didn’t hit our campaign goals (and it just missed by a little bit). The other four were such huge successes, we felt like we hit the lottery.  They outperformed our goals by 3 times!  

In fact, the blogger who charged the most ($400 for a post + the $250 gift card that we gave away) performed exponentially better than our wildest expectations.  She sent a whopping 9,000 people over to our site within the first few hours. And we had 3,000 signups by the end of the week!  

We ended up taking that pivot from The Shelf as a shopping app and applying what we learned and making The Shelf into an influencer marketing tool. Guess what? We started our focus in fashion.

The 5 Mini Epiphanies That Really Brought Everything Home for Us

Now that I’ve given you all that history, I can tell you what I know now:

Do your research!

Do it thoroughly (preferably with a platform like ours, The Shelf).  Your highest priority should be to find bloggers that match your demographic down to the finest nuance. 

Get performance metrics. Depending on what sort of campaign you plan on doing (in our case it was a giveaway), check back through the blogger’s old posts to make sure they have a track record of performing well for the type of project that you plan on approaching them about. I was extremely diligent with this. I’d review the last few months of posts for each person before I’d contact them. I’d also check to see what the comment count looked like on their past giveaways (most people had huge fluctuations here). Because of those fluctuations, I’d then look to see which giveaways performed the best, and why. We needed to be able to replicate their results.

Find out if brands returned. I also took this a step further to see if the blogger had repeat customers. If a brand used her once, did they come back a few months later?  This is always a good sign if people liked them enough to run a second post!

Get a media kit. Most bloggers have a media kit. If they don’t, it’s okay for you to ask them about their traffic stats and past campaign results.  

Communicate expectations. I was always very clear about what sort of ROI I wanted to achieve. Be nice about it, since not all bloggers will be receptive to this. However, you should let them know what expectations you’d like and then ask if they think this is going to be achievable based off of previous campaigns they’ve done  Every blogger that I spoke to about this was totally up-front. Also, by defining my goals before the post went live, it helped me out with the one post which didn’t perform well. The blogger was aware her post didn’t deliver the results I was looking for. She did everything she could to make it right, creating multiple social posts, as well as sending out a newsletter to her followers. The extra effort did wind up getting us close to the ROI we were shooting for initially.

In the end, our four campaigns were a huge success!  We wound up paying around 30 cents per signup. You really can’t beat that!  That ROI blew Google AdWords so far out of the water it was worth the massive amount of torment that went into learning the ropes behind the enigma that was influencer marketing.

Concluding Thoughts

You might be wondering: why did you guys switch ideas if you were doing so darn good after these campaigns? Good question. It was a very gradual change. After we decided that influencer marketing was the way we would grow our business, we started building an internal database for us to use when setting up these pushes.  

If you remember, the shopping app was all about products and pricing. The technology we have in our current app powered that very shopping app that gave us the ability to analyze blogger posts and extract out the products they talk about. What does this mean and why is this great? We know exactly what brands and prices of products are being written about. Using this technology we had earlier, we built ourselves a jerry-rigged blogger search engine that let us discover bloggers with a certain amount of comments per post (say, 15-30) and also narrows down further to bloggers who talked about affordable stores and sale items. Bam! That’s a very specific demographic (ours). This blogger list was automatically generated, rather than spending days compiling a list with Google.  

Initially for internal use, we saw a huge opportunity. We had struggled so much with creating our own blogger campaigns but this tool made our lives SO much easier! We would have been doing mankind a disservice if we’d kept it to ourselves.

All kidding aside, that’s the story behind our first influencer marketing campaigns, about the mistakes we made and the progress we’ve made to date. The rest is history.

The post Here Is EXACTLY How We Ran Our First Influencer Campaign appeared first on The Shelf Full-Service Influencer Marketing.

We’ll be the first to admit it: there are a ton of ways and some really smart techniques out there that will allow social media users and content creators to inflate their numbers. So, it can be hard for brands that are still having trouble finding the right influencers for their campaigns. In this post we’ll review the criteria you need to look at when selecting influencers that will help you achieve the best ROI.

If you’ve been following The Shelf Blog, you’ve probably noticed that we are BIG on metrics – from using actual data to separate the influencers from the fakers to making sure the campaigns we run for our clients actually deliver measurable returns (ROI) beyond earned media value. You know… stuff like clicks and follows, and shares…

In the years ten years since The Shelf launched, the concept of vanity metrics has ROCKED the influencer marketing space. Big brands screaming about fake followers. Social media platforms deleting social accounts by the millions. Elon Musk buying Twitter for revenge (just a best guess).

Over the years, we’ve read plenty of headlines that pronounced the death of influencer marketing. But time and again, the industry has transitioned through these types of sky-is-falling growing pangs only to double or triple in size.

The truth is vanity metrics (like inflated follower numbers and tons of impressions that don’t seem to tie to any engagement) negatively affect both creators and brands. So, in this update of one of our epic pillar posts, I’m going to show you exactly how to go about finding bloggers and influencers for campaigns.

How to Find the Right Influencers for Your Campaign… without the Fancy Software

“Let’s say you have 10,000 fans and 9,000 of them buy ten copies of your book because you tweeted about it. Well then that sounds really valuable. On the other hand, let’s say you have 10,000 fans because you bought them on some weird website when you were trying to be cool. Then you post something and it gets zero engagement, because nobody gives a rat’s ass. I would say that’s less valuable, wouldn’t you?”  

That #instantclassic quote from Josh St. Aubin circa 2014 dives into real examples of turbo-influencers who get overlooked by popularity-focused marketers because their follower counts aren’t skyrocketing. The entire post is a really nice read for anyone interested in the topic.

Vanity metrics sort of suck because they lead marketers to make bad decisions and they’ve turned influencer marketing into more of a gamble. Brands wind up partnering with influencers who don’t (and can’t) deliver at all. And in many cases, these marketers overlook actual influencers who could really launch their brands into orbit because those influencers refuse to play along with the vanity-metric-game.

Since vanity metrics are so misleading, the process for vetting your potential influencers is one that should not be taken lightly. Marketers who put a little more effort into making sure they choose the right ones to work with will see huge long-term benefits – ROI and otherwise.

I’ll now walk through a stripped-down version of our seven step process, which I encourage marketers to use when vetting influencers. This process takes away a pretty hefty amount of risk when it comes to working with the right influencers and seeing real results.

1. Use Creative Demographic Matching

Before you even start looking at metrics, the most important thing to consider is whether or not the influencer is a perfect match for your brand and demographic. You need to be crystal clear on who your specific audience is because it might not always be who you think.

For example, many companies come to us with incredibly specific influencer targets. Like, “I’m selling underwear, therefore I need to use your platform to find bloggers who talk mainly about underwear.”  

Here’s what you have to get: The fact that they’re selling underwear is irrelevant. What’s more important is what TYPE of person would wear their very specific style of underwear.

Is it casual and comfy? Maybe they should target bloggers with a more laid back style. We often drop an example similar to this one in our decks to provide a bit of context.

A Tale of Two Influencers

Let’s say the influencers on the left have lots of similarities. They’re both in their 20s. They both talk about fashion. And they both appeal to women in their late teens to early 30s. So, it’s their distinctive values that would ultimately shape which brands they work with and the kinds of messaging that would resonate with their followers.

One of our all-time favorite examples of creative targeting was a campaign run by HP. They were selling tablets and they really wanted to highlight the photography features. Instead of running straight to tech bloggers (as one would expect for an HP Tablet campaign), they partnered up with fashion bloggers.

Why?

Evidently HP has some marketing geniuses working there! They were smart enough to see that if they partnered up with tech bloggers, their tablet would get lost in a sea of other tech products.

HP Tablets created the perfect recipe for their blogger campaign by partnering up with fashion bloggers:
1. The bloggers used it to take their blog photos.
2. They talked about how great it was for taking those photos.
3. They walked through how to use it in order to take great photos.

After all is said and done, you can imagine that their fashionable, selfie-loving audiences would be drooling over this HP Tablet! AND because these bloggers are mainly focused on fashion, their audiences aren’t being inundated with competing tablets.

BIG TAKEAWAY: When targeting, you need to think in terms of what characteristics define your audience. Not what you’re selling.

Let’s run through one more example. Imagine you’re selling healthy homemade meals delivered right to your doorstep. Yes, you’re selling food, but does that mean you need to hunt down food bloggers to work with? No, probably not. Foodies are usually talking about food they make themselves and their readers probably make their own food, too.

Instead, your audience might be busy people – people who don’t have time to cook. Perhaps mommy bloggers who clearly have a lot on their plates (excuse that pun) or even interior design bloggers who can use the service to complement their decor. You could even get more specific by zeroing in on people who are health conscious.

The bottom line is that you need to find the exact fit in terms of targeting. Our platform is super awesome for this sort of thing. Using our search filters, you can get hyper-specific and narrow down to the right influencers.

For example, you can easily search and find maternity bloggers living in New York who wear vintage clothing and shop in high-end stores. You can even narrow down to the posts where they talk about the specific aesthetic, products, or brands you’re searching. That’s pretty powerful when it comes to gauging the success of those posts and finding the right bloggers to work with.

2. Look at Follower Counts… But Be Aware of Who Your Ideal Influencer Actually Is

Through our platform, I’ve noticed a lot of brands come in and use our search engine to set threshold requirements for high follower counts on EACH of the social networks. The brands who are newer to influencer marketing always go sort of nuts with these follower-count filters. They’ll look for influencers who have 40,000 followers on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram…and many of these people don’t want to compensate anyone for an endorsement.

If this is you, check out this post about why influencers charge for sponsored work and what to expect in terms of pricing.

The problem with setting super high follower requirements on EACH social network is that you pretty much eliminate everyone from your potential list. We’ve seen that most influencers (and I seriously mean MOST) will only focus on one or two social networks max and ignore the rest. If you think about it from their perspective, it makes sense. It’s entirely too painful to keep up with all five or six networks, AND run a successful blog on top of that.

I’m sure that most of you only focus on one or two social networks, too. In those first few years, our company ditched Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest in favor of just maintaining Twitter and LinkedIn. It was more manageable and that’s where we’ve seen the best return in terms of new customers. Only in recent months have we added Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to our SMM arsenal. Bloggers and influencers are the same way. They focus on the social networks that will bring them the best returns.

I’ve copied some of our growth-tracking charts to better illustrate this point. Each color represents a social network. In the below example, you’ll see the top two focus on Facebook, the middle two on Instagram, and the bottom one on Pinterest.

Instagram, by far, has the most attention from influencers in the fashion/beauty/lifestyle space, followed by Facebook. There were a select few who really put effort into Pinterest, too. The one that was really lagging behind was actually Twitter.

As much as I’m ragging on vanity metrics, follower counts are obviously important to a certain degree. After all, you want there to be an audience, otherwise what would be the point?

So rather than completely disregarding follower counts, I’d encourage you to keep an open mind about follower count requirements. You might find a blogger whose follower count is significantly lower than what you were originally shooting for, but whose engagement is just off the charts AND a demographic that’s on-point. Just because a blogger is popular doesn’t necessarily mean she can influence purchase decisions for your brand. Arik Hanson explains this beautifully. 

3. Do Some Fact Checking

If you’re putting together campaigns on behalf of a large brand, you probably have a decent budget to allocate toward influencers. If that’s the case, you might not need to get into nitty-gritty fact-checking quite as much (time is money, after all). Besides, when you run lots of campaigns, you are probably more concerned with the aggregate results, as opposed to the results of each individual campaign. Yay for large marketing budgets! 

On the other hand, if you’re a smaller brand and you have more time than you have money, I’d recommend putting on your best internet-stalking game-face and channeling your inner Nancy Drew. With enough research, you can place very sound bets when it comes to selecting your influencers. It just takes a little more effort from the get-go.

If you’ve already validated the demographic match of an influencer, as well as confirmed that she has enough of a following to warrant consideration, the chances of her working out are pretty high. The last thing you need to deal with is weeding out the false positives, like the influencers who look awesome but might not be as great as they seem due to vanity metrics.

As we reviewed in Post #1 of this series, there are tons of ways to fabricate metrics:

• Buying followers on any social network
• Buying engagement (likes, retweets, comments) on any social network
• Buying YouTube views
• Buying (quality) blog post comments
• Buying website traffic
• Rapidly growing social followings via the follow/unfollow technique.

If you know what to look for though, there’s no reason that you should ever be fooled by one of the above tactics. 

4. Detect Fake Followers

Detecting fake followers is actually really easy. You’ll need to go onto an influencer’s social accounts and scroll through their followers. For this, you’ll need to go pretty far down, because no one is buying followers every day. For that reason, bought followers will usually get covered up by the real ones.

Look for blocks of odd profiles because these fake followers will show up as one big group.

Find recognizable signs of fake followers, like Russian descriptions (for some reason a lot of these fake accounts are from Russia) and default egg-profile pictures. Yes, some people really do live in Russia BUT if you come across an influencer with 20% egg-followers, then you’ll know something is up.

Detect the higher-quality fake followers too. Higher quality means that most of the fake followers will have a profile picture and an English description. It’s still pretty easy to detect fakes though because description text (while in English) will usually just be random words that don’t make sense. AND, while most of these higher-quality fake followers actually do have a profile picture, most of them don’t have COVER photos.

Use our platform to review charts that track daily growth of follower counts across the various social networks. If you see abnormally large follower jumps, you should be weary. 

Look at the relevance of those followers. If they’re entirely composed of randos (plumbers, Caribbean vacation rentals, uptight businessmen, fake-follower-companies…) then you know that something is amiss. And even if that influencer isn’t doing anything wrong (and they just managed to attract totally irrelevant followers), it’s still pretty safe to assume that your product isn’t going to get a great response from their audience because of the untargeted nature of those followers.

Note: Everyone is going to have SOME random followers. This is unavoidable. What you want to avoid is people who have more than 30% randos.

5. Next, Detect Fake Engagement

Straight-up faking engagement seems a little less common than follower-buying, but it still happens, so there are some things you might want to look out for when you’re evaluating an influencer.

While it’s more difficult to identify fake engagement, it’s not impossible. If you see someone with intensely sporadic engagement on social posts, then that’s probably the best indicator because when someone purchases engagement, they usually have to specify ONE of their posts that will receive the engagement (rather than spreading the engagement out across posts in a more natural way. If someone is getting no engagement for most of their posts, then all of a sudden there is one post with 1,000 retweets, you might want to go ahead and question that.

Take the time to scan through blog comments instead of just looking at comment counts. I’ve seen some bloggers comment like 37 times on their OWN posts without any REAL engagement, so it’s pretty easy to detect.

Check for spammy comments that are totally irrelevant to the conversation. “My cousin makes $10,000 a week by filling out surveys….” Or “Check out my homemade Viagra… ” While most bloggers have put up spam filters to keep out all the random viagra-peddlers, you’ll see some bloggers that have unusually high amounts of spam comments. So again, it’s important to just glance through the comment section for each blogger to make sure that the engagement is legit.

See if hordes of smaller influencers are leaving comments for the sole purpose of sending traffic over to their OWN sites. Many of these comments are half-hearted and irrelevant, like: “Nice post! Here’s a link to my blog: www…” These comments certainly don’t indicate that there’s anything wrong with the original blogger (it’s just something that starts happening once a blog reaches a certain size) but you’ll want to ensure that there’s some genuine engagement too.

6. Suss Out Fake Traffic

Detecting fake traffic is actually kind of difficult. As we discussed in our previous post, some influencers will actually buy traffic, in which case their Google Analytics will back up their claims. I’m happy to report that this tactic is pretty uncommon among the influencer crowd but there are still some tactics you can look out for.

You’ll want to figure out if they’re just presenting the metrics that make their site look the best (and keeping the less attractive ones to themselves). For example, they might be getting tons of traffic, but their bounce rate could be close to 100% and time on site might be seconds instead of minutes. Or they might provide metrics that occurred during a spike in traffic, like when they received press coverage. If they only present stats to you that represent the spike, it’s certainly not painting a realistic picture of what their traffic normally looks like.

You should inquire further about the metrics that really matter, like the average time on site for all non-bounced traffic and how many monthly unique visitors a blogger gets vs. individual page views.

Professional bloggers will be able to provide you with a media kit. According to Allyn Lewis, if you can’t find the media kit on their website, you can just as easily inquire for one. If it’s not clear in the media kit, you should ask whether or not the stats are current. Asking is always helpful, and if someone isn’t forthcoming, then you might want to move on.

Depending on what vertical you are in, you can use traffic estimators like Alexa and Ahrefs. These are great if you’re in the marketing or tech space. These are way less accurate though if you’re looking for fashion, beauty, lifestyle or mommy bloggers.

7. Lastly, Our Secret Weapon

Look back through a blogger’s posts and take note of which brands they’ve worked with in the past. Are any of those brands repeat customers? If there are a few repeat customers, you’ve found the real deal. Get yourself on the books with that blogger!

Our philosophy for that is there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. There are many marketers who have come before you and paved the way. They have done due diligence on these people and put their money into campaigns with them. And after analyzing the results of these campaigns, they’ve decided to double-dip. This is a great signal for you to use as a guide when assembling your own campaigns.

If you find a brand in your space who’s going nuts with influencer marketing and putting more money into that than their other marketing efforts, then it’s also a good idea to follow them and really analyze their strategy. We see this all the time in the fashion space. There are some brands who have practically written the book on influencer marketing (we have, too – one holiday-themed one on Influencer Strategy and another on setting real goals for influencer campaigns). And they’re putting enormous amounts of energy into their influencer strategy. Old Navy, Target, Lulus, InPink, Ruche, Alice & Olivia…these are all companies that you can learn from if you’re in the fashion space.

To that end, you can use our platform to track all brand mentions made by influencers on any blog or social network. Many people use us to keep tabs on influencers who mention their own product. Some are using our site to track competitors. Some are just studying the brands who have run their influencer marketing in really creative ways.

Conclusion

Here’s the thing about influencer marketing: Its effectiveness is directly related to selecting the right influencers for your brand. Like Goldilocks and the three bears, the influencer needs to be the right match, with the right size following, and have the right demographic of followers.

If you’re careful with who you select, you’ll be blowing past your ROI goals so fast that everyone’s heads will be spinning! Need help with your campaigns? Give us a shout!

The post A Simple(ish) 7-Step Plan for Finding the Right Influencers for Your Brand appeared first on The Shelf Full-Service Influencer Marketing.

Last Updated September 2018

“Vanity metrics” is a term that comes up pretty often in the context of influencer marketing, typically referring to metrics like follower counts and blog traffic.

Vanity metrics, by definition, are meant to increase the PERCEIVED value of a blog or social influencer by presenting influencer stats that make that influencer more appealing to brands. If their follower count is high, but engagement levels are low, bloggers might direct attention over to their follower count because that particular stat makes them look really valuable. Unfortunately they might be neglecting to mention the fact that they have very low engagement.

We run The Shelf, an influencer marketing platform, so literally every single day we talk brands who are basing their entire outreach strategies on these types of vanity metrics…and getting nowhere. 

At first, it surprised me that so many brands put so much weight on metrics like follower counts, as it’s pretty common knowledge that follower counts are easy to inflate. People can go on Fiverr right now and buy 5,000 Twitter followers for a few bucks… or if you’re dealing with a “set it and forget it” type of person who’s in it for the long haul, there are services that will consistently grow an influencers following with bots, cloned accounts, fake accounts, and dummy accounts for a hundred bucks a month or less.

But the influencer rarely retains their newly-purchased follower numbers… and fake accounts don’t offer great engagement, so… there’s that little piece.

While most people know that it’s possible to buy followers, I don’t think that everyone knows that these shady practices have been going on for years.

So, that’s what this post is about. I’ll be covering:

• Why dishonest metrics (we call it influencer fraud ‘round these parts) have become so prevalent within influencer marketing
• Which metrics bloggers and influencers are easily able to manipulate
• The signals marketers should analyze INSTEAD of these tired little vanity metrics

Why Dishonest Metrics (i.e. Influencer Fraud) Became the Thing

Influencers have all realized that popularity – whether real or fabricated – is often the first signal of an influencer’s potential value to brands. If you have craploads of followers (is craploads supposed to be hyphenated?), brands are far more willing to stuff money into your expensive little pockets.

…And if you don’t, they won’t. Simple.

This preoccupation that brands and marketers have with popularity (i.e. follower count) presents bloggers and wannabe brand ambassadors with a moral dilemma:

1. They can grow their following the hard way by networking, sucking up, and publishing years worth of quality content (without getting paid a dime)…all with the hope that one day their hard work will pay off, and they will finally know what it feels like to achieve that true, unadulterated state of popularity that they so long for…

OR

2. They can simply BUY their popularity for five or fifty bucks (depending on how much popularity they want and how legit they want that popularity to look), and rocket-launch themselves into the company of influencers who get the big contracts, the pretty photo ops, and the free stuff.

I’m going to be a sweetheart and say that most influencers probably start out with noble intentions, but after struggling for enough time, as well as watching other, less qualified influencers zoom past them for the price of 5 dollars worth of followers, many of them start to venture into the vanity metric gray-zone.

There are a few social media users who will leap head-first off of their moral high-ground, and flat-out purchase their followers, traffic, YouTube views, etc…Meanwhile, others will utilize less extreme tactics that are more like shortcuts instead of outright cheating.

Regardless of the intentions behind these tactics, by inflating their numbers these influencers are engaging in deceptive practices and making it a total nightmare for marketers to find the RIGHT influencers for their campaigns. 

The flip side is if brands and marketers weren’t bent on finding a quick fix for the Instagram puzzle, this particular “influencer black market” would never have emerged.

So, I can totally empathize with the brands who have to navigate through this mess… and I can totally empathize with the plight of the influencers.

Whether or not you feel influencers are justified in manipulating their metrics, it’s a real issue for brands.

2018 was bang-up year for influencer marketing.

1. Influencer marketing is largely responsible for making Kylie Jenner one of the world’s youngest billionaires…
2. It also attracted enough negative press this year to make people totally sick of it, and make brands call out influencers who are buying their followers (I’m specifically thinking about Unilever’s dramatic announcement at Cannes)…
3. The UAE required influencers to become licensed publishers, and at a pretty hefty price tag…
4. The FTC refined its Endorsement Guidelines and got rid of a lot of the loopholes and trap doors…

From the outside looking in, it could be easy to assume all these changes were signs influencer marketing was dying.

But dying and maturing are two different things. If you’re doing influencer marketing and you’ve been using vanity metrics as your go-to, you need a new way of evaluating influencers and measuring the ROI of campaigns.

So, we’re going to tell you which signals matter.

Here’s How to ID Legit Influencers Using Data (you know us)

When I went on Google and started typing in “buy Twitter…” check out what auto-populated. Clearly I’m not the first person to be typing in this search query. If you click through Google’s search results, you’ll be confronted with literally thousands of companies selling followers!

Right around the time influencer marketing really took hold of social media and blossomed into it’s own cottage industry, search volume for terms “buying followers” began shooting up, with Instagram being significantly higher than the other social networks.

Back then, to gauge the real demand for fake followers, I checked out Google’s Keyword Research Tool, which reported that there were more than 100K searches per month for the various types of follower-buying.

Perhaps that number doesn’t sound super high. But, Google’s Keyword Tool typically underestimates search volume so I included a search for “cat videos” in the screenshot below just so you can see how the numbers compare to something as widespread as the various cat memes that are ransacking the internet. You can see that there are more people looking to buy Instagram and Twitter followers (combined) than there are people searching for “cat videos”!

One more thing to note here is how much higher Instagram searches are compared to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Instagram is by far leading the race in buying followers. And the fact that it’s still that much further ahead than the rest is impressive, considering the frequency with which platforms like Instagram and Twitter go through and purge fake accounts.

As I mentioned earlier, anyone who engages in this tactic has their own reason for it. And in most cases, I don’t think it’s to manipulate anyone. Oftentimes, these bloggers bring in extremely good ROIs for the brands they work with, yet they’re getting paid paltry amounts because they aren’t gaming their follower counts like everyone else.

• This article, written by Kristen, the blogger behind Just K, walks her readers through her various adventures with buying followers. She’s done quite a few experiments and actually wound up getting hit by Instagram’s big cleanup. Her take is an interesting one, and it also explains the rationale for follower-buying from a blogger’s perspective.
• You might also want to check out this post written by Gilad Lotan, a data scientist who blogs about social data. He did an experiment with buying followers and explained the various positive effects that he experienced as a result of that one large jump in his follower count.

Just for fun, go onto Fiverr and look for “Instagram followers” or “Twitter followers”. You have to click around a little because I think they try to prevent people from using the phrase “buy followers”…but you’ll see all sorts of posts that say: “I will 2500 FACEBOOK Likes” or “I will 3000 Instagram followers”. It’s crazy how much clout 5 bucks can buy you!

Obviously that sort of thing isn’t allowed by the various social networks, so they’ll up their ante from time to time in order to discourage that behavior.

Without fail, crackdowns by social media platforms will typically affect everyone. Some are affected WAY more than others but almost everyone on Instagram has fake followers, whether knowingly or not. So purges cause dips in everyone’s numbers. The people who had abnormally large percentages of their followers dropping off are the ones you’ll want to be a little of.

On our platform, The Shelf, we have tools that help with this quite a bit. We track follower counts over time and plot each social network on a graph. So it’s helpful to see what’s going on before you reach out to someone about a collaboration. When the Instagram cleanup happened, we noticed that quite a few people had huge dips in their follower counts. 

In the above examples, you can see where Instagram made it’s fake-follower-sweep and removed all the fake followers. Our charts can also show you where there are extremely abnormal growth patterns.

For this person, their Instagram was growing at a nice steady rate, but Facebook and Twitter were lagging behind. It looks like they purchased followers for both Twitter and Facebook on the same day in order to get their growth rate up near their Instagram’s. And while the jump doesn’t look huge, this influencer’s social accounts grew by around 500,000 total followers that day!

Below are two separate Pinterest influencers that seem to be up to something too. I can’t really say definitively that they’re buying followers but growing by 700,000 followers within a few months seems sort of unlikely, especially with such abnormal spurts AND considering they both started down near zero.

Anyway, there are countless ways and reasons why influencers buy followers. Regardless of the measures that these social networks are taking to prevent this kind of behavior, it’s a practice that is here to stay. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and as long as follower counts determine the worth of people, there will be people trying to game their follower counts.

PURCHASING ENGAGEMENT

This one was actually news to me. When I was on Fiverr, doing research on how to buy followers, I saw that there were just as many people who were selling social network ENGAGEMENT. You can get people to retweet your tweets, Like your Facebook posts, pin your Pins, like your Instagram photos, and comment on any of your posts across your social networks. You can even buy views for your YouTube videos!!!

I thought that it would be difficult to fake YouTube views but evidently bots are out there doing all sorts of nonsense. And it isn’t just the randos out there who are purchasing followers and engagement…even Justin Bieber has been rumored to play in this space.

$5 GETS YOU 5 (QUALITY) BLOG COMMENTS

Discovering sellers on Fiverr who are selling blog comments was actually a little depressing. I assumed blog comments were safe from this but evidently you need to be wary of blog comments as well.

I would ALSO think that fake comments would be easy enough to notice if you take the time to read through some of the comments but if an influencer opts to pay a little more for said comments, those comments will actually be of higher quality, making them harder to detect. Five for $5 will get you quality comments, as opposed to the normal going rate of 15 comments for 5 bucks, which will earn you low quality comments.

TRAFFIC SCAMS

I was already aware that it’s possible to send fake traffic to your site but I was always under the impression that it required the help of a developer. Evidently you can take care of this too for the meager price of 5 dollars…

Here’s an article on the Observer that talks about this happening to a very extreme extent, where publishers were scamming ad buyers out of millions of dollars by using fake “bot” traffic. This isn’t at all what most influencers are doing, but it shows just how widespread this issue is.

All of the above tactics are straight-up breaking the Terms of Services for these social networks, and even more than that, they’re eroding the trust that brands have with influencers as a whole.  

I’m sure that a large percentage of influencers are not frequent Fiverr shoppers but it’s always good to be aware of the options that are out there so that you know what to look for when finding the right influencers to work with. My exploration into the seedy underbelly of Fiverr was actually quite enlightening, so hopefully you were able to learn from all of that as well!

Moving on, we’ll now cover vanity metrics that are less “illegal” than those covered above.

How Influencers to Inflate Metrics Without Breaking Laws

The world of buying followers isn’t completely unmoderated. Many influencers have seen their fake followers removed, and in more extreme cases, their accounts deleted because social networks have built-in mechanisms to prevent abuse.  For many, the possibility of having their account deleted is enough to stop them from buying followers and/or engagement.

But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

First, there’s the age-old Follow/Unfollow technique, one thats been rocked by some of the most “popular” people out there. It involves following a whole bunch of targeted Twitter users, and then several days later, unfollowing the ones who didn’t follow back. A tool that’s popular for this is Unfollowers.com.

This technique will definitely kick the follower counts up for the influencers who go this route, but it does cause the follower/following ratio to get out of whack. In an ideal world, popular bloggers will have a ratio similar to that of Justin Beiber and his massive following of Beliebers (most of whom HE is not following back). Being popular just isn’t as cool if you “like” as many people as those who “like” you. You need to be snubbing a large enough percentage of those people in order for it to be legit popularity.

So for the influencers who are concerned about their ratio, it just requires a small adjustment to the follow-unfollower strategy. Rather than unfollowing the people who don’t wind up following back, they just unfollow everyone, including the people who were nice enough to follow back. 

Another mechanism for growing followers without breaking rules is through the use of auto-engagement tools, where an influencer can auto-engage with certain hashtags. In return, those people who received the engagement will typically follow back or reciprocate. 

There are many ways to speed up the growth of a social following. Some involve tools. Some just involve focused effort. And…how does one even define foul-play here? Followers don’t just materialize out of thin air, so a certain amount of effort is going to go into growing one’s follower count. 

Conclusion

This is the first post in a series of three on the topic of Vanity Metrics. Hopefully it gave you a nice overview of everything that’s possible in terms of the manipulation of an influencer’s metrics. It should also arm you with the knowledge of what to look out for when choosing influencers to work with.

The second post in this group discusses which bloggers will have accurate Alexa/Compete rankings and which ones won’t, plus why. We did a whole bunch of experiments, so you can read all about that here.

The third post will bring everything to a close. Now that you know what to watch out for, and what metrics to avoid when finding your influencers, you now need to know how you should go about picking your influencers if you don’t have stats like follower counts and traffic to base your decisions on. The third post covers all of that, so stay tuned!

The post Why Vanity Metrics Matter Less Than You Think appeared first on The Shelf Full-Service Influencer Marketing.

This article is the first in a series of posts I’ll be sharing around the questions of cost, ROI and strategy. I want to address these pain points as they come up time and time again when brands and PR pros are getting started with influencer marketing.

If you go online and google “influencer marketing” there are loads of posts that talk about how great it is…and why you need to be doing it.  Influencer marketing has been so useful for driving brand awareness and engagement that some marketers have even wondered if we’re witnessing a sort of “influencer marketing bubble” that’s bound to cave in on itself this year.

Still, six years after Instagram influencers first showed up on our radars, it’s still hard to find content that will give you in-depth strategies around this growing digital marketing technique.

Exactly how does one navigate the still-murky waters of influencer marketing? And why haven’t more brands been able to successfully and consistently get a handle on how to leverage it? 

The landscape is changing. Fast. In 2018, we saw the FTC making updates to endorsement regulations (this time in plain English) in the US. We saw the EU putting up a virtual electric fence around its residents with GDPR to keep marketers from coming in and gathering (and hoarding) private data. We saw the UAE institute influencer licenses that require anyone who accepts payment to endorse products online to be licensed. And brands like Procter & Gamble and Unilever are soapboxing all over the place (that’s a win for influencer marketing, by the way because it will force social media platforms to provide better tools for analyzing influencers- we hope).
 

Where influencer marketing was once the wild child of marketing strategies, it’s now matured to the point where companies and governments are pushing more and more toward creating regulations and standards.

And yet, there are still tens of thousands of searches every single month from people trying to find information about how to roll out and measure influencer marketing campaigns.

To pay or not to pay? That is a questions brands are still asking.  If you’re one of those people who says, “F-off” to any blogger who asks for compensation then you should definitely read this!    

OR, maybe you simply didn’t realize that bloggers charge. If that’s the case, I’m going to give you a run-down of what to expect so that you can plan your strategy accordingly.

The Pitfalls of Influencer Marketing

To give you some context, I’m the co-founder of an influencer marketing platform called The Shelf.  I talk to new customers each day about various influencer marketing strategies and techniques that they should consider because we’ve seen that if someone is totally new to the influencer marketing space, they’ll almost always fall into the same pitfalls.  

One pitfall I see over and over again is that our customers don’t realize that blogger rates vary for sponsored posts. 

For our customers who are new to influencer marketing, this is how their first attempt at setting up some campaigns typically goes:

• First, they go straight to our search engine.
• Without applying any search filters, they’ll start at the very top of our list and send out

• Without applying any search filters, they’ll start at the very top of our list and send out collaboration emails to blogger-celebrities like Lauren Conrad.
• They don’t mention compensation of any sort, aside from gifting her a t-shirt…or some shoes…(whatever it is they want her to blog about).
• And then in return for the free product, they want her to endorse their brand in front of her massive audience of more than 6M followers Instagram.
• They’ll send out maybe 20-30 emails like that to these top-level bloggers and celebrities.
• Then, a few days later, we’ll get an angry email from that customer telling us that none of these bloggers are responding to them.

The problem is, they’re reaching out to bloggers who are simply out of their league. That sounds a little harsh but it’s true. If you’re a small brand looking for newspaper coverage, you might be able to achieve that in your local newspaper without much effort but you’ll have a rough time getting coverage on the front cover of the New York Times.  This same concept applies to blogger coverage.  

For most of these mega-bloggers, when a brand sends them an email, it’s not even going to the actual blogger.  It’s being re-routed through their agent.   And these agents are getting bombarded with requests every single day from thousands of other small brands.  They can’t respond to all of them.  

And this is a hard lesson that many of our newer customers learn.  They’ll blast through a list of 20-30 bloggers without having any luck.  And then comes their inevitable angry email, after which, I’ll quickly hop on a call with them to come up with a better strategy.  From there, they’re off to the races!

Well, it occurred to me today that there’s really no need for these angry emails because we should be helping you BEFORE you get started.  And I’m going to do that by telling you everything you need to know about payments and targeting, right here in this blog post!  Yay! 

Plus, there are two more articles after this one that deal with other common pitfalls.  So you’ll be all set!

Reason #1 Bloggers Charge for a Sponsored Post: The time/effort required for a collaboration.

There are a number of variables here, so lets quickly walk through them:

1. Brands tend to be super-picky. They want the blogger to mention a variety of key points. They want their items displayed in a certain way. We’ve seen that our customers go back and forth with a blogger an average of 23 times before the post goes live. That’s a lot of time spent on just emailing back and forth about the details! (Some customers, we’ve seen go back and forth more than 60 times, which is just extreme. I think I would tell a brand to go take a hike at that point. But that’s just me.)
2. After the details have been hammered out, then contracts have to be signed, invoices supplied, and payments made.
3. At that point the blogger is finally able to start working on the post.
4. For most verticals, photos are a super important part of the post. So planning is required from the blogger’s standpoint. In fashion, what photos will the sponsored product get paired with? Where will the photos be taken? (While location doesn’t sound important, it is! Good bloggers (we’ve seen) don’t take their photos in the same location each day. Just like the unique outfits and products they’re showing, the setting gets swapped out too. It keeps things fresh and interesting for her regular readers. When a blogger doesn’t switch things up…regular readers find themselves saying, “Oh, there’s that damn porch again…Look, she has a holiday wreath on her door now. Lame!”
5. Many bloggers hire a professional photographer to take these inspirational photos of your products in action.
6. Once the photos are done, then there’s editing.
7. Plus the writing of the post.
8. Finally when everything is live, the blogger will need to work her social media magic and spread the post throughout her social networks.
9. AND finally that blogger will hopefully be following up with any comments she receives on her blog or social networks.

It’s a big rig-a-marole.  

All of those tasks listed above are reason enough for compensation.  Would you ever hire a contractor and rattle off that same laundry-list of tasks that you need them to do (and do well)… and then tell them, “Hey, for all your trouble, here’s a blouse.”?  

Most of the people we talk to have no idea how much time goes into these posts.  But once they realize what all is entailed, the compensation seems a little more reasonable of a request.

One thing to note though: Despite all of that effort involved in putting together a sponsored post, smaller bloggers who are trying to get their blog off the ground often don’t charge.  And this makes sense from their perspective. If they’re wanting to start monetizing their blog they need to have some brand experience under their belt.  They sort of take an “intern” style approach to the jobs they take on…they do free work in exchange for the experience and resume building.  This works out for the brand (if the brand is on a super super tight budget)… because they are able to get some exposure.  But the exposure isn’t really enough to justify a payment.  So the brand is able to stick within their tight budget.

Reason #2: Supply and Demand

Yay for a little Econ 101. Supply and demand.  As soon as the blogger has a little bit of an audience, brands will start to notice that they get traffic from her post as well as some purchases here and there.  Other brands start to see that this blogger is working with brands and they decide to get in on the action. Before you know it this blogger has posts lined up all week.  She’s running herself ragged doing free work.  And then it dawns on her, “Hey, I can start charging now!”  And so she does.  

Demand for a blogger just continues to increase as she becomes more well-known.  She gets more traffic and followers…more brands discover her and her workload grows along with this. All of a sudden, her week is once again filled up with jobs (even though she’s charging $200 per post)…so she raises her prices.  

Now, when a brand comes in and says, “Will you cover my products, and, by the way, I NEVER pay bloggers,”  she says, “Suck it!” And makes a gesture of some sort.  Probably.  Her schedule is already filled up with brands paying her $400 per post.  Why would she make an exception for your company?  Be honest, here.  Would you advise your blogger friend to do the post for free if she could easily get a few hundred bucks from another brand willing to pay her what she’s worth? 

Another thing that I don’t really think brands realize is the volume of requests that even the mid-sized bloggers are getting.  We’ve spoken to a number of bloggers about this who are in our network and they’ve mentioned that by the time they hit the 10,000 follower-count on Instagram, they were getting 200 emails a day from brands as well as fans.  That’s a ton of mail to sift through…and suddenly their little blog has turned into a much more full-time effort.  
 

Two hundred emails is a lot, and when you start considering the amount of time that it takes you to sift through 200 emails, you’ll realize that only special emails with good (and targeted) opportunities will be getting that blogger’s attention, let alone a reply. 

Many brands simply start out with the I’m-not-paying mentality…but once they understand the going-rates, then they rearrange their budget.  

This isn’t always possible for all brands.  Some brands are in super-bootstrap mode and payment isn’t an option.  So I’d like to mention that even without a budget, you can still get coverage on some of these mid-sized blogs…you’ll just need to put in more work.  We’ve seen many bloggers do pro-bono work, but if you’re going to go that route, get ready to do a lot more outreach because your response rate will be significantly lower.  

And, when doing your outreach, you need to be aware that if a blogger decides to work with you for free (despite her typical rates being much higher), you should know what a huge favor you’re getting, and acknowledge this.  Because, as you can see above, these bloggers with a large following have worked extremely hard to grow their audiences, and the amount of time that they put into their blog is huge.  Way higher than what most people expect.  Getting free coverage when others are paying is huge.  So let them know your appreciation.  And that you understand what a huge favor it is.

One exception to that above statement is when blogger-agents are brought into the mix because agents do a pretty good job of weeding out people who they don’t think will pay.  

And while I’m sure it’s not completely unheard of, not too many of them allow pro-bono work to pass through the gates.  Agents get paid a percentage of what the blogger is charging.  And if a blogger is handing out free work, then the agent doesn’t get paid either.  This is more of a speculative opinion though, and if I’m wrong here, I would love to get a little more insight into this in the comments!  

(SIDENOTE : How do you know if a blogger has an agent? Most bloggers mention that agent on their Contact or Collaborations page.  They will usually request that collaboration requests go to the agent’s email instead of theirs.)

A Little Commentary on Angry Brands Who Refuse to Pay

A little side story: I did some freelance design work for a startup a few years ago.  They were in business for about four months before they decided to call it quits.  And I remember suggesting influencer marketing to the CEO when he was telling me that he was throwing in the towel.  He instantly got all bent out of shape and rambled off his hatred for blogging…“All these damn mommy bloggers…no one does free coverage.  Why would I pay for a blog post?”

It struck me as odd that the whole payment-issue would get him so worked up.  I remember thinking: if these blogger’s were charging, it might be worth a few experiments to at least see if collaborations with them brought good results.  Especially because he didn’t have any problem paying for Google Ads.  But when bloggers ask for money…watch out.  

And now that I’m working with customers every day who are new to this type of marketing, I see that many people get just as angry as this guy did…some get way angrier.  I spoke to this truly irate man who owns a high-end men’s store online.  He was dropping F-bombs right, left, and center…and I’m sure after our call, he had to go lie down or take blood-pressure pills or something.  

Another founder that I spoke to this past Friday (who is launching a jewelry brand) told me a long story about how they’ve tried 2 different PR agencies, and how she literally has nothing to show for the thousands of dollars that she spent.  When I brought up bloggers.  She said, “No way!  They all charge, and they don’t guarantee any results.”  Which is an odd thing to gripe about, considering that’s the exact same scenario that she encountered with the two PR agencies who brought no results… 

Except, bloggers don’t usually charge unless they’re generating results for other brands.  AND, the bloggers who she would need to target would only be a fraction of the cost of what those PR agencies charged her…  so it seems like it would at least be worth an experiment.  Instead, she’s planning on finding a third PR agency.  Maybe the third-time will be the charm…  who knows.

Anyway.  Many people get worked up about paying bloggers.  And after talking to enough angry people, I think I have it figured out.  These brands feel like their product is truly awesome! And why should they PAY a blogger to ACT like they like it…that blogger should like it because it’s great!  

And while that makes total sense…the two reasons I discussed above are the reasons why this logic doesn’t hold water:

Time / Effort

and

Supply / Demand.

The reason you want to work with these bloggers is because they’re not a bunch of sellouts who talk about any old product that comes their way.  They only work with brands that they love! And they only endorse products that they think will truly resonate with their audience who trusts their guidance.  

Paying a super-relevant and quality blogger to endorse your product does not make your product any less awesome.  Getting anyone to cover your product is great validation! Regardless of whether or not money is involved.  Payment is going to be a factor when supply and demand has kicked in.

Analogies!

In case you’re not on the same page yet, here is a fun analogy-story to help you process the idea (assuming you’re one of those angry brand-owners that I was discussing above).

I went to Portfolio Center, a graphic design school. Every week we’d have a two-hour seminar with a designer that was famous (or at least kind of famous) who would come and present their work.  Well, one of the speakers was huge!!  Paula Scher came in and was talking about how she designed the Citibank logo.  She did it on the back of a napkin.  And the client was mad that she charged x number of thousands of dollars for a 15 minute sketch.  And she said she was shocked by this.  Because in her mind, they’re not paying for that 15 minutes.  They’re paying for the last 30+ years of her experience that allowed her to do brilliant work like that in 15 minutes.  

With bloggers, you’re not just paying for the hours that it takes them to put together your post. You’re paying them for the years that they’ve spent cultivating, nurturing, and growing their very targeted audience.  

Ooo, oo, ooh!  I have another one.  Why are Super Bowl ads so expensive?  If no one cared about the Super Bowl those ads would sell for the same rate that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reruns get. In 2018, about 103 million people watched Super Bowl LII. It’s more national holiday than sporting event. 

Paying for a huge blogger with millions of followers is the equivalent of Bud Light shelling out cash each year for the Super Bowl spot.

Perhaps that’s a stretch…

The Bottom (Blogger) Line

In the end, you need to make your own decision about whether or not to pay a blogger.  If you simply can’t get past the payment thing (whether it be for budgetary constraints or just merely out of principle), then try your luck with finding bloggers who don’t charge.  

Once those campaigns are live, check to see how much time you spent and if your returns were worth the amount of time and effort put in, plus the cost of gifted products.  The key to doing influencer marketing on a super small budget is being creative!!  And there are ways to do this with money-constraints!  We’ve done it ourselves with a seriously tight budget!

Lastly, once you figure out where you land on the payment debate, your next step will be to define the strategy for your first campaigns… as well as creative ways to kickstart this marketing channel.  And I will be sharing some great insights on measuring ROI, how to create campaigns that tie back to your ROI, and lastly, how to optimize those campaigns once you have some analytics to measure. Stay tuned!

The post Why Do Bloggers Charge for Sponsored Posts? appeared first on The Shelf Full-Service Influencer Marketing.

One of the primary benefits of Thanksgiving marketing is that there’s a considerably wide range of products that can intuitively fit your Thanksgiving Day marketing campaign. Unlike, say… Mother’s Day, where a brand may not find real value in running spots to promote a new power drill (Mother’s Day is usually focused on doing something for Mom, not the other way around), Thanksgiving Day provides marketers with a broad selection of possible marketing angles, from more obvious products like a turkey baster to less obvious products like a dog’s sweater vest (real Thanksgiving promo – read on).

For instance, any one of these products would be great to promote for Thanksgiving:

• Food is an obvious choice, as it’s the main event for most families who celebrate Thanksgiving.
• Cookware and cutlery can help make meal prep seamless and add a little personality to the dinner table.
• Fall-inspired home décor is usually in place by Thanksgiving, so if you’re going to buy that cinnamon broom to scent your house, you’ve probably already done it by the time family shows up for Thanksgiving dinner.
• Home improvement supplies to ready your home for guests, just in case it’s your year to host the big family dinner.
• Winter outerwear to comfortably attend parades in the morning and warmly wait in line in the evening for “Black Thursday” sales.
• VR, game consoles, televisions, or electronic products that help make family time spent together feel less like family time spent together.
• Makeup for a woman meeting her new beau’s family for the first time at Thanksgiving dinner (or in my case, cooking dinner for a house full of strangers a month after you and your new boyfriend start dating).

 That’s what we mean by a wide range of products.

Influencer Marketing During Thanksgiving

For this post, we are looking at influencer campaigns that specifically targeted Thanksgiving Day. For the time being, we’re going to refrain from Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. And we’ll skip the more obvious “shop this look” posts. Instead, we want to introduce you to a series of marketing campaigns from influencers whose marketing tactics were a little less on-the-nose.   

CAMPAIGN 1

Influencers Thanksgiving-ize Non-traditional Holiday Foods

Cilantro Lime Sour Cream is probably not at the top of your Thanksgiving dinner shopping list. Mexican food producer, Cacique, Inc. knows that, which is why their 2016 Thanksgiving marketing strategy included influencer marketing. The campaign, which stretched from November 23rd (the day before Thanksgiving) to November 25th of 2016, focused on providing holiday-inspired ways to incorporate their signature products.

For their day-before and day-of campaigns, Cacique tapped micro influencer Carolina Rojas, creator of the popular recipe site, MiDiarioDeCocina.com (My Kitchen Diary). Carolina is no stranger to working with brands. At a quick glance, I noticed her recipe blog has her partnering with Bar-S, Popsugar (for the #MUSTHAVEBOX), Alaska Seafood, and Dole. And that’s just what I saw on the first page.

On Thanksgiving Eve, Carolina published a sponsored recipe post with an image of baked sweet potatoes with pork chorizo and queso blanco. It was somewhat of a “teaser” post because on Thanksgiving Day, Carolina posted a video of that same recipe that showed step-by-step instructions for recreating the dish.

Carolina has more than 5,000 followers on Instagram and usually averages more than 100 Likes per post. This post, though a fantastic idea, lacked a bit in execution, getting only 60 Likes. 

CAMPAIGN 2

And We’re Most Thankful for Our Kids’… Clothes

This post from healthcare IT consultant, self-professed shopaholic, and mommy & me blogger-influencer Sandy (@sandyalamode) is actually a pretty clever advertisement for OshKosh.

The post features an adorable shot of her kids hugging outside with little evergreen bushes in the backdrop – very autumn, very holiday. You almost don’t notice how cute their clothes are. It would stand to reason a cute shot of cute kids would include cute clothes, right? Sure. And their outfits are coordinated, no doubt.

This sponsored post is actually a promotion for the kids’ outfits.  They are sporting outerwear like hats, gloves, scarves, and warm sweaters. And their clothes are cute.

The link in the post takes you back to Sandy’s website where users can look through a full photo spread of more than a dozen images of her kids posing and playing in the OshKosh Kids outfits. At the end of the post is a coupon for 25% off any purchase of just $30 or more through December 31, 2016.

With nearly 70,000 followers on Instagram and a healthy 2.4% engagement rate, @sandyalamode focuses on creating eye-catching fashion (for both her and the kids) and lifestyle content.

CAMPAIGN 3

The Days and Lives of American Express Users

I came across a couple of ads from micro influencers who are using their American Express ambassadorships (that’s a thing, right?) to do everything from replenish an apartment’s collection of knickknacks to buying the #Friendsgiving turkey. 

The #AmExAmbassador posts are typically low-key, day-in-the-life posts – understated, without making a big deal of the fact that these sponsored posts are intended to promote American Express. Most of them are written in a way that puts the focus on the influencer’s activities and not necessarily their method of payment.

In Denny Balmaceda’s Thanksgiving Day post (above), Denny (@Denny623) talks about being thankful for the new apartment into which he, his wife, and his kids are moving. He uses the post as an opportunity to mention his favorite local store (Kanibal & Co) at which he plans to shop. It’s almost coincidental that he’ll be shopping with his American Express card.

Denny is a menswear blogger from New York whose savvy vintage-meets-modern look has helped him grow his Instagram audience to more than 82,000 followers.  Averaging just a few more than two new posts a day, Denny gets more than a 1,100 Likes per post, and posts almost exclusively about fashion.

Another influencer-slash-ambassador who has some cool day-in-the-life sponsored content is Kelly Larkin of KellyintheCity.com. Kelly has more than 64,000 followers on Instagram and gets an average of 1,300+ Likes per post.

The day before Thanksgiving, Kelly (@kellyinthecity) used the post above to tell her followers she was giving them an inside peek at her holiday plans, which included celebrating #Friendsgiving in NYC and using her American Express Blue Cash Everyday card to cover the cost of buying two full Thanksgiving Day meals for her friends (in lieu of cooking them herself).

Again, the post is less about her payment method and instead focuses on what she did to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.  

One more example of the mentioned-in-passing style of #AmExAmbassador sponsored posts comes from West Coast social media influencer Melissa Sonico. Melissa (@melissasonico) has more than 80,000 followers and gets an average of 775 Likes per post.

In Melissa’s post, she features a lovely picture of a hearty spiced sweet potato soup for Friendsgiving. But it does get a little hard to tell who is sponsoring the post. She at-mentions both American Express and BuzzFeed sort of in the same breath, and later in the post invites followers to read the recipe on “the blog” AND learn about #BlueCashEveryday rewards.

It’s clearly a sponsored post. But if I hadn’t seen the previous #AmExAmbassador posts ahead of this one, I would be a little confused as to whether the post is sponsored by American Express or BuzzFeed. And just as a matter of principle, I’m not interested in finding out about the official terms of any credit card on a food blog.

That’s just me.

CAMPAIGN 4

Some Things Are Just For Dog Lovers

#DogThanking

That’s a thing. But I don’t have a dog (though I am a great dog sitter), so I didn’t know about it until I started to do some digging. Purina launched a campaign to raise money for the Canine Health Foundation using the branded hashtag #DogThanking just ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.  For every branded post, Purina agreed to donate $1 (up to $50,000) to pet research. So, naturally, pet owners began posting.

To spread the word, Purina created an influencer marketing campaign to run alongside the National Dog Show. Influencers posted pictures of their dogs and created posts about how they thank their dogs. Some posts were identified as sponsored posts. Others were not.

Simba the White Schnauzer (@rawrsimba) is actually a micro influencer. With more than 17,000 Instagram followers, Simba was able to get his Thanksgiving Day #DogThanking post in front of at least 600 people. That’s about how many people Liked the post, at least.

The call-to-action is for followers to use the branded hashtag to tell Simba (and Purina) how they do #DogThanking. This approach  appeals to the user’s sense of compassion. By taking a moment to do this simple thing, the Canine Health Foundation gets much-needed funding to help further pet health research.

While I loved the Purina campaign, as well as the messaging, the execution was a little more on the so-so side. Many of the influencers selected for the campaign had obscenely low engagement. Industry standard is 2%. As influencers get larger, that percentage might start to creep down a bit. But Purina worked with primarily micro-influencers, so there’s really no excuse to be working with influencers down in the .05% range of engagement.

Additionally, not to get all critical, while it is my firm belief that almost all dogs are cute, regardless of their physical appearances, certain owners are way better at capturing that cuteness in photos. And the Purina set might not have been high up on that list. 

Just my two cents. 

Another fun campaign by Petco featured @Hamlin_the_Frenchie, a dog influencer with a staggering 127,000+ followers. On Thanksgiving Day 2016, Hamlin put up a sponsored post that he was searching for his cupcake sweater vest in preparation for an epic time caroling with friends the following day.

The post got 3,681 Likes, which tops Hamlin’s average number of Likes by quite a bit.  Just as impressive is that Hamlin – the dog – gets nearly 40 comments per daily post.

This Petco campaign is a pretty good example of non-Thanksgiving products – which, in this case are sweater vests (one vanilla frosting with chocolate sprinkles and one red velvet one with gold star flakes), lollipop antlers, and red buckle shoes for dogs – being successfully, amusingly marketed during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Wrapping Up

The examples in this post should provide you with a few good Thanksgiving influencer marketing ideas. Better still, it’s proof positive that your Thanksgiving campaign isn’t just limited to posts about turkey dinners and family time.

For help nailing down an effective influencer marketing campaign for your brand, check us out at The Shelf. If you’re concerned that your campaigns might have the issues Purina’s campaign had, get in touch right away! We can get you all fixed up. We have crafted thousands of successful influencer marketing campaigns, and we’d love to help you with your Thanksgiving marketing efforts.

The post Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Shop Small Campaigns appeared first on The Shelf Full-Service Influencer Marketing.

Why Lifestyle Bloggers Are The Next Big For Influencer Marketing

If you’re not a ‘lifestyle blog’ aficionado let me introduce you to Ashley Muir Bruhn’s blog, Hither and Thither. Even if you don’t like blogs, you should check out some of her posts because you’ll probably be inspired to go do something that’s worthy of at least a selfie.

She covers a little bit of everything: travel, her home in California, fashion, parties, decor, recipes, kids, lifehacks, all woven together with the most beautiful photos, inspiring her readers to recreate similar experiences in their own lives. After reading about her trip to Positano, my partner and I started looking at plane tickets. I’m seriously not kidding, go look at that post and tell me you didn’t do the same thing.

 

A shift within the blogosphere.

Recently we’ve noticed a shift happening within the blogosphere, where many of the blogs that previously had very narrow and specific focuses are now diversifying their content. This shift is giving rise to a new style of lifestyle blogger, which is almost like a hybrid of what the blog’s original topic was…merged with “lifestyle”.

• You might find a fashion blogger teaching her readers how to cook a new recipe. Within that post you’ll find a series of beautiful cooking photos, some that give you a glimpse of her outfit, thus tying the post back to her blog’s original fashion theme.
• You might see a travel blogger describing the new exercise regimen he’s using to get into shape for his big Machu Picchu trip. That trip is what ties this off-topic post back to his travel theme.

Those two examples illustrate the shift in subject matter, where niche bloggers are starting to incorporate other aspects of their lives into their blog posts. They’re diversifying their content without fully switching over to the typical breakdown of content found within a more traditional “lifestyle” blog.

If you think about this new breed of lifestyle bloggers in terms of influencer marketing, it’s actually a pretty big deal.

With so many bloggers now expanding into more “lifestyle” subject matter, marketers can do so much more with their influencer marketing campaigns and really push their creative targeting to the next level. Instead of chasing a travel blogger to review your resort in Puerto Rico, you can engage a fashion blogger to takeover your Instagram account when she comes for a visit.

Below I’ve outlined six campaigns that will jumpstart your OWN creative genius, so the next time you’re running influencer campaigns, you can seriously knock everyone’s socks off!

And then everyone around you will need to go read some lifestyle blogs in order to find new hip socks.  Because you knocked them all off…Get it?  

1. HP’s X360 Convertible PC

HP is knocking it out of the park with their influencer marketing campaigns but it took some seriously out-of-box thinking (and marketers) to devise their clever strategy.

For starters, when you think of HP as a brand, the word ‘sexy’ doesn’t exactly come to mind, even in the computer space. Most people would award the title of “computer-sexiness” to Apple…

When I think of HP, I immediately think of my dirty little work computer at my previous job that had the askew logo stuck onto the corner in such a way that made the designer in me weep.

So, imagine that you’re in charge of promoting the HP X360 Convertible PC using influencer marketing? What type of influencers would you go for?

Seriously think about it for just a moment.

If you’re thinking that tech bloggers would be the way to go, then you’re in for a surprise.

But first, why would tech bloggers be a bad route to go?

Tech blogs are completely saturated with tech products. And most of these tech bloggers provide super honest reviews of the products that come their way because they’d quickly lose credibility within the Hacker-News-type crowd that they tend to attract. And by that I mean the nerdy one-uppers, who will take the time to peruse product specs and argue about random stuff like memory card capacity. If a tech blogger were to review this HP computer, how would it possibly stand out amongst all of the other computer products being reviewed?

It wouldn’t. It would get eaten alive. (My personal opinion. Apologies to the HP groupies out there.)

Instead of going that route, HP went full speed ahead in the exact opposite direction.

First, they decided to work with an up-and-coming pop star, Meghan Trainor in a campaign that was hashtagged #BendTheRules. In this campaign, they used her influential fans to produce a documentary about her during her tour around the US…YouTube, Vine, Instagram, and Twitter stars were all brought in for the ride to record the behind-the-scenes experience from their perspective. 

Here’s the video.

Everyone involved in the production of the documentary utilized the X360 as their creative tool, thus positioning it as AWESOME. Influencers were using it to create content for their fans while also working with the production team. And, every single one of these incredible internet stars used the X360 in a different way.

By engaging with people through a variety of platforms, with everything centred on this tour and documentary, HP was able to create a very strong story around the versatility and power of the X360.

HP has also worked with a number of individual fashion bloggers in the form of giveaways and sponsored posts. Take this post from Hollyhoque, for example. She gushes about how much she loves her HP laptop as she showcases it along with a variety of matching outfits. By doing so, she’s creating a stylish aura around the product and changing brand perceptions. Her readers will read her post thinking, “Hot Jiminy Crickets, she looks so cool carrying around that X360. It looks so sleek. That case matches her outfit…maybe I should buy one too.”

2. Blue Apron

For those of you who don’t know, Blue Apron delivers three recipes to your doorstep each week – along with the required fresh ingredients needed to cook these amazing dishes – all in a cute little refrigerated box!! It’s awesome, and it’s totally revolutionized my weekly cooking rut, which previously consisted of two nights of rotisserie chicken, two nights of lentil soup, and then our weekly run to Curry-in-a-Hurry…(the poster-child of healthy eating).

When setting up a campaign for Blue Apron, you’d need to start by considering who their demographic is. This company is a food delivery service which has made cooking a much easier (and more fun) chore than it used to be. Their meals are healthy, and a little more on the gourmet side. And probably not the most kid-friendly.

So, what type of influencers would you target?

I think the obvious answer would be food bloggers.

But typically food bloggers are talking about their OWN homemade recipes, not promoting a little recipe kit, sent to their door in a box. And, even if they decided to play along, what would an audience of food bloggers think about this? Let’s be honest, no self-respecting foodie would be down with food in a box.

So, the marketers behind the Blue Apron campaigns went with a less obvious, but far more targeted choice: fashion and lifestyle bloggers. Here are a few of those campaigns if you want to check them out: Pink Peonies, BlueBird, Kelle Hampton, Love Taza, and Style by Emily Henderson. But be forewarned…you will probably get lured into joining if you click through to those campaigns.

3. BarkBox

We have this sturdy little rescue-pug named Toggle who came to us a little bit defective. So we spoil him in every way possible. Case in point: in this photo, little Toggle just got back from surgery and is wearing his post-op-bathrobe, posing next to his BarkBox. He’s been a happy customer of theirs for the last year!

 

BarkBox has done campaigns with a variety of bloggers, without really focusing on any one TYPE. Because let’s get real here, being a dog owner isn’t exclusive to one kind of person, or blogger for that matter. Fashion bloggers, mommy bloggers, lifestyle bloggers, decor bloggers are all part of the dog-owner-party.

Yes, there are some blogs out there that do focus specifically on dogs. But as we’ve discussed above, in many cases, it’s better to find blogs that will allow your product to really stand out instead of floating around in a sea of a dozen other competing products.

And that’s what Barkbox did.

My favorite Barkbox collaboration was, by far, the one with Lauren Conrad. Here, instead of merely gifting readers with a promo-code, they partnered with Lauren to promote Adopt-A-Shelter-Dog-Month as well as donate stuff to homeless puppies. 

Check out some of the other Barkbox campaigns: PB Fingers, Northern Belle Diaries, Ramblings of a Suburban Mom, and Style Girlfriend

4. Biore

Biore is another example that I use pretty frequently when I talk to brands and PR professionals about their campaign strategies. If you don’t know what they are, Biore nosestrips are little white pieces of cloth that you wet, and then paste to your nose, and when you pull them off five minutes later, they pull out all of your clogged pore gunk. They are genius (and no, we weren’t sponsored to say that). 

You buy them at the drugstore for a couple bucks. They’re not exactly known as a chic, sexy product. In fact, there was a Biore commercial a while back where the girl pulled the strip off of her face and then said “Eweeeee… it’s like a blackhead convention”.

So as you can imagine, these strips are useful to just about anyone with clogged pores, but the entire concept is a little gross.

With all of that in mind, if you had to analyze their demographic, you’d probably think it was college kids, right? They’re a little more prone to problem skin AND most of them are on budgets, thus leading them to buy these cheaper drugstore products.

But Biore went after an entirely different demographic. After all, they probably already have that college age group locked down. Instead, they went with slightly high-end fashion and lifestyle bloggers. Here are three campaign examples: Barefoot Blonde, Pink Peonies, and Ivory Lane.

Much like our previous examples, the readers following these blogs will be way less innundated with products like this than say the audience of a beauty blogger who does drug-store product reviews every other day. The other thing that’s really nice about this target group is that they’re more high-end, which has exposed Biore to an equally high-end audience. Most people have heard of Biore because of those “blackhead-convention” commercials…but the high-end group is probably more likely to go to a dermatologist or a spa. But when you watch Amber from the Barefoot Blonde guiding you through her pore-cleaning process, it’s definitely perception-changing and piques the interest of this less obvious demographic.

In this campaign, Biore took it one step further by getting the blogger to highlight their #stripwithbiore contest, which ask readers to snap a selfie with the Biore strip of their choice, then post it on Instagram or Twitter for a chance to win a trip to LA and walk the red carpet with Brittany Snow. It’s sort of surprising how many people actually participated in this. If you click on that link you’ll even see some dudes mixed in! The campaign took this completely non-glamourous product and made it sort of hip and fun. Just because fashion bloggers are thought to be glamorous doesn’t mean their clogged pores are glamorous too… so it just works.

5. Nike

Nike has always targeted a pretty diverse range of people, like yoga groupies, marathon runners, and even people like myself who like to give off that hint of being athletic without actually doing fitnessy things.

If you were to think about the right blogger fit for Nike, you’d probably decide that the fitness and health niche is the way to go. But, not unlike our other campaign examples, if Nike were to advertise with strictly fitness bloggers, they would be competing against all of the other fitness apps and activewear companies out there who are using that same group of bloggers to push their products. That doesn’t really stand out, does it?

So instead of going the obvious route, they promoted both their activewear as well as their new Nike Training App through some pretty high-profile fashion bloggers: The Blonde Salad, I AM STYLE-ISH, and Talks about stake in fashion. And let’s just say, when you see Nike on the likes of the ever-so-hip, The Blonde Salad, you might consider the brand as your next fitness clothing purchase…and wait, Chiara even made the brand look cool for non-fitness activity…’athleisure’ as we like to call it. 

6. The Sleep Council

My last example is probably the most out-there in terms of targeting, which is why I’m using it for the grand finale.

If you were The Sleep Council would you even consider influencer marketing in the first place? I probably wouldn’t. Influencer marketing is a great solution for selling consumer products and solutions. But The Sleep Council wanted to use influencers to spread healthy sleep habits and promote a contest that they were launching within this same effort.

When considering influencer marketing for a brand like this, health and fitness bloggers seem like the obvious choice. But by now you’re probably thinking outside the box…so if you’re thinking fashion, lifestyle, and mommy bloggers… you’re right!

What type of people have trouble sleeping?

That’s a trick question.

There is not one-type of troubled sleeper. CEO’s, restaurant owners, kids, moms, gamers…whoever. It doesn’t really matter. Everyone has trouble sleeping from time to time, so why pigeon-hole your audience by working with health bloggers? Any influencer who suffers from sleep problems would be able to tell an inspiring story to her readers about the benefits of healthy sleep. Here are some examples: Fash Boulevard, Mom’s Spark (also), and It’s A Lovely Life.

The exact messenger for this campaign wasn’t overly important. Instead, The Sleep Council needed to find influencers who have very engaged audiences because their post relied on audience participation. If you find yourself in a similar boat, where the type of blogger is somewhat irrelevant, then check out this post that we wrote about our 7 step blogger-validation checklist. It will guide you through the things you need to look at when selecting the influencers who will get the best ROI.

Takeaways

• Bloggers have become much more diverse in terms of the topics they cover. This gives you, as a marketer, a much wider pool to choose from. You need to get creative with your targeting. It’s about demographic matching, not vertical matching.
• Smart marketers have discovered that by targeting LESS OBVIOUS influencers, they’re able to tap into audiences who are less inundated with competitive products. Think of HP working with fashion bloggers. Their product resonated with that group because that demographic likes taking photos…AND their tech product had way less competition because these fashion bloggers don’t typically review tech products.

If you decide to go this more creative route and work with bloggers who are outside of your direct vertical there’s one huge thing that you really need to pay attention to and that is demographic-targeting. I have a post in the works that discusses targeting in more detail, as I feel that marketers who pay attention to targeting-nuances are the ones who will be the ones who really kill-it in this space.

Lastly, I’ll finish up this post with a tiny plug for my site, The Shelf. It’s an influencer-targeting-wizard. If you’ve run campaigns in the past, you will literally find yourself weeping with joy when you see the level of relevance that you’re able to achieve with us. (I’m not being biased.  

If any of you have other tips or campaigns that you really admire, I’d LOVE to discuss in the comments!

The post Six Brands That Make Influencer Marketing Look Easy appeared first on The Shelf Full-Service Influencer Marketing.

While I always have my tried and true favourites, it’s time to shed light on a few others we, at The Shelf, like to browse on the regular. Ahead, I’m sharing 12 up-and-coming San Francisco style bloggers you should get to know really well. Inspiration (and possible collaborations) lie ahead!

12 San Francisco Style Bloggers You Should Get To Know

Sunkissed Steph / Stephanie Nguyen

Stephanie of Sunkissed Steph has the uncanny ability to take ultra feminine pieces and transform them into effortless and edgy outfits. Through her blog, she explores minimalism one black and white outfit at a time and does so in the chicest way possible. And we can definitely get down with this nude heel kick she’s on right now.

David Ou

Talk about the new guy on the block. The boyfriend to Stephanie of Sunkissed Steph, David Ou, just started a style blog as an addition to his already-existing website. With a killer creative portfolio, he already has an equally awesome fanbase and great style to boot. Don’t be surprised if you spot these two snapping each other’s #OOTD’s around SF.

Ready to Wear / Whitney and Mallory

Ready to Wear isn’t your typical style blog. Run by best friends, Whitney and Mallory, these two girls take us on a journey of their style both together and apart. Their style is accessible and fun, so we never leave their blog without a little bit of #OOTD inspiration to take us into our week.

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Window of Imagination / Jen Szeto

Jen really knows her way around a perfectly-curated Instagram feed. While her musings are currently Instagram-only, she captures minimalism at its very best. We’d be lying if we said we wouldn’t love to see her musings on a blog but for brands looking to partner up with an Instagrammer, Jen is the perfect match.

Pushups With Polish / Emily Bibb

Emily isn’t afraid to tell all on her blog and scratch the filtered moments in favor of a more genuine approach. From what her iPhone sees to fit tips (because the couch is boring) to a week’s worth of selfies, Pushups With Polish offers just a little something different.

it’s not her, it’s me / Toshiko Shek

Toshkio isn’t the newest blogger on the scene and she has the partnerships to prove it. What we love is her quirky and feminine fashion sensibility because it shows she doesn’t take herself too seriously and fashion indeed should be fun. Plus, her fashion and beauty section is chock full of fun DIYs, fashion tips, and beauty routines to try out.

pancakeSTACKER / Chandamheer Stacker

When we peruse Chadamheer’s blog, we just feel like she’s having fun (and we are too). Aside from the usual outfit inspiration, she also takes the time to write thorough posts that leave us with tips and a taste of her personality – from beauty bites to slacker style to food friday, pancakeSTACKER has us covered.

Wannabe Fashion Blogger / Tamryn

Living in a city where fashion experimentation is highly encouraged, Tamryn embraces her keen eye for style by mixing pieces you wouldn’t normally expect. Case in point: a babydoll dress gets paired with a striped top or unexpected prints are mixed together to add serious interest.

The Fancy Pants Report / Kate Ogata

Kate of The Fancy Pants takes us on a journey of her personal style, testing our new trends, and reinventing old ones. Through her blog, she strives to live by one rule: you wear the pants, they don’t wear you. This style maven has lately been found working with the likes of Nordstrom Rack, J.Crew and Lexus.

Crystalin Marie

Crystalin launched her blog in 2009 but didn’t get serious with it until 2012. Since then it has transformed into a space she calls home, where she documents topics related to fashion, food (including her favourites in San Francisco), personal style, and other daily bits, bobs, and bytes. Her style is simple, chic, and totally relatable.

So You Agree / Donna Hale

So You Agree is a space to find approachable style inspiration. Donna combines her love of vintage finds with classic basics and pops of fun. In turn, she offers her readers ways to look stylish without breaking the bank. The fact that she quotes Bill Cunningham, “The best fashion show is definitely on the street. Always has been and always will be.” makes her a winner in our books (and feeds) any day.

Style BFFs / Adrienne Kwok-Lundy and Jackie Groffman

If you’re looking for something just a little unexpected, you’ve come to the right blog. Between these BFFs – Adrienne and Jackie – there is quirkiness and coolness coming out the wazoo. The two girls experiment with layers of different lengths and proportions and let their personalities shine through in every outfit post (OOTD gifs included).

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