Influence Comes from Taste
When you work in influencer marketing, you meet clients from every industry and every kind of product. The questions they bring are mostly about how to put the influencer lineup together, and what the budget and pricing look like. Many come with concrete execution plans already, such as beauty seeding or a set number of content pieces.
But when I listen further, there are cases where what the campaign is ultimately meant to achieve can't be described, either qualitatively or quantitatively. Some clients come in a hurry, because everyone is doing it or because it's the trend, and say let's just start with seeding.
Maybe that's why I hear more and more that "influencer marketing isn't as efficient as it used to be." I don't think the channel has lost its power. I think the process of matching a brand's taste to an influencer's audience has become thin. If you haven't decided what you want to achieve, what you are matching to gets blurry too.
Influencer marketing has settled in as an alternative to legacy media. That means the result you want from it has to connect to the overall marketing objective. Only then can you build a solid strategy, and judge the results when it's over.
Purpose comes first
Influencers have always been around us. What changed is that their influence has grown so much that they have become a medium, a channel, a means in their own right. So the core of influencer marketing is to take that influence and use it to fit the brand's purpose.
But it isn't always the answer. In digital marketing we talk a lot about data-driven optimization and efficiency. If optimization means running the means that best fits the purpose as efficiently as possible, then influencers can't be the answer to every purpose. Influencer marketing is a means, not a purpose. So decide the purpose first, then ask whether influencers are the best means for it. Choose them because they fit the purpose, not because they are a trend. Sometimes mass seeding is right, and sometimes a digital banner is.
Where does an influencer's influence come from?
So why do we look for influencers at all? Because of their influence. Influence is the power to move people's attention and get them to act. Increasing ad volume and exposing people again and again also creates influence, but an influencer's influence is different in that it becomes the trigger for action. I break this influence into three elements.
- Reach: how many people see it
- Trust: whether they believe what this person says
- Fit: whether this story matches the sensibility of this person's followers
Reach is checked by follower count or views. It is the most intuitive and quantitative way to judge influence, so tiers are still set by follower count and rates are still priced on it. These days we also look at the depth of response through metrics such as Engagement Rate. Trust comes from the reputation an influencer has built over a long time and the goodwill of their subscribers.
Reach shows up in numbers right away, but trust and fit are hard to capture in numbers. So they have to be read qualitatively alongside the quantitative metrics. What people say in the comments, and how close the influencer's usual content is to our brand, are the clues.
Fit is what decides the choice
If you try to choose influencers by reach and trust alone, you end up with too many candidates. The market is full of influencers with many followers who are trusted. To pick one among them, all that's left is follower count and rate. Reach and trust are only criteria for finding people with big influence, not for finding people who fit our brand. So of the three elements, I think fit is what decides the choice. And fit, in the end, is a matter of taste.
Marketing that looks only at follower counts is like raising your voice in a wide public square where an anonymous crowd walks by. A collaboration with an influencer whose taste matches is closer to chatting naturally in a hangout full of people who share your brand's sensibility.
That's why even the same product is delivered in completely different ways depending on the influencer's taste. When a brand picks a particular influencer, it is picking that taste, and choosing to be with the fandom that shares it. When trust is added to that taste, influence is at its largest.
Of course, fit isn't always the most important. If the objective is to tell many people quickly, reach comes first, and mass seeding may be right. If the objective is to win a specific core audience, fit comes first. The case below was like that. Which element goes first is decided, in the end, by the objective.
Street fashion that started with dancers
Here is a case that shows this thinking well. It was a recent campaign for an overseas fashion brand entering Korea, and the objective wasn't simple exposure. It was to win the core audience that could represent the brand in the early days of the Korean launch.
The usual target for a street fashion brand is men and women in their 20s and 30s. That is right on paper, but too broad to count as a sharp customer base that could drive a campaign. So we narrowed down who loves and regularly wears the brand's signature oversized fit, and found that the people who carry that fit best are professional dancers in the dance community.
We built the influencer lineup from people inside the dancer community. The brand then settled in as "clothes street dancers actually wear," and claimed one territory of taste inside the broad fashion market. Once the brand's taste and the professional dancers' taste matched, trust and reach followed. As a result, the brand was talked about naturally inside the dancer community.
The first step in using influence
So the first step in using influence well is to sharpen the target. First, match the taste the brand aims for with the taste the influencer holds, one by one.
Before you look for influencers, how about asking this: "Whose space, with what taste, do we want our brand to blend into naturally?"