Influencer Marketing

Modern Day marketing has been transformed by the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram,Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and TikTok. Many individuals are now growing their own fan bases and becoming their own brands, in many ways, creating microeconomics that is largely scalable. Established influencers can provide an impressive $6.50 per every dollar invested in marketing with them (Tomson,2022) – making it the fastest-growing online marketing tactic to date (although not as strong as some of the ROI we see on Paperplanes campaigns ).

The Influencer Marketing Hub has calculated that roughly $ 13.8 Billion will have been spent on influencer marketing in 2021, demonstrating that there is a success and attraction for this type of marketing, with a clear benefit of return from the initial investment. Companies who are using Influencer marketing tend to favour Instagram as the choice platform with 68% of companies posting their influencer marketing there. Instagram is a platform with over 1.1 Billion active users and 90% of those users follow a brand that is advertising on that platform. This is typical because most of the influencer’s network is following them on that respective platform.
But is instagram, or any social media platform for that matter, the best way to sell to consumers?

In short, No. Instagram has an average of 1.08% conversion rate, which is just barely above the 1% email conversion rate average (Statista, 2022). On Top of this, you will likely have to pay both the influencer and the digital platform, whilst competing for traffic and bidding. Utilising a celebrity influencer as an ambassador/figure representation for your product is often not enough. Companies have to be smart in the way they engage with their consumers. Using influencer marketing with Paperplanes intelligent direct mail has proved to have up to 30% conversion rates for online stores.

This might lead you to believe that influencer marketing could be a great potential opportunity for your business before that consider the following questions:

What exactly are influencers and what are the roadblocks?

How can Programmatic Direct Mail optimise your campaign results?

Which demographics do Influencer marketing have the strongest effects on?

Influencers can be poorly defined. Each platform has its own measurement which is considered professional, whereas influencers charge you more. Kim Kardashian is paid an average of $850,000 per Instagram post to over 200 million followers, but with a rippling effect due to her expanded network and net worth of $1.8 Billion (ManyofMany,2022).

More commonly, influencers of today are defined by segments of a few thousand up to >1M.

Source (https://www.shopify.com/blog/influencer-marketing-statistics)

Over the years, the smaller ‘micro-influencers have grown to have higher engagement and response thanks to the younger generations’ ability to share content for free via online content.

So what are the main issues with these types of micro-influencers for marketing?

Demand

- - As is the case with all trends they attract demand to a certain person, service, idea or product and supply is scarce. This logic can be applied to influencers who might have busier periods of the year or might be going through a boom in popularity thus increasing their demand and possibly price.

Style of Content

- - The content amount will change the price an Influencer would charge. If an Influencer is asked to create a large number of posts or a large amount of high-effort content it’s going to cost more.

Follower engagement

- - Some influencers might have a large audience but only engage a small percentage in the advertising they do. This will lower their value as a marketing pipeline hence lowering the price they will receive for their assistance.

Platform

- Content creators and influencers have their own personal preferences and social media platforms that they use and are willing to advertise on. Tying it in with the style of content certain platforms thrive on shorter or longer content which might affect the willingness to collaborate with a firm.

Distribution
- As aforementioned, using an influencer in aid to your marketing strategy is a clear risk-free investment. However, the channels in which your marketing is promoted may be ineffective. A physical direct mail channel could be a solution, where content is always read and almost always actioned upon. Especially when the right people are targeted by an influencer they love.

Programmatic Direct mail

Direct mail marketing drives strong performance and high response rates compared to other marketing channels while not being as costly as influencer marketing on digital channels. Competition, traffic and timing are no longer an issue, and using programmatic data tracking such as Paperplanes innovative technology allows you to identify s, the right people who follow a particular influencer in their homes; multiplying the effectiveness of the response.

Notably, in 2021 Direct mail marketing had a 9% response rate, up to an astounding 30% utilising Paperplanes programmatic capabilities; tracking customer web data for targeting only the right people at the right time. Paperplanes can achieve the same if not better results as traditional bulk mail marketing with up to 78% less send volume.

In regards to variable costs, direct mail marketing and specifically programmatic direct mail marketing are much more stable in their pricing. Without there being factors such as platform and content length Direct mail comes out to be a more affordable to consistent channel of marketing.

When taking website data and integrating it in an algorithm to produce personalised and targeted direct mail pieces, the results attained can be more than tenfold that of classic direct mail. Paperplanes demonstrated that Programmatic direct mail can respectively achieve 30% conversion rates, ROAS as high as £ 11-1 and uplift on sales as high as 50%.

Demographics

Different marketing channels undeniably will attract different demographics from their efforts. Direct mail marketing has a strong response rate with both younger and older generations. Influencer marketing is not much different in the sense that it has a clear demographic that it can attract to a business.

Gen Z

Statistics would argue that Gen-Z has the strongest response to Influencer marketing despite not holding as much of the market compared to Gen-X and Baby Boomers. Gen Z has the highest usage rates on media such as Instagram and TikTok with 71% and 58% of the generation using those media platforms. But also 82% more likely to read and act upon direct mail content addressed to them.

This generation follows social media trends and influencers much more closely than other generations leading to Influencers with forward-thinking mindsets being more successful at marketing to this generation. Gen-Z will follow Gen-Z leading to a snowball effect with members of Gen-Z wanting to find out what their peers are interested in and who they are following.

Millennials & Gen-X

These older generations tend not to react to similar styles of Influencer marketing as Gen-Z. Whilst no Generation is as active on social media as Gen-Z overall, these older generations do respond better on platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Whilst the younger generation has a knack for following trends more closely and being swayed easier, these two generations have great response rates to nostalgic marketing and authentic personalities when it comes to Influencers.

To better demand the attention of these two generations it would be optimal to utilise influencers who this generation would be more familiar with. Influencers who might invoke nostalgic feelings or influencers who are more authentic in the way they present themselves and the content that they are marketing. This generation also is quite susceptible to physical mail content, with up to 72% of millennials taking action upon or at least reading the content.

If you’d like to learn how you can integrate influencer marketing in a programmatic direct mail campaign to improve your current strategy, get in touch with us below for a chat with our experts.