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Why Influencers Deserve To – And Should – Be Paid by Brands

Ever since sponsored posts were made popular by the likes of Izea, the question has remained: should influencers be paid for their promotion of your brand?s message, product or service?

On the one hand, you have those that say paying an influencer removes the validity of the review of promotion, since you can?t possibly remain non-biased when there?s been an exchange of money.

On the other hand, you have those that say it?s no different from any other marketing channel, and you pay for that, so why should influencers be any different?

As someone who?s on both sides of the coin ? I?m a marketer who uses influencers for client campaigns, and I?m fortunate enough to work with brands as an influencer for their campaigns ? here?s my take on the topic.

Time is Money

How long do you think the average blog post takes to create? If you, the marketer, don?t blog yourself, how long do you think it takes to put together what you?re reading now?

10 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour? More, less?

The truth is, blog posts take as long as they need to be ready. This might sound clich?d, but it?s true. There?s much more to a blog post than just stringing some words together (or images and sounds, if you?re a video blogger or podcaster).

Ideas and research;
Content;
Format;
Links and attribution to relevant topics;
Images and media;
Proofreading.

That?s just the creation part. Then you have the marketing of a post, along with replying to comments and encouraging further discussion. All told, a blog post can easily take up a few days of your time, if you were to add up all the components.

And that?s just one post, where the blogger knows the topic inside out and can create content on the fly. If there?s a brand message involved, there needs to be further research into the product, testing any giveaways, liaising with the brand, etc.

So that single post has now turned into a mini-campaign. And you want that for free? Um??NO.

Trust Can?t be Bought ? But It Deserves to be Rewarded

When I started this blog, the one core tenet I made it my mission to adhere to was to never break the trust of whatever community managed to grow around the blog.

That meant all opinions would be treated equally, as long as they were respectful and on topic, and I would never promote or recommend something I hadn?t used myself, or didn?t 100% believe in.

It?s a big reason there have been very few ads on my blog, with the exception of the WordPress theme I use. It?s also why there has been very few sponsored posts on my blog ? perhaps two in five years plus of blogging here.

Simply put, if I?m going to recommend something to my community ? whether as a non-paid fan or a sponsored ?influencer? ? it needs to be right for my audience. There?s no amount of dollar value you can pay to erode the trust that?s built between a blogger and his or her community.

Money comes and goes; trust and a legacy doesn?t.?That can never be bought back.

If you, as a brand manager or agency, want to connect an influencer?s hard-earned community trust to your client, you need to understand what it?s taken to build that trust. It?s the ultimate endorsement, for that influencer to introduce your brand to the community, and not only introduce, but honestly recommend.

You can?t buy that kind of advertising ? but you can reward it.

Relevance Equals More Effective Outreach and ROI

There?s a reason today?s definition of influence ? social scoring platforms like Klout, etc. ? have been very slow at sharing public success stories when it comes to their influencer outreach campaigns.

While generic influence as offered by these platforms can help brands gain share of voice and brand amplification, the fact is the identification process of influencers to use lacks true context and relevance to an audience.

While a lifestyle blogger with 10,000 subscribers and demographics of 25-44 year old women might be attractive to a brand looking to promote their latest healthcare product, how many of that 10,000 is right for the brand?

Let?s say the product is for women with sensitive skin; that might be one-third of the audience. So what about the other two-thirds? A generic target by score ???this blogger has a score of 72 in women?s products, they?re perfect!??? will immediately reduce your brand?s success rate.

However, get in touch with the blogger that?s 100% right for your brand, and who has a higher engaged audience around that topic, and you?ll immediately see both financial benefits and more positive sentiment around your outreach campaign.

It?s why?InNetwork’s solution of filtering out the true audience size is a welcome addition to the influence software marketplace.

Instead of wasting time and resources on partnering with bloggers with 10,000 subscribers but only 900 actual interested readers,?you can connect with a blogger with 1,000 subscribers and 900 interested readers.

Considering you’ll rarely – if ever – have a blog that has 100% of its readers engaged, the 90% engagement of the latter example compared to the under 10% of the initial example is much more rewarding, especially given the probable cost to work with the former over the latter due to “audience” size.

That?s a big difference in relevance and the ratio for success is much bigger. It?s the smarter way to market, and paying the influencer for connecting you to that more engaged audience means?less risk, more return, and better campaigns.

Influence Marketing is a Key Business Strategy ? Don?t Treat It Like a Cheap Date

At the end of the day, the old adage??you get what you pay for??has never been more true when it comes to influencers and how they can really help turn a promotional campaign into a loyalty-driven customer base.

There?s a reason people are ?influential? in their community: expertise, respect, trust and the ability to make things happen.

You have the choice to pay or not to pay what they?re worth ? in reality, though,?if you?re serious about your campaigns, there?s only one choice to make:?how much is true influence and what it can offer your brand worth to you?

Don?t be cheap with your answer.

A version of this post originally appeared on the InNetwork blog.

image: H.Michael Karshis

InNetwork, the Drive for Authentic Influence and What It Means for Brands

In the book Influence Marketing, we dedicate a chapter to some of the platforms we felt were leading the way in the next wave of influence marketing.

These platforms include Traackr, Tellagence and others, for the way they’re moving beyond generic influence and actually delivering business intelligence and results.

Of course, the limitations of a book, as well as how fast this space moves, meant as soon as we’d finished, new platforms came into play that impressed just as much.

One such platform is InNetwork, from Nova Scotia, Canada.

Quality Assurance and Influence

The beauty of the platforms that are moving the influence conversation forward is that they all have something different to offer, and can either complement each other or be used because of these differences for specific campaign needs.

Traackr, for instance, has their new INA solution, which allows you to see who influences the influencers (a key factor for success in the methodology we present in the book);
Appinions takes into account offline data, which counters the “you’re only influential if you’re online” approach that the likes of Klout take;
Tellagence tracks the ebb and flow of influence across communities, and helps identifies the next layer or generation of influencers.

For InNetwork, their differentiating factor is the authority stance they take when identifying influencers.

When you use InNetwork as a marketer and you set up your first campaign, you enter the keywords around the industry you’re in, and the target audience for that industry. That starts to populate InNetwork’s influence roster, as highlighted in the image above.

There are two types of influencers on InNetwork – registered and searched. The registered ones are those that have connected their data to the InNetwork database, and these are highlighted by blue stars.

The searched ones are those that haven’t registered with InNetwork, but have dropped into your search based on keywords used.

This is where the first part of the InNetwork Authority metrics comes into play.

When an influencer registers, they are manually curated by the quality control team at InNetwork, who verify authority on a topic, that they aren’t a bot or fake account, that the numbers add up, and that the influencer actually knows what they’re talking about. Only then do they gain access to the system.

This offers an immediate benefit for brands used to using social scoring platforms for “influencer outreach” campaigns. No more generic, no more false expertise – instead, real influencers with real audiences.

But the authority doesn’t stop there.

The True Audience of Influence

Once you start to use the various filters while setting up your campaign, the audience number of the influencer changes.

While someone may have a collected “follower” number of 10,000 across Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc, not all 10,000 are going to be interested in the same thing.

For instance, a marketing blogger’s audience may be made up of small business owners, Fortune 50 executives, non-profit volunteers, etc. They need different information for different strategies.

Likewise, a lifestyle blogger may have married moms with teens, single moms with a toddler, retired moms, etc. Again, they’re going to need different messages targeted to their different buying needs.

As you add extra keywords and demographics into the InNetwork algorithm, it starts to show you what the true audience size for these filters looks like, as shown in the image below.

Now, instead of a non-targeted couple of thousand followers, you have access to a very targeted couple of hundred, that are in your target audience demographic and trust the advice of that particular influencer on that topic.

It immediately ramps up the success potential versus throwing a generic message at 5,000 audience members and seeing what sticks.

The more filters you add, the more targeted results you get, until you have a roster of influencers with a warm and engaged audience that’s right for your brand and the message/product/service you’re trying to promote.

The One to One Relationship Factor

Now that you have your chosen influencers, InNetwork adds the final piece of the authority puzzle.

Brand managers, or whoever’s responsible for the relationship with the identified influencers, now have access to a Brief and Statement of Work area, as well as a private messaging function directly with the influencer, as shown in the two images below.

Here, the brand can connect with the influencer directly, and propose their project as well as their requirements, goals, expectations, compensation and more.

In return, the influencer can negotiate that statement of work, to ensure that the message that’s shared with their audience is right for them; doesn’t impact the trust of the influencer; and offers a fair reward for the work that’s being done.

With both sides working together like this, it ensures the brand’s message is going to the right audience, and that the brand is allowing the influencer to share the message in a way that’s relevant to their community.

It’s one of the core reasons any campaign succeeds and, more importantly, moves beyond a short-term campaign and into a longer term loyalty and advocacy relationship.

Once the campaign finishes, the influencer can be “ranked” for relevance of message, results, goals met, and general working relationship. This again helps InNetwork connect the strongest influencers for brand messages, based on their proven metrics and successes in similar campaigns.

The Future Looks Bright

InNetwork only came into public beta launch at the beginning of June, but already you can see they put a lot of legwork in when it comes to providing the type of solution agencies want and need.

The fact they carried out a lot of pre-build conversations with brands and agencies as to what solutions would be useful shows in the features highlighted here.

There are some features currently missing that I’d love to see added – the ability to add your own search terms, versus the pre-defined ones, for instance. Additionally, reports are currently generated by a client services team versus being able to define your own metrics and apply that data manually.

However, it’s still early days for InNetwork and these are two features that have been promised in either the next iteration, or an update before the year end.

For brands right now, the platform offers a solid, very easy-to-use solution that takes the pain out of identifying the true reach and relevant audience for an influencer roster, as well as baking in authority data throughout the whole platform.

It takes influence marketing into another excellent and much-needed direction and for that I’m extremely optimistic about what InNetwork is adding to the influence conversation.

The market continues to mature – and that’s never a bad thing.

This post is part of a demo program I’m running in partnership with InNetwork, to test the platform and offer feedback and direction on the platform itself. No financial compensation was exchanged, and these opinions are my own.

If you wish to trial the platform, you can sign up here. During the beta phase, InNetwork costs $499 per month for an agency site license for up to 5 users on unlimited campaigns. Brands can use it directly for $249 per month for three users. ?