There’s a common misconception that influencer marketing works best for brand awareness campaigns - but according to Ryan Silberman, CEO at Webfluential, it’s increasingly being used to drive performance. At Appfest 2022, Ryan explained how you can leverage influencer marketing to increase installs. Read the summary or watch the video below.
The original ad recipe
According to Ryan, creating engaging ads has historically been built on using two basic ingredients: context and personalization.
Advertisers first use what they learn in different environments (context clues) to offer relevant information to consumers (personalized content). For example, let’s say a woman comes into a store soaked from the rain. When the store keeper offers her an umbrella, he’s using context clues (the woman soaked from the rain) to give her an item.
Leveraging trust: Nano influencers
However, even when you implement context and personalization into your ads, there’s a key ingredient still missing in the mix: trust. By incorporating trust into your ads, you can generate higher consumer confidence in your product - that’s because when we trust someone, we’re more likely to believe what they say.
Consumers are more likely to trust people who feel accessible and relatable. For example, someone touring a new city likely trusts a local’s recommendation over a celebrity that’s getting paid to give those recommendations. Even though a celebrity is more well known and has a higher reach, a local would seem more credible. Another word for a person with a smaller reach, but a higher engagement rate? Introducing nano influencers.
Nano influencers are influencers that have fewer than 3,000 followers. The graph below illustrates how leveraging nano influencers shows huge promise: the smaller someone’s audience size, the higher their engagement rate is.
Improving performance at scale
Engagement rate is one thing, but can it translate to actual transactions like sales and installs?
Looking to garner more sales, Elysium Health, an American health company that sells vitamins, partnered with nano influencers who were passionate about cycling, to drive traffic that resulted in sales. They used that content at scale by running ads on Facebook and Tiktok and managed to improve the CPA by 2x.
Beyond sales, nano influencers can also improve sentiment towards your app. That’s because you’re creating an authentic narrative with your audience, while also showing your product in a positive light. In fact, Chef, a restaurant tycoon game, teamed up with nano influencers to create sponsored content that showed a 10x uplift in sentiment.
Referrals with results
In addition to traditional social channels like Instagram and TikTok, here’s another way nano influencers can share your ads - dark social.
Dark social includes more intimate channels like WhatsApp or email, in which nano influencers can simply copy and paste a link and share it directly with friends - producing extremely high conversion and engagement rates. In fact, Ryan says 84% of sharing is in dark social. So while it’s not tracked or spoken about, it’s a huge opportunity to leverage with nano influencers.
Tips for influencers becoming a performance channel
Ryan gives us the 4 key pillars that make a successful influencer program.
1. Technology platform
Having the right platform saves time and money for recruiting and contracting the right influencers. An added benefit is that it also manages your workflow.
2. Inventory
Some people may think you need a lot of influencers on stand-by but according to Ryan, that’s actually not the case. What’s important is that your influencers are opt-in, meaning that they’ve linked their social channels, have agreed on contractual terms, and are fully ready to work - getting you a faster campaign turnaround.
3. Strategy (on demand)
You’ve got your technology and the right influencers, and now it’s time to decide what the influencers should do. Ryan’s suggestion? Bring your influencers into your world and ask them what the strategy should be, because they know their audience best.
4. Execution + paid
Even if you hit the other 3 pillars perfectly, Ryan says this is the most important pillar to ensure success. If you can’t execute at scale then it means nothing and organic isn't big enough. You need to integrate into ad networks and social platforms to scale up.
Wrapping up
If there’s one thing to remember with influencer marketing, Ryan encourages you to remember these key points.
- Apply trust, context, and personalization to engage users
- Use low cost nano influencers as opposed to high cost celebrities or branded content
- Figure out how to leverage dark social and use your ad networks through Paid
- Retention is built into the community - use this to your advantage
