The "Professional Guide to Overseas Influencer Marketing" written by Meltwater mainly introduces knowledge and strategies related to overseas influencer marketing, aiming to help marketers better understand and utilize influencer marketing to enhance brand influence and marketing effectiveness.
1. Advantages of Overseas Influencer Marketing
- Attracting Target Audiences: Influencers come with specific audiences and can introduce brands and products to interested groups, reaching highly relevant new audiences and increasing brand awareness. For example, Chobani Australia expanded its influence on Instagram and strengthened its brand positioning among health and fitness enthusiasts by collaborating with 500 global influencers.
- Enhancing Audience Engagement: In addition to attracting new followers, influencers can interact with existing audiences, reigniting their enthusiasm for the brand and driving repeat purchases. Relevant influencers can help consumers see the brand in a new light, increasing purchase intent.
- Building Trust and Credibility: Positive reviews from influencers help build trust and credibility, increasing the likelihood that fans will purchase products.
- Improving Brand Authenticity: Collaborating with influencers can spread messages, change perceptions, or emphasize commitment to important causes, showcasing the brand's human side and increasing authenticity, which aligns with Gen Z and Millennial consumers' emphasis on marketing authenticity.
- Seizing Trend Opportunities: Influencers help brands capture the zeitgeist and moments in pop culture, leveraging trends to enhance the relevance and fun of marketing strategies.
- Promoting UGC Generation: Inspired by marketing, user-generated content (UGC) may increase, and brands can continue to showcase themselves through comments and reposting UGC.
- Expanding Market Share: Leveraging influencer promotion can capture a larger market share, bring more sales, and strengthen relationships with influencers.
- Driving Sales Conversion: Influencer marketing can optimize both qualitative and quantitative results, increasing conversions and sales. For example, 32% of Gen Z consumers say they buy products from influencer posts, and 43% like discovering products through influencer recommendations.
- Saving Marketing Costs: Even with limited budgets, brands can profit from influencer marketing, with every dollar spent expected to earn $5.78.
2. Types of Overseas Influencers
- Classified by Audience Size
- Small Influencers (500 - 5,000 followers): Relatively few followers but can closely interact with fans, have broad creative boundaries and low costs, repeated collaborations easily gain fan trust, suitable for brands with tight budgets and seeking long-term brand building benefits. For example, beauty and skincare influencer Janine C. posts skincare routines, makeup tutorials, tags products, and provides discount codes.
- Medium Influencers (5,000 - 30,000 followers): Have loyal audiences, more collaboration experience, affordable rates, can reach niche markets or specific topic audiences, suitable for brands with moderate budgets wanting to try or prove the value of influencer marketing. For example, home decor influencer Ann Vallotton, whose rustic, quaint, and country-style videos are loved by fans, shares sources of items and design ideas.
- Large Influencers (30,000 - 500,000 followers): Target larger audiences, charge higher but are experienced, can provide more sponsored content over longer periods, focus on audience expectations, can explore more collaboration methods, suitable for brands with sufficient budgets wanting to launch large-scale marketing campaigns. For example, tech influencer Michael Soledad has a certain number of followers on Instagram and YouTube, his content includes product reviews, demos, etc., and fans are interested in his precise, high-quality videos.
- Celebrities and Super Influencers (over 500,000 followers): Such as Jennifer Aniston marketing for Aveeno, Michael Jordan endorsing Nike, and YouTube's MrBeast, Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, etc. They have high popularity and fan trust, with different marketing focuses. Although audience relevance is harder to assess, the power of celebrities cannot be ignored, suitable for brands with large budgets seeking famous endorsers for major marketing campaigns.
- Classified by Marketing Channels and Communication Methods
- Social Media Influencers: Active on social media, can be contacted via Meltwater platform or media kits, including various content forms and platform features, such as YouTube for long videos, live streaming, and product reviews; Instagram with multiple content formats and marketing options; TikTok mainly for short videos and live streaming, etc.
- Traditional Media Influencers: Includes print journalists, TV hosts, industry publications, and digital publishers. Brands establish partnerships through standard methods to gain media coverage.
- Bloggers: Blogs were once the main channel for influencers and still offer collaboration opportunities. Bloggers have high email recipient engagement rates, and brands can consider sponsoring email ads or guest blog posts.
- Industry Experts and Analysts: At the forefront of B2B technology, brands need to cultivate influencer relationships with them, inviting them to meet company executives and provide product demos.
3. Overseas Influencer Marketing Strategies
- Clarify Marketing Project Goals
- Brand Awareness: Collaborate with influencers who reach large audiences to increase brand awareness. Key performance indicators (KPIs) include reach, views, shares, etc.
- Brand Loyalty: Choose influencers with similar brand values to convey brand values and attract fans to become loyal users. KPIs include new followers, user-generated content (UGC), comments, email subscriptions, etc.
- Sales: Use influencer recommendations to drive sales, as consumers are more likely to trust recommendations from people they relate to. KPIs include website visits, purchase volume, etc.
- Identify Target Audience: Deeply understand target audience interests, hobbies, lifestyles, etc., use Meltwater consumer insights tools to discover and locate relevant content, and use these attributes for influencer searches to find suitable partners.
- Finding Overseas Influencers
- Platform Filtering: Use Meltwater's overseas influencer marketing platform to filter influencers by gender, age range, location, etc. You can also use visual search features, leveraging AI to match visual effects to find influencers. For example, beauty brands can search for "curly-haired women" to find relevant influencers.
- Evaluate Influencer Profiles: Check influencer engagement rates, demographics, recent activities, and partner brands, evaluating from content suitability and authenticity perspectives. Meltwater platform can provide relevant information, such as checking for negative parameters like profanity in past content.
- Define Influencer Impact
- Engagement Rate: Focus on engagement rate rather than just views. Small and medium influencers usually have higher engagement rates and more potential to build relationships with fans and encourage interaction.
- Audience Quality: Ensure influencer followers are active and real, not fake or low-quality. Influencers whose fan comments look like bots or who buy followers should not be chosen. High-quality followers improve content visibility and reach.
- Audience Relevance: Analyze the consistency between influencer followers and target audience, including user profiles and preferred social media platforms, ensuring influencers can reach the target audience. If an influencer's active platform does not match the target audience's commonly used platform, they may not be the best choice.
- Real Reach: Meltwater platform can calculate "real reach" for Instagram accounts, excluding fake bots and spam accounts for a more accurate reflection of user influence.
4. Managing Overseas Influencer Partnerships
- Sign Detailed Contracts
- Specify Campaign Timeline: Determine the start and end dates of the marketing campaign and the time frame for sponsored content to go live.
- Detail Scope of Work: Avoid vague descriptions and specify the influencer's exact work, such as creating specific types and quantities of content.
- Specify Deliverables: Include content format, quantity, such as blog post word count, number of social media posts, etc. Meltwater platform can conveniently manage deliverables for multi-person collaborations.
- Determine Ownership Rights: Clarify the brand's ownership of influencer marketing collaboration works and the influencer's subsequent usage rights.
- Standardize Brand Promotion: Ensure influencers accurately represent brand image and information, following brand colors, logos, language requirements, etc.
- Specify Format Requirements: Specify the format for influencer-delivered marketing content, such as document format, image size, etc.
- Set Feedback Process: Determine the number, timing, and management of feedback rounds, avoid excessive editing, and maintain the authenticity of influencer content style.
- Consider Derivative Content: Clarify whether derivative content will be created based on influencer works and related rights.
- Include Advertising Regulations: If planning to promote influencer content, specify advertising-related regulations in the contract.
- Plan Distribution Channels: Detail the channels and frequency for influencers to promote sponsored content, ensuring the marketing team understands the schedule and avoids accidental releases.
- Specify Evaluation Metrics: Clarify the criteria for measuring the success of marketing collaborations, such as number of leads, social media shares, new followers, sales volume, etc.
- Clarify Legal Obligations: Ensure influencers understand platform requirements for sponsored posts and guide them to properly display sponsored content.
- Specify Payment Terms: Clarify payment amount and method, ensure fair and timely payment, and avoid affecting partnership relationships.
- Smoothly Launch Marketing: Ensure influencer agreements are clear and deliverables are specified, facilitating content review and campaign launch, maintain communication, resolve issues promptly. Meltwater can help regularly contact influencers and, combined with the Engage social media management solution, track progress, share UGC, and report results.
5. Evaluating Overseas Influencer Marketing Results
- Methods for Measuring Success
- Earned Media Value: Additional reach from influencer posts and trending hashtags shared by target audiences, counted as earned media results.
- Follower Growth: Increase in new followers or subscribers during and after the campaign, requiring prior understanding of baseline data to track growth.
- Sales Data: Assign promo codes to influencers, associate sales with codes, and count the impact of influencer marketing campaigns on sales.
- Website Traffic: Use UTM codes to track link clicks and measure website traffic goal completion. UTM codes include fields for campaign source, medium, name, and content, used to identify traffic sources and link types.
- Obtain Marketing Insights: Meltwater's overseas influencer marketing platform can provide marketing insights, and through Engage social media management integration, create custom and dynamic dashboards to display in-depth results and insights, demonstrating the value of influencer marketing to stakeholders.
