Episode 69: The ins and outs of influencer marketing

Sophie Peterson  00:03

Welcome to the CIM Marketing Podcast. The contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIM Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for. We hope you enjoy the episode.

 

Ben Walker  00:18

Hello everybody and welcome to the CIM Marketing Podcast and today we are returning to one of the great themes of the podcast, which is influencers and influencer marketing. And I'm delighted to say we've got couple of great guests with us this week, we've got Henry Purchase, who is founder of Rough Water Media, and Michelle Carvill, who's actually a course director at CIM. Now Henry runs SEO and content marketing at Rough Water Media. And he also has a successful TikTok account called A Couple Things to Do, which has recently boomed and gained over 168,000 followers. Michelle teaches CIMs influencer strategy course. And she's an experienced senior marketer. She's a digital agency founder and is a five times published author in the digital marketing and social media arenas. Michelle, Henry, how you two today?

 

Henry Purchase  01:14

Hi Ben

 

Michelle Carvill  01:14

Hi Ben, fabulous. Looking forward to this.

 

Ben Walker  01:17

Oh, me too. It's great to have you back. Michelle, and to introduce you for the first time Henry I'm interested to hear about some of your experiences of working with influencers the good and the bad.

 

Henry Purchase  01:28

Really happy to be here thanks for- thanks for having me guys.

 

Ben Walker  01:31

You Henry have worked a lot with influencers on social media in your career so far, have you not?

 

Henry Purchase  01:39

So before found in Rough Water Media, I worked with- helped a friend run a marketing agency called Social 90, and that was sort of a full service Social Media Marketing Agency. And we've worked a lot of influences, we began primarily working with rugby players, because myself and the founder were rugby players, and so we worked with Alex Cuthbert, British and Irish lion, a few bath rugby players, and then also influencers such as Toby Huntington Whiteley. And I've sort of seen the good, the bad and the ugly. And now I've started my own agency that sort of coincided, just switching on the other side to, to run in a Tik Tok and travel blog with my girlfriend.

 

Ben Walker  02:18

You say the good, the bad, and the ugly that as a journalist makes me lean towards the bad and the ugly. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've found in that side of the influencer world?

 

Henry Purchase  02:30

Yeah, I think it's fair to say, you know, I guess with any industry, any role, you're always gonna get good and bad actors, people that are good at their job, bad at their job, and influencers are no different. Particularly because I think as well influencers, they have got there through being able to grow an audience through creating amazing content, maybe there's an element of their life that people are drawn to, they don't necessarily have to be good at business, good at organisation, good at communication, which is why I've had it quite a few times where you're sending six or seven chaser emails to get a post posted, to get paid, there's all sorts of stuff that I've seen. and also fake followers that you can get bought as well, that I'm sure we're gonna talk about a little bit later. But the main thing is just communication that I found personally that's been quite challenging because influencers maybe you know, they're spread quite thin, they're building a social account, they're working across brand deals, and then you're sort of there in the middle, trying to manage it all, yeah it can be quite challenging at times.

 

Ben Walker  03:30

Presumably there are, Michelle, people who fall between the two stores, they're good at influencing, but they're a bit poor at the admin. What do you do as an influencer manager to handle that?

 

Michelle Carvill  03:40

Social media has changed what influencing means, because relationship marketing, influencer marketing, partnership, marketing has been around forever and ever, you know, Oh, you do something for me to help me get into, in front of this audience, and I'll do something for you. So this idea of, of kind of collaborating with somebody so that they can introduce you to others is not a new thing. But social media, of course, has enabled lots of individuals to be entertaining, to be creative, to be educational, and to create content that has grown, as Henry said, you know, an audience. And of course, brands and organisations want to kind of tap into that, because it's becoming more expensive and more challenging to get in front of, of the relevant audiences. So the way of doing that is to go through these influencers, and some influencers don't even know they're influences. You know, some of it have kind of cottoned on and said, okay, look at me, I've got the media pack, I've, I've got all of this going, but many influencers don't even know that they're influencers.

 

Ben Walker  04:46

That's bizarre though isn't it, because the stereotype of influencers is that they're all the big I am they're fully aware they've got it and they know it. And you're saying actually, there's a lot of stealth influencers who are influential Henry, but don't realise it?

 

Henry Purchase  05:02

Well, I guess it's, you know, you can have micro-influencers that may just have a few thousand followers, that may, their followers are a real specific demographic, whether that be potentially a certain area, you know, for example, you could have a local football player who's got a few thousand followers, and may be perfect for a local business to work with, because his followers are all in that he or she's followers are all in that local area. You know, people may not call that person an influencer, but just by nature, that they can influence people's decision through the life that they live and the content that they share, makes them sort of in the category that businesses may be interested to work with them.

 

Michelle Carvill  05:42

Yeah, and I would say that, for those organisations that struggle to think about budgets for getting in, you know, into a relationship with a, with a kind of larger than, you know, a Kendall Jenner size kind of influencer, that, you know, oh, it's gonna cost me a million pounds or whatever, to engage with that person. What brands are doing, and I have to say, large brands are actually doing this as well.

 

Henry Purchase  06:07

Yeah.

 

Michelle Carvill  06:07

There's, there's examples of people like Adidas now working with kind of street footballers, you know, bringing these micro influencers together to actually create a bigger audience. And, and I've actually witnessed it myself in, in the beauty kind of sector, where you see a lot of individual micro influencers that may individually have 17 to maybe 30,000 followers, yet, you see brands jumping in and working with maybe 10 of them. And so therefore, they are getting the expansion of reach, but they're getting it through a very trusted relationship with these individual micro influencers. Because, you know, there's a lot of benchmarking, and lots of research and lots of statistics that would tell you that actually, people that have a really big following, often aren't trusted. Whereas the most trusted, relevant influencers are those with a much smaller following. So where they have 10 to 20,000 followers. So you can see that it actually makes sense for brands and organisations to be thinking about building relationships with a number of these micro influencers, to build that portfolio, so they can extend that reach.

 

Ben Walker  07:21

But that's quite hard to do though isn't it Michelle? If you look at the stereotypical TikTok feed or Instagram feed, first thing you look at is how many followers has this person got. And to some degree, rightly or wrongly, that may give you a feeling of authenticity. But what you're saying is that that can be a bit of a mirage, that actually, large followerships don't necessarily translate into large amounts of influence into large amounts of business gain. Sometimes the smaller influencers, as you say to Henry, the micro influencers have much more punch, much more impact. How then if you can't just use the followership number, do you analyse the good from the bad?

 

Henry Purchase  07:56

So one of the things that you need to look at is engagement rates, it's essentially just what percentage of the audience is engaging with their social media content, you can use a tool such as Modash, that I believe it's free, you can put in the Instagram handle, and it will give you an engagement score, really you want to have between two to three or above percent engagement. If it's less than that, let's say for example, you see someone's got 100,000 followers, and they've got a couple of 100 likes. That's where you start to get a little bit fishy, where about how have they got that many followers? And therefore, you know, as a company, you may pay more to work with that influencer, but actually the reach that you get i.e the amount of people that see the content that's shared, may not be as high and engagement won't be as high as if you worked with someone that's got a more loyal following that may have much less followers.

 

Ben Walker  08:48

So Michelle if you can get through all of these traps, you- don't be just bowled over by the headline number, do as Henry says, look for engagement and proof of engagement.

 

Michelle Carvill  08:57

It's critical yep.

 

Ben Walker  08:59

Is it still possible to get it wrong? Is it still possible to get someone who's got all the credentials, you're a big brand, you've hired someone who's got all the credentials, they seem like the right fit, and it goes wrong, it backfires.

 

Michelle Carvill  09:10

We need to understand what we mean by getting it wrong. As Henry said, there's lots of tools and resources out there to help you validate that the people are saying what they do is what they actually do. And and that engagement piece is, in my view, way more important than the reach and the follower numbers because you really want to understand the kind of relationship and the level of engagement because it's pointless having hundreds of 1000s of followers if nobody's reacting and nobody's engaging. So engagement is actually a measure of that your content lands, that you've got genuinely engaged followers and you know, that is what brands and organisations really want to tap into. It's not just a vanity game about numbers, it's got to be about the return on investment. You know, I think you can get to that bit no problem, you know that that should be a pretty much a standard process to be able to know what you're looking for and make sure you're looking at the right things.  I think where it goes wrong and where I've seen things backfire is then that the person that you're dealing with isn't necessarily, like I say, clued up as to what is expected from this relationship as an influencer. And I think if you go into those relationships with somebody who may be a micro influencer, who may be really great at just keeping those people engaged, but now you want them to actually do things slightly differently, or you want them to become part of a programme or a campaign, where I've seen things go wrong is where there is an assumption that because that influencer is influential with what they do in their kind of day to day lives and getting on and engaging with these audiences, that they're going to be naturally aware of what they need to do to make your campaign a success. And I've seen it where we've been brought in to say, you know, oh, you know, this campaign didn't go so well what can we maybe do next time? And we've looked at these campaigns and say, well, what didn't go so well? And we're saying, so hang on, where's the brief to the influencer? Where's the project timeline? Where's the content requirements that you were expecting this influencer to do? Where's the frequency rates that you're expecting the influencer to post? You know, where's the detail? And there needs to be a process in place, and often there isn't. There is an assumption that the influencer knows what to do.

 

Ben Walker  11:29

That's interesting, isn't it? Henry you can't just wheel in a professional influencer, sit he or she there and tell them to get on with it, and hope for the best. You need to be proactive as a marketing manager and as a commisioning marketing manager. For it to work.

 

Henry Purchase  11:44

You've got to have really clearly outlined success metrics. So what are the numbers that you want to see change? So for example, you might be a hotel, obviously, what you want is more bookings, that comes through more website visits, that comes through more social media profile visits. But if you're working with an influencer, and you don't know what the end result is, how are you meant to measure towards that and how are you meant to determine whether the investment that you put in has given you a positive ROI or not? I've seen it recently, on the other side, we're working with a couple of brands, the contracts I've seen so far, I've actually been really impressed with that I've received from brands really clear what they expect from us. And actually, we haven't had to do any thinking it's just, we know exactly what we've got to do when we're there and the rest of the time, we can just enjoy the experiences that we're being given.

 

Ben Walker  12:31

 What are the sort of best and worst experiences that you've had Henry with influencres?

 

Henry Purchase  12:36

In terms of the bad examples, we agreed to do five stories and two feed posts, within I believe it was four weeks, and essentially, I think 25% of the posts were done at the end of the month. And the company that we were working with, managing the influencer, we were working with a third party was chasing us. We didn't get a reply from the influencer for two weeks. The funny thing was, we were managing their Instagram and we could see that they were DMing people, they were messaging people personally, yet they weren't replying to our calls, WhatsApps, emails, but we could see that they're replying to people on their Instagram. So that was probably the worst example. It's a bit bit frustrating.

 

Ben Walker  13:16

But do the normal rules of business not apply to some influencers, Michelle Carvill?

 

Michelle Carvill  13:19

Well, they're not business people you know, some of them. My daughter is 16 and she's blown up on TikTok, and is not a business person, you know, she's just really good at content and has got a great following. She wouldn't necessarily understand what that professional relationship needs to look like. Because she's just doing her thing on TikTok and you know, wow if somebody's going to pay her and send her stuff to do that, isn't that great? So, again, it's contextual, it's about the education, it's about building relationships. It's about setting expectations, and not setting expectations that are enforced but actually working with your influencer, you know, seeing this as a partnership seeing this as a relationship. They they understand the audience, they understand the content way better than the brand or the organisation so you know, it's for organisations to be listening to the influencer, but it's also for the influencer to be listening to what the expectations are of the brand and the organisation from a professional perspective as well.

 

Ben Walker  14:20

This is fascinating so your daughter, has sort of foremost fallen into being an influencer as you're saying, she must have expertise in some area.

 

Michelle Carvill  14:29

I don't know if it's expertise but I suppose she's got a real passion for kind of special effects makeup and and she is an artist, you know, she's very artistic. And so she does all these kinds of transformations of one look through to another look and various other bits and pieces. And I suppose people like that, you know, and she knows not to do it for too long or how it needs to- you know, she's she's kind of picked up over the months what works and what doesn't work and has got this following. And she says it's so good because there's no hate on this. There's no negative stuff. It's all really positive and creative. So yes, she, she loves what she's doing. And of course, because she's been getting literally millions of views on videos, then she will start to set alarm bells going with the influencer agencies who have now been contacting her over the past few months to say, can you do this? Could you do this? Could you do that? But what's interesting is she has pushed back where they have said can we do this? Can you do that? Can you do that? She's like, you know what, I can't do that frequency, because that wouldn't work with the audience. And no I can't put those kinds of trends over the top, because I don't do that. And it would look weird with my audience. And so, you know, they've had to kind of have these negotiations to the extent that at one point, she said, you know, what, I don't think it's gonna work. I don't think I'm the right influencer for you. And they've said, you know, what, we like what you're doing, we like what you stand for, we'll go with what you're doing, and we'll look at it, you know, and then they've even tested things where she said, I'll do it your way, and let's see what happens. And, and then she'll say to you, I can tell you now it's gonna go wrong. And I can tell you how many followers and how many views we're gonna get on this. And then she said that I can tell you how many followers and how many views we're gonna get on my take of this. And of course, when they see the difference, they can trust what's going on. So I think it's a partnership. You know, it's learning from one another.

 

Ben Walker  16:23

It is a partnership its' a fascinating example of someone who's gone in she's got a skill, she's got a passion for special effects makeup, and has then been picked up as an influencer for special effects makeup, not a business person, 16 year old girl, but actually is acting as a consultant rather than a supplier to her clients, and a client's best placed to listen to her. But Henry Purchase, do you think that big brands and big companies are aware that the relationship does have to be as Michelle puts it, a partnership and not a client-supply relationship if it is work properly?

 

Henry Purchase  16:56

There are the big brands that are aware of it and work more, but I would say it's on the influencer side, to be aware that if they want to charge the most for their services, if they want to be known as an influencer, that can provide the best service and the best return, they do have to be a consultant, they know their audience better than anyone. So if they're being told how to get engagement, and work with their audience by a business who, realistically, most of these businesses, they don't know how to build a brand. They're there, because they've been there for a long time they're a big business, but in terms of reaching this new demographic, they're not experts in it. So you, you have to as an influencer, be a consultant, and look at it on both sides and figure out what's going to work.

 

Ben Walker  17:37

There are so many influences, fake and fabulous, and everything in between out there. If you're a brand going out for a marketing partner going out, where do you start?

 

Michelle Carvill  17:48

Well, I think there are lots of different ways of starting, I mean, you're either gonna go to an agency, you know, somewhere like Henry is working with, and I mean, there's been an explosion of influencer agencies since 2016 we've seen like a hockey stick trajectory about how this industry has grown. And so- and so there are 1000s I mean, if not millions of influencer agencies that as a brand, as an organisation, you could go to one of these and say, this is my brief duh duh duh... find me the people, which is exactly what has happened to my daughter's situation, they are out there scouting and looking for the next person who's going to blow up and, and who's doing what, and they are out there finding these people, and many influencers, or these people who don't really see themselves as influencers, but would like to be an influencer can register themselves onto these platforms as well. So you know, so you've got people registering, and you've got brands kind of looking, and it's almost like this blind date situation, let's you know, dating app, let's match them up. So there's that kind of process. But sometimes it's not just about I want more followers or more bookings, sometimes it's a case of do you know what we need some content, because we've got a big content gap here. And we don't have anybody explaining how this works from, you know, A to B. So we need somebody to kind of create the content for us. So therefore, depending on what the objective of the brief is, you're looking for different things. You're either looking for people that can convert really well, you're looking for people that can create really the type of content on the platforms, you know, so if it's like, oh, we need somebody who's really good at video, oh, we need somebody that's really thought leadership focused. It will all be very contextual, based on what it is you're looking for. So in our perspective, we're tracking this we're looking for this actively and then we are approaching people directly and and saying this is the brief, are you interested? And building these relationships with with people and then bringing them on board to become part of the project. That is what's really paid off we built some brilliant relationships. And of course, these relationships aren't just one hit wonders, these are things where we're saying, okay, we're going to do this campaign in quarter one, in quarter four we're going to do a different campaign with you in 2022.

 

Henry Purchase  20:04

It grows over time.

 

Michelle Carvill  20:05

Absolutely. In 2023, we want to run this campaign with you. So you know, it becomes a partnership that is a business partnership that may go on for years and years.

 

Ben Walker  20:16

Great influencers can become a great part of a great business.

 

Michelle Carvill  20:19

Well, they're ambassadors yeah.

 

Henry Purchase  20:20

If it's not broken, don't fix it.

 

Michelle Carvill  20:22

Yeah.

 

Henry Purchase  20:23

You know, as a business grows, influencers will grow and especially as the platform's evolve as well, TikTok's really the massive one at the moment for organic reach. But there'll be a new one in the future, you know, these things sort of evolve. It used to be Facebook, it used to be Instagram, these are slowly declining. Instagram has been brought up recently with how much they're pushing reels, but things ebb and flow. And if you as a business are able to evolve, as with the influencer, then it can be beneficial on both sides.

 

Ben Walker  20:53

Have you got examples of where you've seen a step change in the performance of a business, either on the content side either in terms of profile thought leadership, or in terms of the commercials by the introduction of a great influencer?

 

Michelle Carvill  21:07

Yes, absolutely. I mean, there's not many of our clients that work with the influencer space. But for those that do, where it naturally fits, yes, one of the main campaigns recently was about content. So they had some significant content gaps that needed to be addressed and so they had all the content gaps addressed. But of course, as a byproduct of that, that also creates awareness, and that also drove more interest, which also drove more conversion, which then also drives commercial impact. And they found that their influencer programme was way more effective from a performance perspective than their paid search. If you get it right commercially, on every front from a content, you know, it all has that kind of domino effect. If you're getting the right content, you're gonna get more reach if you're building that trust and relationship, not only with the influencer, but with their audience. Because if you think of those all those influencers as trusted friends, people trust those trusted friends, they will there it's almost like a friend referring and saying, hey, go and do it this way and of course, it worked. And so it drove more leads, and fundamentally more conversion and more commercial impact.

 

Henry Purchase  22:21

I've got quite a good example as well, a client I'm working with at the moment called Pulseroll they do massage guns, and they sponsor in the Premier League football clubs, Leicester Tigers, England Rugby League, and this is an example where influencers by itself isn't the thing that's driving forward their business, but influencers in synergy with the other marketing channels, is what is making them a success. So because they've got all the content from the footballers, from the rugby players from the athletes using their products, they're they're able to use that UGC, that user generated content with influencers alongside their paid campaigns, which improves their ROI's and improves all their social media marketing because people want to see that sort of content. So that as a whole has really managed to, to drive their business forward.

 

Michelle Carvill  23:12

It's so interconnected. It's not a kind of lone channel, you know, when it comes to digital, everything and the way that we consume it's a it's a wriggly path isn't it?

 

Henry Purchase  23:22

It's content.

 

Michelle Carvill  23:22

Yeah, it's not, it's not linear.

 

Ben Walker  23:25

If you find the right person, if you get the right brief, and you're able to interconnect it into your business and integrate into your business, it can clearly be a hugely, hugely powerful tool for marketers, I mean, you can see why influencers have boomed and why people do it. But let me just quote you these statistics here that shows that not everybody is an expert, as you two at getting it right. This is from Hype Auditors research, only 62% of Instagram followers in the UK are real users. According to this research, a whole quarter of UK influencers have more than 30% inauthentic comments. This is the real killer it actually warns this report that fake influencers and fake engagement is costing advertisers 600 million pounds globally every year. So you two sort of probably expert at finding and utilising influencers, but it seems a lot of the advertising industry a lot of the marketing industry is not expert.

 

Michelle Carvill  24:24

Yeah. And I would say it's a bit lazy I think, you know, not to now- I mean I see these reports, and I read these reports but I do think that there is enough, there are enough of the other tools to kind of weed that out. You know, Henry's absolutely right, you could do that. But really, as a brand, if you're going to be investing serious investment time, resource, money into- you want to check these relationships out, right, it's got to be you've got to you wouldn't just go to anyone that and say oh, we just want to scale this and get this out to anybody. And if you're doing that, then you may get your fingers burnt and in some cases I think you deserve to because it's, it's pretty lazy. So do the work, check them out, that's not building a relationship, you know, that's just easy, that's just almost like, oh, get somebody else to do it for me, we're not really bothered but we're gonna kick and scream if we get it wrong you know. So actually either work with your agency, or really do the due diligence yourself, because there are no excuses now, not really to be checking out who it is you're working for checking their engagement, making sure that they resonate, making sure that they're relevant. And also, you know, if somebody's coming to you and knocking on your door and saying hey I've got 100,000 followers, I mean, I would immediately be a bit concerned about that, that would set off alarm bells for me go out and find who is relevant for you by doing the due diligence, the research and or working with a really reputable agency that's gonna do that for you. I think trying to shortcut this is problematic.

 

Henry Purchase  24:24

This, this isn't an instruction of how to do it but in 10 minutes after this podcast, I could go on to the internet, buy 100,000 followers, turn off the like counts on my Instagram so you can't see how many likes I'm getting anyway, so if you went onto my social media, you couldn't say, oh, Henry's got 100,000 followers, but he's getting 100 likes. And then I can approach brands as an influencer with 100,000 followers, the brand can't see on the surface that those are fake. I could also not even do that, I could purchase likes, I can purchase comments all within 10 minutes. Now that isn't an instruction to influencers if they want to boost their numbers, what that is is a warning to businesses that there are bad actors out there and they need to do the homework, they need to do the research to make sure that they're going to get the return that their business needs. Because otherwise, what can happen? And Michelle, I'm sure you've seen this a lot, people get turned off from working with marketers because they see the bad examples when actually it could be a game changer for their business. I particularly see it with ecom businesses on TikTok at the moment, if you find the right influencers, the user generated content can make a real difference. You shouldn't be put off because there's bad actors, because there are ways to sieve them out.  I'd say a caveat to that Michelle, I would say that there are also- because for example, for for our travel account, we'll do we do the outreach ourselves.

 

Michelle Carvill  27:20

Yeah.

 

Henry Purchase  27:21

So we can't- so if an influencer does contact you, there are ways to- make sure you ask for a brand pack.

 

Michelle Carvill  27:26

Yep.

 

Henry Purchase  27:26

So we have sort of a brand package where it will show screenshots of our demographics, it will show screenshots from the analytics on Instagram, TikTok, Google Analytics. So if you are a brand and you do get outreached, you know, be inquisitive, ask for that information ask for the screenshots because an influencer should provide that if they don't, don't work with them, because you know, what they're trying to hide?

 

Michelle Carvill  27:52

Yeah.

 

Ben Walker  27:52

The 600 million pound loss globally suggests that people are a bit lazy, ie they're lacking application, or they are inexpert, they're lacking knowledge, both of those two things can be rectified, if you know how to manage this space. So I'm going to put you two on the spot I want three top tips for being a good commissioner of influencers.

 

Henry Purchase  28:15

So I'd say first of all, the point that I just touched on, always, always ask for screenshots. Screenshots can be faked, but you want to be able to see it from the horse's mouth, see the data from the platforms that you are ultimately going to share across. So get screenshots of their TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Google Analytics, whatever platform it is get screenshots of it. I'd say the second thing is do your research on the platforms that you're looking to spread yourself across. So let's say for example, you're a gym, start off by putting hashtag gym into Instagram, it may sound basic, but that is going to put right at the top the top people that are sharing across that niche. And then the third one, look to build a relationship. Don't look for a one off thing because sometimes these one off things don't work. It doesn't mean they're the wrong influencer for your business, things take time things snowball and things take a while to get right.

 

Michelle Carvill  29:07

Yeah.

 

Ben Walker  29:07

Michelle, your top tips or top three resources, whichever you'd prefer?

 

Michelle Carvill  29:10

Yeah, well, I would I would definitely start with the build the relationship so we're just reiterating you know what what Henry said, it is it see it as a relationship don't see it as that one hit wonder, you know, see them as trusted friends who can you build a trusted friendship with? Because that's the relationship you want them to have with their audience and your audience. The other thing I would say is the devil is in the detail, the brief, the objective, make sure it is absolutely spelled out what it is that you expect of that partnership, of that relationship when you want it, how you're going to expect it, lines of communication, all of that stuff clear and really upfront about that because if I've seen things fall off and go wrong, I've often asked well, where's the brief? Where's that? It's all a bit higgledy piccledy and sometimes you are dealing with 16 year olds that may not have that kind of professional acumen. So, you know, have the brief, have the detail. And the final other thing I would say is, is this listening piece, you know, listening in and doing the research, as Henry said, finding out making sure that you are working with the right people, that they are experts on that channel so listening in from that perspective, but also listening in to what the influencer is feeding back to you as well, that you know, as that brand, it is a partnership. And so listen to what they've got to say, because they know these channels, they know what's going to work, they know these audiences better than the brands and organisations that are trying to get into that space. So you know, it may feel a bit difficult for brand manager at Adidas to be listening to a 16 year old saying, well, actually, it's not gonna work that way. You know, you've got no marketing experience 16 year old but I've been in this business for 30 years, actually, they know this platform. So open your minds, and listen.

 

Ben Walker  29:19

Open your minds and listen, make sure that brief is tight and on the money and you both said, make sure you build the ongoing relationship. The other thing I will add here is there is help out there, you know, it is a bit of a minefield, let's be honest, it is a bit of a minefield, getting this right, Henry, you have penned an article on CIM's content of quite recently about how to work with influencers if you're a small business. So there is resources out there, go and have a look on CIM's content for Henry's piece I do commend it to you. Are there any other resources you'd like to plug quickly as we come to the end of our time?

 

Michelle Carvill  31:37

A couple of things I share with delegates on when we're training on the influencer strategy course is there's the influencer marketing benchmark report that comes out every year, it has got useful stats and data and insights about what's happening across the platforms, I actually find that quite useful for some of the insights if you're building a business case about how big this is, or what the opportunity is, and you need data and insights, I think that's quite useful, I think for case studies, and what people are doing and creativity and what's working and how can because I mean, influencers is so many things, you know, there are so many different types of influencers, influencers could be your own customers, for goodness sake, you know, who just love your product, and you're going to work with them, and they're going to become ambassadors. So, you know, it could be that they're a subject matter expert in your business, it could be that they're an academic or a thought leader, so they can be lots of different things that influencers are. So what I like to look at is the influencer marketing awards so looking back at who's won, what won, what won the best this award, what when the best use of this award, I think that can be really quite useful for brands and organisations of all different sizes and sectors to just kind of pick up some ideas and think oooo that was quite, you know, we could be thinking about doing that, that's quite interesting. So I think, look at what others are doing. Look at what has won awards, and is a winning formula and and just get some ideas around that. So I think that can be quite useful The Influencer Marketing Awards.com.

 

Henry Purchase  33:08

Look at what your 16 year old daughter or son is doing.

 

Michelle Carvill  33:11

Oh yeah.

 

Henry Purchase  33:11

Because that is the feet on the ground. People were laughing at TikTok six, six months ago, two years ago saying it's just for kids. The fastest growing demographic now on TikTok is in the sort of 35 to 50 year old range. So yeah it may start off with your 16,10 year old wherever it is-

 

Michelle Carvill  33:29

They always do.

 

Henry Purchase  33:30

-child, dancing videos, whatever it is, but it soon trickles up. So, you know, look what they're using. And don't be surprised if in a few years, you find yourself you're on there, too.

 

Michelle Carvill  33:41

I mean, my husband is in his late 50s and is the kind of insights and things that he just loves listening to. So where did you get that TikTok? TikTok, he's always sharing TikTok videos to me about somebody that's- thought leadership pieces, but humorous and funny and short and punchy, and just brilliant, you know, super creative. So I validate that that Henry is right, you know, so so it's not just about the kids.

 

Ben Walker  34:04

Don't dismiss these news platforms of kids because they'll come and catch you up and they'll suddenly take over the world. Michelle, and Henry, thanks very much for your time and insights today. There have been some fantastic insights today which I'm sure our audience will relish. Thank you again for joining us on the show. And I hope to invite you back very soon. Thank you very much indeed.

 

Michelle Carvill  34:24

My pleasure thank you.

 

Henry Purchase  34:25

Cheers Ben.

 

Sophie Peterson  34:27

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