With distrust in traditional marketing tactics, it has caused brands to move away from in-your-face advertising. Not only that, we have seen a way a change in the way people shop and make decisions. People trust recommendations from their peers, family members, or their favourite influencer over a companies website any day. This is where we are seeing the true power of influence and why it is so vital for brands to collaborate with the right people. Finding and nurturing the ones that love you and want to create a social buzz around your brand, will ultimately determine how your brand is perceived to consumers.
Modern-day consumers are savvy enough to know what influencer marketing is, and when their favourite influencer or celebrity is probably pocketing from mentioning a product on their social media. And, with the rigorous governance that has been implemented in influencer marketing, greater scrutiny has been put on properly disclosing paid partnerships. As a result, consumers now know when they are seeing unnatural or superficial partnerships, so are unlikely to buy into what a brand is offering. Brands need to build collaborations that bring added value and establish a genuine affinity between a brand and advocate to resonate more with digitally-savvy consumers.
70% of influencers find that brands are more interested in long-term collaborations rather than just paying for promotion
The Value of Authenticity
More and more brands are seeing that paying an influencer to endorse a brand which they don’t believe in or clearly won’t use, is showing a huge lack of authenticity to consumers. As a result, the pressure is on to prove validity to social audiences, which can only be achieved with transparency, accountability and creativity. Having the right voices telling the right stories can change how people think about a brand, as well as drive them to purchase and then advocate to others. Whereas, getting the wrong partnerships with the wrong influencers can cause damaging credibility to a brands image.
So what can authenticity bring to your influencer marketing campaign?
72% of influencers believe that advocacy/brand ambassador campaigns generate better results
What Brands Usually Pay Influencers Per Post
Paid sponsorship is a great way of driving quality traffic and leads. However, the cost of paying an influencer per post can mean that the return on your investment is lower.
Due to the ASA regulations, it is a requirement for influencers to put #AD on their content. Therefore, consumers are now not buying into the products they know influencers are paid to talk about. The loss of trust in paid posts means consumers are now demanding more organic and genuine content. As a result, brands have seen a decrease in organic reach on paid social sites.
To understand the true value of collaborating with brand lovers, we need to look at how much it costs a brand to work with an influencer on a paid campaign. The amount influencers earn depends on different factors, such as which platform they are on, how many followers they have, and what their engagement rate is. We’ll look at Instagram according to the type of influencer to give an idea of what the average payment is per post.
| Micro | Mid-tier | Macro |
| $100 - 500 per post | $500 - 5,000 per post | $5,000 - 10,000 per post |
As we can see from the data above, there is greater value for brands in working with the people who love their brand, where no money is exchanged, over paying an influencer to post a singular piece of content. Not only does this eliminate the large influencer costs, but this can generate a higher ROI and EMV, lower cost per engagement, and more genuine content that can be repurposed across their own channels.
Impact of Advocacy
Room Unlocked has seen multiple successful campaigns where brands have worked collaboratively with talent that have generated both quality and high volumes of content, as well as high ROI and EMV.
Yutaka
Yutaka used Room Unlocked to elevate their offering and generate brand awareness and reach. The campaign was extremely successful with brand advocates creating multiple pieces of engaging content. Yutaka benefitted from a high return as a result of this success.
16 Brand Advocates 66 Pieces of Content £10.7K Earned Media Value
Olay
Olay gifted our member's exclusive products from their new Olay cleanse range. The campaign results were highly successful as advocates created multiple pieces of content of them using the product range at home. Authentic and creative content was created in the form of Instagram Stories, posts, and Reels. The use of different types of content allowed the campaign to more dynamic and creative, and allow it to reach a wider audience.
40 Brand Advocates 130 Pieces of Content £24K Earned Media Value
Want to find out more on how we can help you collaborate with brand lovers? Then download the full report below to see how brands have used Room Unlocked to create authentic partnerships to successfully reach their campaign goals.
