Anyone can become an influencer today. Of course, it’s not easy to become popular overnight, but in recent years there has been a real democratisation of influencer marketing, which started with blogs and social networks, but only consolidated after the rise of TikTok, says Cristiana Pană, Head of Strategy at Minio Studio.

Influencer marketing is one of the most dynamic industries and the brands need to keep up. Choosing the right influencers is increasingly difficult and requires time and constant monitoring of the local landscape, Cristiana believes. Things sometimes change in just a few months and recipes need to be changed all the time.

However, we are talking about an industry based on people and credibility, so trust is the most important factor in the relationship with the influencer, but also in their relationship with the audience. We invite you to read on with trust for more valuable lessons shared by Cristiana.

How we define an influencer

Defining what an influencer is now is like trying to define a deity of the current culture. To me, an influencer is anyone who has managed to gather a consistent community around a niche topic for which it is relevant and for which they manage to generate behavioral impact when creating content.

However, it is important for brands to choose the right person to partner with.

Nowadays, since the rise of social media, anyone can become a content creator and therefore an online influencer. This is as beneficial as it has democratised content creation to anyone who can gather a community around their content, as it is dangerous.

The Romanian influencer community

If, in general, Romania is always slightly behind trends or movements in foreign markets, in terms of influencers, I think we are pretty much in line. I think the influencer panel is complete and functional. Even social ads platforms have emerged that automatically integrate content created by influencers directly into ads or live stream shopping platforms.

So we have a choice, we also have built-in tools for analyzing influencer interests and performance or even platforms for content creators from ordinary people.

Role of influencers in brand promotion

I believe that the panel is currently complete in Romania – both in terms of influencer typologies and brand collaborations. We are slowly, slowly starting to recover from the pandemic depression and exploring more in consumer experiences. All campaigns now have an influencer marketing component. I can say that influencers are a channel of their own in communication, just like TV or OOH.

While we have a lot to choose from, we run into three common bottlenecks when working with influencers:

1. The paradox of choice – it’s getting more and more difficult to get quality curation right for brands, in choosing the right influencers in a campaign.
2. Brands’ inflexibility in pairings – despite the democratisation of content creation and influencers by ordinary people, brands still choose to go with established influencer mix recipes.
3. Difficulty keeping up – curating quality influencers requires dedicating even more time to keeping track of all the newly launched accounts and their relevance to the brands you work with.

Influencer selection

It is essential to choose well who, how and why you communicate. Because we’re so rigorous about this, we’ve invested quite a bit in developing a dedicated reputation team to provide integrated services across the image space – from influencer marketing, to PR, to self-reputation. We are always guided by a few key elements of working with influencers: how clean the image is, relevance, impact and authenticity of the association.

Credibility and audience. Which one does it matter?

I think you can’t afford to be caught off guard by consumers at the moment. Everything is happening real time and it’s spreading fast online, and influencers are the first port of call. Which means that we, as an agency, need to be constantly up to date with the tools, trends, but also the image of the people we recommend. Image is the most fragile thing you can work with. Today you’re fine, tomorrow you make a mistake that spreads faster than any good thing you’ve done before.

Credibility, but also how clean the influencer’s image is, basically forms the business card anyone should check before starting a collaboration. And that frequently. If you collaborated 6 months ago with someone, it doesn’t mean their image is still current. You need to check constantly, stay connected.

An influencer’s audience/community is also important in selection. Because without it, the influencer would just be a nice idea that you want to plaster on your campaign because you heard it’s trending. Influencer selection always starts from the goal – what is the community you want to reach (what is it made up of, who do they follow online)? Only then do you ask yourself – X has a clean image online, is it natural to make that association for my brand? What impact would it have if you used X’s community or Y’s community for your brand message?

Collaborating with influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the most dynamic industries right now.

Let’s look back a bit and remember that influencer marketing emerged many years ago, when TV commercials needed a pop culture endorsement to get more traction with the audience. That’s how the first influencers were born – from red Santa Claus for Coca Cola, to Hollywood stars, to people from famous sitcoms, to world-class athletes, to scientists and even politicians. All of these people suddenly became an “approved by me” stamp for whatever they got to communicate to their followers – shows, products, services.

What first revolutionised influencer marketing was the advent of blogs and social media. That was one of the main turning points that changed the way we currently define an influencer. Brands realised they could reach and interact faster, cheaper and more impactfully through influencer channels.

However, the full democratisation of influencing only happened with the launch and popularisation of the TikTok network, which has seen a good spike in growth especially in the context of the pandemic and the lockdown. TikTok has become this hub of snackable video content that is both entertaining and informative. The platform allows all users to create and share videos of up to 3 minutes, some as long as 10 minutes, with features such as filters, effects and soundtracks.

Influencers are now any content creator who has content relevant to their community. Basically, social influencing has become so democratised that now anyone with access to electricity and the Internet can become an influencer overnight (see Khaby Lame who also made the New York Times with his success on TikTok). Of course, doing this is no simple feat.

What’s more, the desire and appetite for authentic content has led brands to collaborate directly with consumers. These regular content creators are promoting products and services – from trending challenges, to dances, to product reviews. Content creators use their creativity to present brands in a way that feels authentic and engaging.

Influencer campaigns

We often integrate influencers into campaign mixes precisely because they beautifully close communications with consumers, drive conversations forward and make the natural connection between online and offline, and vice versa. We try to build long-term partnerships, especially where the brand has initiatives that extend their goals beyond a one-off project.

Recent collaborations include the donation campaign for Hill’s Pet Nutrition, where influencers went to animal shelters and created content to boost food donations online. It’s a long-standing campaign, now in its third year, consumers are looking forward to it year after year.

Another impactful campaign was the launch of SOCAR’s new communication platform – Your Project Engine, where we had a series of collaborations with relevant influencers from an audience perspective. The results were even more spectacular as we assessed that the engagement rate on the pages of the selected influencers was 3 times higher during the campaign period than the usual engagement on their pages. That’s what I think it means to choose the right influencer for the campaign.

We are currently working on special projects with influencers for Ciuc Radler, Mondelez, JDE and others. Many of the summer campaigns integrate influencers into the communication mix precisely because of the mobility of the channel in relation to consumers.

I invite you to discover more of our collaborations here.

Challenges

As long as you work with people, unpredictability and delicate situations are the order of the day. The most challenging situations arise most often in implementation. That’s because life happens and you’re likely to run into personal issues, lack of Internet or signal, other technical problems, bad tags or even an image crisis right when you’re in the spotlight with that collaboration.

The most difficult situations occur when the agency does not coordinate the direct relationship with the influencers. In such situations various communication slips appear that can affect a project that was planned months in advance.

Secret of success

Successful collaboration can take place even in spite of problems, as long as there is goodwill, attention and a desire to do things right. The best thing you can do before starting any collaboration, apart from research of course, is to initiate a transparent and assertive communication channel with the influencers you will be collaborating with. Influencer marketing is first and foremost about trust.

It’s a business that leverages the image, and therefore the trust that people have in the person. So a relationship based on trust can only be developed or maintained by paying the same currency – trust in collaboration, that all information is accurate and complete, that we are looking out for your common interests.

Lessons and surprises

From all the collaborations so far I like to think that I have learned the importance of developing the right relationships.

I’ve been fascinated by human nature since I was a child, how we develop relationships, how we trust each other in order to collaborate and move forward. We are a social animal and this has helped us to be the most developed species on earth. Without the influence we have in groups, we would be isolated and live only on what we give ourselves.

We all go on recommendations, read reviews, fondly follow people we trust because we genuinely feel it will help us get better. If you break that circle of trust, it all falls apart. Studies show that our happiness isn’t just based on the security of tomorrow, or even our health, but on the quality of the relationships we develop and maintain throughout our lives. This shows how important trust and the relationships you develop in your campaigns are – influencer marketing is a relationship-based industry.

Influencer marketing trends

There are many things that have taken wing around us. Among the most interesting to me are product development collaborations between influencers and brands, but also live shopping streaming and inclusivity of influencer selection.

I can’t fail to mention the expansion of brand collaborations with micro-influencers and content creators. TikTok has revolutionized the way we relate to authentic influencer content, but also the representation of influence in communities of everyday people.

I don’t have trends that I hope will go away. I think trends come from a real need that a culture has at a moment in time to manifest itself in a particular way. I don’t think we should shy away from it or point fingers at it. People will want to display what they feel represents them.

Responsibility

I think online allows us to create unrealistic characters and standards based, not always, on reality or correct values. Communities can very quickly turn into real moral courts or hate spaces or, even worse, spaces of misinformation and fake news. Influencers play a very difficult role in society. Whether they want to or not, they have a responsibility to their audience – both to promote fair, balanced principles and values, but also not to get carried away with inauthentic promotions.

For brands, authenticity is key when it comes to collaborations with influencers. Consumers can quickly detect when an influencer is promoting a product they don’t really believe in. And that can be charged quite dearly, especially if you’re a brand with a time-built image.

We all have a responsibility in dealing with consumers and that’s because we work with people, not audiences, stats, likes or shares. If we call them consumers we run the risk of becoming detached from the subject and protecting ourselves behind screens, brand manuals or KPIs. No matter who we are, the promise we should be guided by is that we will launch the right messages and campaigns for people.

Necessary regulations

From my point of view, the area we should look at more closely would be the quality of information and the accuracy of the content that influencers sometimes promote. Because they are communication channels, on par with TV and print media, I think there is a big responsibility in conveying some recommendations to the general public, especially when we are talking about sensitive topics – education, health and politics. I don’t see how such a measure could be implemented, but I am convinced that just as there are institutions that monitor the quality of broadcast and print media, something could also be organised around the protection of online information.

Cleaner online environment

In addition to the regulation I mentioned above, I think it’s all about our behavioural hygiene, of all of us. After all, being online, and especially on social media, is up to each of us. We mirror the thoughts, values and principles we live by on a daily basis, so I believe we are all responsible for a clean online environment that represents us.

I think we too often hide behind the screens of absolute freedom of expression, authenticity and brutal honesty, and run away from the consequences of our online behaviours. That can’t be pro-social or pro-inclusion. On the other hand, I don’t believe in censoring free speech either. But I think it would be decent to ask ourselves a few questions before we hit send on anything – How much of what I say here is about me and how much about the other? What am I trying to prove with this, and how does offending someone help me prove that I’m “right”? After all, whether online or offline, humanity and decency is a choice.

3 “precepts” in a code of ethics for influencers

I wouldn’t ever call them precepts, but recommendations. However, anyone who does not follow them will, in time, be taken off the list of collaborators by the very communities that follow them. But if I had to name a few things, I would say this:

1. Be gentle with yourself and don’t try to please everyone.
2. Be honest with yourself and see if this collaboration is for you.
3. Be responsible with what you promote – whether it’s message or brand. Never recommend something you haven’t tested yourself.

Source: IQads