We live in the age of the . Whether they are celebrities, athletes, actors or models () influencers have become a key element for the brand strategy: a fast and credible access route to the heart of the public.
To find out a little more about how they set up their relationship with the big brands, we talked to , Manager of one of the leaders in electronics and IT eCommerce in Spain, who has based part of his success on the correct use of this type of actions in social networks.
Interview with David Gutiérrez Pérez, Social Media Manager/CM of PcComponentes
You were recently talking on LinkedIn about the long-term profitability of campaigns with influencers. Could you tell us in more detail how your experience has been in this regard? Have you done many campaigns of this type?
We started working on this type of campaign in the year 2012, when influencer marketing was hardly known in Spain. We started by focusing on a niche audience such as the gamer public, which represents a significant percentage of our current audience. Little by little we have been covering other specialized sectors such as telephony, photography, etc.
We have worked and work with influencers of all kinds in terms of size, from, to with communities of between 15,000 and 20,000 or more followers, depending on the objective we want to achieve with the campaign or action. We have always sought the greatest diffusion and the use of all possible channels (Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram…) of the influencer to try to create synergies.
When we launch an action, we try to make it as durable as possible over time, and this is allowed by social platforms such as Youtube, in which a video can be circulating for years and steadily increasing ROI.
Today, we continue to make profitable actions that we launched in 2012, since we continue to receive traffic and sales through them. How do we do it? The secret is in the focus of the action and its expiration, that is, what you do must continue to make sense and attract the attention of the public after a few years, and of course all the actors involved in that action, such as links, landing page, etc, must remain active and updated for as long as possible.
My experience with influencer marketing has been more than satisfactory since we have achieved great results thanks to this type of action.
How is a campaign with influencers planned? With what criteria is the ideal person chosen, the channel, what kind of instructions are given, how is the progress of the campaign controlled?
It all depends on the goal you want to achieve. The first thing is to be clear to what kind of public we want to come up with that campaign and, once we have it clear, we will start the search for the influencer or influencers who can help us achieve that goal.
We usually work with influencers who have a powerful community in more than one social network. We look at the type of content it generates, variables such as its channels, the demographics of the audience that follows it, its growth, etc.
Once we have chosen the influencer, We send you the briefing of the action, showing you what we want to achieve and transmit. The influencer adapts the action to the style of their content and presents us with the result before launching it so that we can give it the go-ahead. Once we give it the ok, the action is launched and its monitoring begins through the generic indicators of social networks (retweets, views, I like you,…) and tools such as Google Analytics.
What is the main advantage of influencer marketing campaigns over other types of online actions?
The main advantage of working with influencers over other channels is that in this case, the brand goes hand in hand with a person who exerts a powerful influence on a certain community.
Prescribers have always been the most effective advertising tool in the world of marketing. We apply influencer marketing to convert the influencer into a prescriber of our brand.
This cannot be achieved through other advertising channels, since advertising on them is usually more common and you only depend on the credibility of your brand. In addition, influencer marketing is a very powerful means for attracting new users.
All of the above being said, I always recommend combine different online actions when carrying out campaigns, since options such as the SEM and Social adsthey have a brutal capacity that, combined with influencer marketing, can provide us with a very interesting global ROI.
However, 2017 was the year of controversy in influencer marketing: controversial videos and statements, boycotts, youtubers who were left without the possibility of monetizing their videos… What is the risk that brands run when they put their image in the hands of an influencer?
Effectively, there is a significant risk when linking your brand with influencers, since we do not know if they may be involved in controversy in the future, or they may carry out any action that may affect us as a brand by being linked in some way, but that risk can be minimized considerably.
When working with influencers, we carry out all the actions in their channels, that is, our brand only appears linked to them for their audiences. Why are we doing this? For two simple reasons:
- All our clients and followers do not have to like the influencers we work with, what is more, They can even annoy you.
- In the event of a controversy, the followers of these influencers are going to be “faithful” to them in their majority, so the damage to our brand is considerably reduced, since we have only reached that audience with our action.
Even so, we take maximum care of the type of influencer with whom we associate our brand, due to what may happen.
In recent months we have talked about micro and nano influencers… are they the new kings of the sector? Which ones do you feel more comfortable working with or have given you better results? Why do brands bet on them?
As I mentioned before, opting for one or the other It will depend on the objective of the action.. If I want to offer a product very niche the ideal would be to work with micro influencer, since they are usually specialists in a certain field and their audience is highly segmented. If I want to carry out a campaign focused on branding or to any product in general use, macro influencers they can be very profitable.
The fact of working more or less comfortably does not depend on the size of the influencer, depends on the person. You can find very professional and organized people or you can find real disasters, who don’t know how to interpret what you ask of them and who don’t have an organized way of working.
I think that brands are not focusing on micro-influencers and nano-influencers, but have recently started working with them, as well as continuing to work with macro-influencers. That said, some important factors that can make a brand opt for micro-influencers exclusively, is the budget available to carry out this type of action, the type of public you want to reach and having greater control over the action and its impact.
What do you measure and how do you measure it, in an influencer marketing campaign?
My premise is perform only actions that are fully measurable. We try to take advantage of the tools provided by the world of digital marketing, such as Google Analytics and the statistical panels of social platforms, and thanks to this we know at all times which actions are profitable for us and which are not.
We try to measure everything: traffic, average duration of the session, percentage of new users that arrive through the action, transactions, billing, etc.
In addition to the results that are produced directly, we also measure everything that comes indirectly thanks to those actions, that is, if someone has made a purchase on our website through another channel, in the event that they have received an impact from our influencer marketing action, we can have information and get an idea of to what extent that impact on that person’s purchase decision. This is achieved thanks to a model of
Imagine that we give you unlimited funds to hire a single influencer from around the world, the one you want, for a new campaign with Pc Components. Who would it be and why? What channel would you use?
I am very heavy with the subject of the objectives, but it is that If I don’t have a clear goal, I can’t decide who to work with. What I am clear about in this case is that the influencer must have a very broad Spanish audience, since it is the market where we currently operate to a greater extent, as long as the objective is not to open new markets, since in that case, I would seek a powerful influencer from the country where we want to land.
As for the channels I would use, it would also depend on what we wanted to achieve. We usually try to use the most powerful social profiles of the influencer, although in certain cases and depending on what we want to transmit and how we want to transmit it, we use one or the other depending on its nature.
Let’s do a bit of futurology: How do you imagine digital marketing will evolve between now and 2020? And influencer marketing?
I think that is a question that all digital marketing professionals ask ourselves on a daily basis. The environment is very changing, technology advances very quickly and the only thing that is clear to me is that We must adapt as quickly as possible to all the changes that are presented to us.
The user is more and more demanding. The usual advertising is no longer as effective and will be less and less. We must focus our efforts on being creative and different. The present and future of advertising I summarize it in one sentence: sell without selling. Native advertising is going to play a very important role in the coming years and I believe that pay-per-view digital platforms are also going to play a leading role in the marketing of the future.
The influencer sector is a sector that it is still very green in Spain, since we find ourselves with a serious problem: the lack of professionalism. Absence of standardized rates, lack of professionalism of some influencers, absence of bureaucratic protocols, agreements very much in the air, etc., are some of the problems that Social Media professionals face on a day-to-day basis. I hope that all this will be history in the year 2020 and we can finally all enjoy an optimal way of working.
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- What is the first social network you open in the day? LinkedIn
- iOS or Android? Android
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