Technological advancement is making influence marketing the main channel for brands to communicate with their audience, according to Artem Paulkin, Commercial Director at leading European influence marketing firm, HypeFactory.
Business Matters sat down with Paulkin from HypeFactory and discovered what he had to say on the impact of global lockdown measures on influence marketing and what the future holds for the ever-changing industry.
Under lockdown, users began to spend more time on social networks and video services. Has this affected the influence marketing industry?
The global influence marketing industry has been continually growing. Over the past five years, it has shifted rapidly from being an experimental type of advertising through to the main avenue for brands. The technologies of analysis, selection of influencers and scaling of advertising campaigns that we have developed allow the industry to compete with television advertisement.
With younger generations, in particular, increasingly relying on their favourite online personalities and social media stars for product and lifestyle recommendations, brands can enjoy impressive results through influencer partnerships, building awareness, and demand for their products and services.
Will the trend to shift the focus of collaboration from millionaire influencers to influencers with a smaller audience continue?
Yes, it is more efficient to use a mix of influencers who are selected depending on the task and the goals of a campaign. Our work with customers has shown that the cost of conversion of sales and clicks is much higher when we use mid-level and micro-influencers. Micro-targeting is changing the landscape for brands and influencers.
In one recent example, HypeFactory worked with To the Moon Mobile, a UK brand that combines mobile network and fintech ecosystems under the same roof, for instance, by allowing users to manage their mobile account and crypto-wallet from the same app. During the promotion of its fintech offering, HypeFactory targeted campaigns through influencer marketing, reaching target end users that led to successful product roll-out.
Accessible data and automation is providing a paradigm shift that is placing smaller influencers in the driving seat.
Are large audiences the only key to success of a campaign?
A large audience and well-engaged account does not guarantee success of an advertising campaign. It all begins with finding the right format for each promo and choosing a platform that appeals to the intended audience.
HypeFactory is the leading agency that offers targeted influence marketing campaigns based on neural networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Our development, based on AI technology, allows us to create a detailed analysis of the audience. The algorithm analyses 53 behavioural patterns of the audience, including syntactic and semantic analysis of the language, to determine authenticity of comments. Computer vision technology reads the image content and determines the age and gender of the audience, which allows us to target more accurately.
When selecting an influencer for a marketing campaign, we look directly at influencers that can reach the right target audience and not just the top influencers. Using unique hypertargeting, we can find influencers with an audience concentrated in a certain region, city and even down to a particular district.
Should companies fulfil this work in-house or outsource to agencies?
It is more profitable for an advertiser to rely on professionals. Advertisers do not need to spend time on building relationships with bloggers: this is an unstructured and uncontrolled process.
We have developed a tool for analysing an influencer’s audience: our technology allows us to analyse any influencer on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok by using 38 different metrics. We can gain an understanding of his or her audience and evaluate its real volume (OTS). With this data, we can accurately identify specific leads for audiences, depending on the advertiser’s goals.
To determine the most effective strategy for promotion requires thorough examination. We have about a thousand placements per month around the world and collect a lot of data, which our machine learning algorithm is able to use to accurately determine. It is such opportunities that will make influence marketing the main channel of communication with the audience in the future.