Leveraging Influencer Marketing as a Growth Channel — Review

5 min readJun 21, 2021

In the last couple of years through my internships and even my first real job, I never dealt with influencers. Having always worked at a B2B company more technical in nature, the influencers I even came close to interacting with were all from research analyst firms. Now while that is a different type of brand and product advocacy, today’s influencer marketing is shaped a little differently.

So as I explore this topic for the week, I hope I can give you enough clarity on this new information I learnt.

To start from the beginning, what is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is to work with individuals to tell your brand story who seem to have a voice in social. Social media has been around since the early 2000s, starting with platforms like MySpace, IRC etc and now moving into Instagram, Tik Tok, Clubhouse and so much more. When we look at what’s been around back then and what we have now, nothing much has really changed. The fundamentals are still the same: in marketing we’re still working with three different things. We’re working with driving demand, we’re building brand distinction, and storytelling.

The main value proposition of influencer marketing ultimately boils down to that: to tell a relatable, distinct, and entertaining brand story that cuts through the usual advertising noise.

The Science of Influence

Influence is made up of a couple of different points. In CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini Degree, Influencer Marketing guru, Siim Säinas, Chief Researcher & Founder @ BrandHero summarises these points as follows:

Consistency: Being consistent with your message and telling very often the same story over and over again with slightly different flavours.
Social Proof: Having Credibility in terms of content and overall look.
Likability Quotient: Having an overall character that makes you likeable. Whether it is because you are funny, or because you have great world views etc, likability helps with relatability.
Authority: This ties to social proof, but also implies that authority on social media is having a good following of people who listen to you because of your content.
Kindness: Empathy is what drives influence over others.
Entertainment value: There’s a big difference in traditional influencers vs the influencers and the creators that are thought of that have come up with their own style and are very entertaining before the screen, and they make a big difference in terms of the audiences they also attract.

Grouping Influencers (Exclusive from Brand Hero)

While this is not a hard and fast rule, this classification of influencers comes in handy when trying to pick who to look out for:

Type A: 1.5 million and above

Type B: 200K to 1.5 million

Type C: 101K to 200K

Type D: 61K to 100K

Type E: 30K — 60K

Planning an Influencer Campaign

Planning a campaign requires a lot of effort by both parties. This can be streamlined by following these steps:

Value Human Insight: Remember that every proper campaign starts with a real and relatable human insight. An insight is a previously unconnected relationship or knowledge that unlocks exponential growth opportunities for your brand and product.
Clearly outline your marketing objectives: Be sure to explicitly state the goals and even include numbers when talking about: Awareness, Brand love, Advocacy, Product usage and Sales.
State your audience: Market Age, Gender, Passion points (eg soccer) and any other information that might be relevant.
Outline the Timeline: Influencers need to be perfectly aware of the overall campaign schedule and social schedule. Lock in dates for the same so that there are fixed deliverables.
Product USPs: Campaigns need to be designed to convey exactly why people care about your product/service and what would happen if they would not have your product/service.
Campaign Message: Influencers must have the exact key messages of your overall campaign and key messages of your digital and social campaign (if different).
Select Influencers based on bracket mentioned above and set budget.
Influencer Campaign Objectives: What do you expect the influencers to do? How do you know the influencer did well? # UGC by influencer audience # Post Engagement Rate
Terms and Conditions: Highlights of your terms and conditions. This does not have to be exhaustive, as we recommend you still sign also a Master Service Agreement and a Scope of Work.

This brief format is primarily meant for your internal use. However, with minor amendments, you could share a version of this with the influencer. Taking into account their profile and level of status, you might want to put this into a slide deck when presenting.

Measuring the impact of Influencer Marketing

Lucky for us, social media business pages have all sort of metric trackers in place for us to measure the ROI of our influencers especially in terms of reach.

Ways of achieving Reach from simplest options:

■ Boost influencer posts in IG/FB using the Branded Content Tool

■ Create an ad with Twitter Ads or with FB Ad Manager

■ Create YouTube Ads (search, in-stream and other formats available)

■ Google Ads (display and search)

■ OOH/DOOH/Digital Radio/TV and others

To elaborate in detail about these tools and how to setup business tools, check out CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Course.

Measurement frameworks are supposed to be flexible enough to accommodate the uniqueness of a specific campaign. But not flexible enough to cultivate cherry picking. Good measurement enables comparisons and benchmarks to understand goal posts and progress made (eg vs other or past campaigns).

Measuring the success can work in a simple way by charting out the challenges, the execution and results. This report is largely qualitative, but is definitely helpful to keep in mind when evaluating your ROI and also important to understand which influencers to pick next.

Case Study: Daniel Wellington

Daniel Wellington started influencer marketing in 2011, where as Instagram launched in 2010. They saw the trend earlier than anyone else did.

It was possibly one of the first brands to build their strategy around micro influencers. Maybe because of budget, or they knew something other’s hadn’t noticed. Smaller influencers usually have better engagement rates with their audience.

Instagram had phenomenal organic reach in the early days. They grew to a 4.2M account with an average 35K engagements per post. In addition, the hashtag #danielwellington carries more than 2.2M+ posts as of today. This is an important step in the process, because now they have a flock of influencers who want to work with them just for the hashtag reach. And a constant stream of UGC feeds their web traffic, discoverability of products and creates intent.

This ultimately grew them from a 30K startup to a 228M company with influencer marketing.