Thinking Beyond Social When It Comes to Influencers
Emerging, Owned Channels in the Influencer Ecosystem
In the last few years, we have seen first-hand the evolution of the influencer industry go from skeptical questions to now nuanced strategies around year-long, tiered influencer activations— the pace of innovation in thinking and technology in the world of influencers has been breathtaking.
As brands continue to formalize more relationships with influential content creators, understanding the full scale and flexibility in building robust partnerships with them have extended well beyond social.
In no particular order, here is what we are thinking about when it comes to emerging, owned channels for tapping into influencers:
Getting in Consumers’ Ears with Podcasts
Most notably, we are seeing brands tap influencers that may be hosting their own podcast and can incorporate audio as a layer into the partnership, incremental to branded content on social.
Within the ACTIVATE network, we have a curated a community of 60+ creators hosting podcasts on topics ranging from motherhood to entrepreneurship to fitness & wellness.
Podcasts predominantly apply to larger influencers that have been able to grow a significant presence on their podcast, which initially is driven from their scaled audiences on social or blog. Lauryn Evarts from The Skinny Confidential is a fantastic example of a creator that has expanded across all social channels as well as host a wildly successful podcast, The Him & Her Podcast — but we are seeing more niche creators emerging with engaged and highly targeted podcast audiences.
Driving Consumers to Conversion with Amazon & Shopify
We are also seeing many more brands looking to incorporate an e-commerce layer into an influencer program. While affiliate links and promo codes are very commonplace in the influencer sphere, we are now seeing brands tap into creators that have the ability to integrate the brand/product into a curated shop on Amazon or Shopify, and natively incorporate this into their content.
Within the ACTIVATE network, we have a curated community of 300+ creators that actively curate Amazon Shops or Shopify pages. We also curate networks of creators that have shown a demonstrated ability to drive traffic and sales for brands over the years.
Driving Further Distribution with Influencer Newsletters
Speak with any digital marketer, and you can confirm that email marketing is not dead. Email remains one of the most effective methods for reaching and engaging target audiences and a backbone of digital marketing. Influencers that have invested time in growing their audiences across various channels are also investing in growing their owned channels, predominantly their site (or blog) and email.
What we find is that the most engaged followers for an influencer are those that subscribe to the newsletters — as demonstrated by eyebrow-raising open rates (oftentimes well north of 30%) and CTRs. It is a great way to amplify and extend the life of content the influencer may be publishing on their social channels. Within the ACTIVATE network, we have a curated community of 250+ creators that have built newsletter audiences. We’ve also built our own newsletters over the years catering to key categories of influence that match up with our influencer network — and have found it to be a powerful way to drive extensions to an influencer program.
Taking a step back, we believe the emergence of owned channels in the influencer space to be a fantastic next step for the industry. From an influencer’s perspective, this creates a more holistic approach to how they partner with brands — they can spend more time picking the brand partners they want to align more deeply with and deliver more to those brands across a variety of channels, and their audiences will appreciate it. A win-win-win for brands, influencers and audiences.
If you’re open to discuss any of the above further — feel free to reach out! I can be reached at kamiu@activate.social.
ACTIVATE is a fully end-to-end influencer marketing platform, covering influencer discovery, program workflow, measurement, and analytics. Our ACTIVATE Studio team also helps brands build out and execute their influencer strategy. Last year, the ACTIVATE platform enabled over 75,000 influencers to collaborate with brands.
Want to learn more about Bloglovin’ or ACTIVATE? Just drop us a note at research@activate.social.
