The ‘Save-You-Money-When-Working-with-Influencers-Strategy’ by Lumio
Brands… lo and behold, Lumio. After being lulled by many Influencers in the past, we thought it was time to “make social media fair again” for brands.
As a result, we created a strategy designed to improve the decision-making process and ROI for brands when it comes to selecting the right Influencer. After many hours pondering and arguing over names for our new-found strategy, we drew inspiration from our primary school teachers who taught us the ever-important acronym KISS — “keep it simple stupid”. And so, we decided to call our strategy the ‘save-you-money-when-working-with-Influencers strategy’. Ta-da…
To demonstrate our ‘save-you-money-when-working-with-Influencers strategy’, we put together a case study using pricing data from real Influencers. Since this type of data is not typically made publically available, we went incognito to conduct this experiment. The aim of this experiment was to illustrate for brands the difference between choosing Influencers without Lumio and choosing influencers with Lumio. From our sample size, Influencers with an average of 110,000 followers had an average price per post of $750. For our experiment, we decided to use 5 Influencers.
Choosing Influencers without Lumio
- Select 5 Influencers using engagement rate
- Average following: 110,000 Followers
- Average cost: $750 each
You will spend a total of $3750 on average for five Influencers.
Based on our findings, when brands only use the traditional metrics approach (namely, the engagement rate) to indicate whether an Influencer is quality; on average, two out of five Influencers will be ineffective. Put differently, these Influencers will fail to: generate any sales, push a substantial volume of visitors to your website, and provide considerable reach via their post.
This staggering average is based on our results from an experiment we conducted with 42 different brands and 1000 Influencers. We analysed each Influencers effectiveness through factors, such as: number of sales, click through rates and impressions. We then compared our metrics with statistics representing current industry standards, which were generated by our kind friends from Wordstream. Naturally, if an Influencer produced results that were below the average of a Facebook advertisement or Adword, then that Influencer would be, invariably, deemed ineffective. Why? Because you would be far better off running that ad campaign through those alternative platforms.
“on average, two out of five Influencers will be ineffective”
So, for your example campaign above, you will spend $1,500 (2 x Influencers @ $750 each) on ineffective Influencers. This, in any case, is not a small amount of money. This is money that could instead be spent on Influencers who are actually #influential.
The unnecessary spend of $1,500 effectively reduces the true potential of ROI for your campaign, which is only made worse when you factor in the loss of time spent working with those ineffective Influencers.
Now, it’s not all doom and gloom. This is the whole point of Lumio! We want brands like yourself to come out on top. Our mission is to make the decision-making process better for brands and eliminate the guess work so brands can produce a greater ROI. We not only want to see brands survive, but thrive! So, let’s see the difference.
Choosing Influencers with Lumio
Before you went ahead with the 5 Influencers above, let’s say you instead decided to analyse them using Lumio.
- Select 5 Influencers with a good Lumio Quality Score (60 and above)
- Average following: 110,000 Followers
- Average cost: $750 each
- Five reports from Lumio: $99 (Semi Pro Monthly Plan paid annually)
The Lumio reports are designed to highlight to you who really is a good influencer in light of your campaign goal. Brands, with Lumio, will now be able to weed out the non-effective Influencers from the effective influencers. Generally speaking, you want to work with Influencers who have a Lumio Score above 60 (Taken from our case study here). The execution of campaign goals by brands will no longer be jeopardised by ineffective Influencers.
By virtue of the insights provided by Lumio, you will immediately save $1,401 from your total campaign costs (the cost of two ineffective Influencers minus the cost of the reports from Lumio ($1,500-$99)). All in all, you can see that reliance on the engagement rate alone nowadays is strategically counterproductive, costly, and to put it frankly, out of date.
Not bad, right? From the total spend of $3,750, you are now able to save over 37%. This can be likened to switching off an ineffective ad campaign on Facebook, as you’ll get almost the same reach but at a better cost with a more refined and concentrated focus to give you a greater ROI.
In response to our personal experience working with Influencers, we do not want to see campaign goals seriously compromised for brands any longer. This growing inconsistency motivated us to intervene, in favour of brands. Gut feels and intuition can only take you so far today; instead, it is data that will validate your “gut” feel which is always going to be your noble steed. In the end, using our insights can only help you improve your chances of a successful Influencer campaign.
Learn more how you can use the power of data to make better decisions here.
