The Next Level of automated Influencer Marketing
The days of billboard advertising and print ads are numbered. For years the marketing industry is looking to find new ways to monetize attention and give their customers the best bang for their money. While there are still billions, put into traditional marketing, and it still works depending on whom you ask, but new ways are emerging. Besides the big guns like Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, more and more brands are looking into influencer marketing, and they are right. Most of them over-index on conversion rates and having brand advocates never hurt, especially now that you can drive significant business even without hiring a famous person.
So the rise of influencer marketing helped a lot of young and talented people to monetize their online presence and brands could siphon that with reaching their audience way more efficiently regarding trust and ultimately conversions. As ROI for traditional advertising continues to decrease, advertisers need to find new ways to reach key audiences better for delivering better value for their prices.
After having breathed in some fresh inspirations from DMEXCO in Cologne, Germany I believe that the key for this will be all of our profiles on the internet.
Let me explain:
Today companies look for influencers, people who have a big online following and work with them to promote their product, service or otherwise. The goal is to maximize conversion and minimize cost per conversion. If your influencer is worth their money, you will find no better ROI in the market right now. Heck, you can even find influencers who love your product, and they will promote it for free if you send them one of your cool phones or stickers or whatever.
Now imagine this, all of us have an online presence somewhere. Sometimes people are more secretive, but we all got something. So, potentially, all of us can and probably will become micro-influencers over time. There is not yet a scalable blueprint or business behind it, but there will be.
There are even areas where this is the case. Take LinkedIn for example; you can buy a premium profile as a job seeker, so your profile will be highlighted to a certain audience. On the other hand, a recruiter can buy a recruiter license to market directly towards their audience. Now, Facebook and Co. are already deeply involved in ad and revenue streams. So in the future, you might be able to monetize your private or even professional network by promoting services. If you follow your company’s page and like posts, you are kind of already an ad machine for them, which is great by the way, looking from my marketing perspective.
I would take a wild guess and say that every one of us has at least one consumer product or even professional software, that they would recommend without hesitation. What we consider word-of-mouth could also scale as influencer marketing. So, I believe that for better or worse we will be able to monetize our social presence by promoting products on our Facebook profile with influencer links or buy buttons, which will ultimately bring us money or bitcoins or some benefit. It doesn’t have to be money; it could be coupons, free products, etc. pp.
Yes, this is already somewhat happening with emails that give you codes to give your friends, but I think this can be vastly optimized and automated in the future. How? By opening the floodgates of profiles. Imagine your cover photo can be your photo or you could give this space to a company you love and let them use it as a marketing bulletin board.
What do you think? Would you be willing to monetize your Facebook or LinkedIn profile to serve as a marketing platform for advertisers, giving you 0,02$ a click or more?
Everyone is an influencer to someone, be it parents to his or her children, older siblings to his or her young ones, friends, girlfriends, cousins, business partners, you name it. Most of what I see today is pretty random, not well researched or relevant. I see this as a great potential in the future. Yes, I see a major downside as a consumer, but a big upside for advertisers. I don’t know about you, but I rather get well-targeted ads than non-specific random ones. Online ads won’t disappear, we might just make the best out of it.
Thanks for reading.
Sebastian
Originally published at www.sebarsch.com.
