A lot of what we see passed off as “best practices” in influencer marketing are simply dated, or repurposed from other media practices — far from the state of the art. Why? I’d venture that the relatively low barriers to entry have created a noisy and crowded market, with a bunch of “me too” partners with too little experience, offering solutions that focus on what they can deliver — instead of focusing on how their solutions will drive results, why those results will matter to brands and recognizing when a solution revolution is required.

After thousands of campaigns, the emergence of new technology and data-driven strategies in support of influencer campaign performance, I have some new ideas around “Best Practices” for influencer campaigns which I’d like to share:

• Forget vanity metrics. 2017 will see the end of vanity metrics like “follower count” in influencer selection. The focus on public numbers is at minimum misleading and quite often kills any potential ROI. Instead, demand to understand the influencer’s audience — who do they reach, exactly? What demographic, psychographic and lifestyle clusters engage with their content? How can you prove that? Is that a modeled analysis, or something more reliable? How many people do they really reach each month? Ask. And if you don’t get real answers, keep looking.
• “Impressions” or “Social Impressions” are irrelevant. Optimizing for reach and impressions were about the only way partners in the influencer space could track and measure value. But how valuable is that, really? How reliable of a metric is it, in a world of algorithmic feed manipulation? If you believe Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and others don’t penalize sponsored content — we’ve got news for you. They do. And that’s why you see sponsored content from thud-factor influencers like models and celebs fall so flat when measured against engagement. Don’t fall for it. Guaranteed engagement will be the metric of choice in 2017 to deliver real, measurable impact.
• Pure reach doesn’t matter. If reach is not aligned with an interested audience who has a relationship with the author or creator, the true impact is limited. Influencer marketing is about making a connection, an impact on a consumer’s point of view through trust. Again, go for engagement. Impacting a real, live human being is the value of influencer marketing.
• Avoid dead ends. Integrate influencer campaigns around your broader marketing initiatives. Engage audiences with influencer marketing then remarket to them with conversion tactics — or — surface engaged audience profiles to inform your next branding campaign. Collaboration with your influencer partners should yield actionable data and insights to further your overall marketing efforts.
• Don’t be a social wallflower. Be an active participant in the influencer space. Consider always-on strategies and partners who can help you conduct research and divine insights along the way, recommend adjustments to strategy, then test and verify that you’re moving your KPIs in the right direction based on these insights. Observe results. Identify trends. Adjust strategy. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Don’t be a bystander in your social influencer strategy, jump into the conversation.

It’s time to cut through the noise and push aside the old “Best Practices” which drive marketers towards meaningless results. Influencer marketing has the opportunity to shed the dated thinking and carryover metrics from other media — and deliver tangible results for marketers; engagement and actionable insights combined with qualified remarketing and CRM opportunities.

What commonly held “Best Practices” have you busted in the influencer marketing space?

Megan Media began offering services to brands and content creators in 2009, and to date we’ve run thousands of influencer campaigns for blue chip brands like P&G, Clorox, Disney, Unilever, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Sub-Zero and more. The company introduced Athena Prime in 2016, a groundbreaking approach to optimizing influencer marketing campaigns with the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In recent conversations with brands, three common threads have surfaced as influencer marketing secures an accountable place in the marketing mix. ‘Fluffy feel-good’ results or analysis of its impact will no longer suffice. It’s worth taking a look at each of those threads and digging in to find out what this means for 2017, and how it’s affected our thinking (and actions) here at Megan Media:

1. Influencer marketing is becoming a bigger part of the marketing mix and, with that, there is increased attention and an increased focus on the ROI of these campaigns — as there should be.
2. The promise of “programmatic” in influencer marketing is exciting — but, the introduction of automation into the front-end of an influencer campaign — the selection and activation of influencers — has delivered sub-optimal results in terms of quality of content, and therefore results. High involvement and increased complexity just aren’t worth the effort.
3. It’s still a test and learn period, where many brands are figuring out the optimal approach to influencer marketing, how to best track and align it with their overall social strategy. This is where we see big strides being made in 2017 and beyond.

In my nine years operating in this space focused on working with female creators, this is the most exciting opportunity for the progression of influencer marketing into a staple of the marketing mix. At the same time, increased attention and pressure on influencer marketing is pushing some approaches in the wrong direction.

The pressure of proving ROI on influencer campaigns is driving the introduction of new solutions and approaches to influencer marketing — even attempts to bring “programmatic” or more correctly, “self-serve” approaches into play. However, it is more important than ever to understand the implications in this evolving space and to recognize and learn from the challenges we face.

The Pros of the Cons

For some, automating the front-end influencer identification and selection process delivers ROI from a lowered investment perspective. Influencer selection, activation and content publishing can also be automated. Agencies and brands then use available promotional tools provided by social platforms to distribute that content.

The flaw that’s come to light in these “self-serve” approaches is that quality content is at the core of an effective influencer campaign — and all content is not created equally. It’s not good ROI if you’re literally too embarrassed to share content created from these approaches with top brass (which we’ve seen happen to a few notable brands with whom we’ve spoken recently).

An even bigger challenge to ROI is the continued, and increased, focus on follower count or impressions. It’s increasingly clear that your effective cost per thousand impressions or eCPM is far less meaningful in the social sphere than volume of engagement. If someone has liked, shared or commented on the branded content — or taken a deeper prescribed action — you’ve made a connection. You are that much closer to ROI (assuming you’ve structured your campaign properly) because you’ve created a new, addressable audience ripe for remarketing and downfunnel conversion.

If someone follows an influencer who posted on your behalf and they catch a glimpse of your brand (and others) as they scroll through their feed — that may not be as effective in your ROI. We now have the data to back that learning up. More on that momentarily.

Add to that the constantly evolving algorithm efforts of the social platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. They are incentivized, quite literally, to bury the sponsored posts you’re paying influencers to create, which severely limits their organic distribution. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram do this to encourage influencers (and brands) to pay for “boosts” to drive content distribution. This is effectively levying a sponsored content tax on your campaign, giving you yet another hurdle to brand engagement.

Most influencers are great content creators, but not necessarily gifted content promoters — let alone sophisticated promoted post buyers. This fact kills engagement and therefore ROI.

Still others choose to align with influencer sites that offers significant reach in an effort to achieve ROI — which is similar to the approach above. In the influencer space, the focus on destination rather than distribution is fundamentally misguided and can work at odds with what brand objectives should focus on in this new, increasingly important facet of the marketing mix.

The pros of these cons have driven organizations like ours to take a fresh look at the space, and find new ways to deliver ROI to our partners.

In our experience, established relationships and continuous evaluation of influencers and content creators to aid brands in the influencer selection process is still a requirement to ensure the core of the campaign remains true to the brand.

The creator community in this model is much more motivated to produce authentic and engaging content their audience will find engaging. The combination allows us to find the right group of advocates to create quality content for a particular brand — around which their audience engages. We believe the curation and creation of quality content requires human involvement throughout the process.

If the increased pressure of proving ROI for brand partners would not come at the expense of quality content, we needed to leverage the platforms available to help quality content travel and find it’s way to the right people, in the right place, at the right time to create maximum engagement.

This pressure drove us to build out our technology to introduce an AI element for all our campaigns, which optimizes engagement across social platforms by matching the best creative, with the right audience at the right time. We call it Athena Prime™, fitting for a network of female creators, as Athena is the Greek Goddess of reason, intelligent activity, arts and literature.

With the smarts of Athena, smart content meets smarter distribution. More engagement at scale, more opportunity for downfunnel conversions, means more ROI and happy clients.

While still new — we just rolled out Athena to production at scale in Q4 last year — Athena is teaching us a lot! She’s supporting the best of human creativity, and at the same time taking randomness and selection bias out of distribution.

Quite often, she delivers surprising insights and approaches to audience development for us to observe and learn from. Most importantly, she ensures tremendous results for our brands. Another unexpected benefit? She’s loved by our creators, who benefit from increased engagement on the sponsored posts Athena distributes for them.

With that, we look forward to continuing to learn and evolve in the space this year and welcome your thoughts on the this evolving social influencer landscape. What challenges are you facing? How have you turned your cons into pros?

The kids played an amazing game, showed a lot of grit, and proved their resilience on the field today. Each and every one of them. A victory in every sense, except for the “mercy rule” that maxes runs at five per inning. That’s the only thing that separates our little ones from their first victory.

The game ended in a hard-fought 6-6 tie. Without the rule, the kids battled to come back from a four run deficit to what would have been an 8-6 victory. But such is life, and we take pride in our performance and move on. The effort was totally there, but those are the breaks in baseball. It’s a long season.

As coaches, we liked what we saw out there, starting with the vomit. While standing in line for pictures, Oscar — our designated starting pitcher — was overcome with nerves and hurled massive chunks while standing in the heat. He sprayed down the Bacich outfield with a display of volume and power one truly needed to experience to believe. Straight up projectile stuff, the kind you only see in 70s horror flicks. Linda Blair took a knee, folks.

It was awesome.

In that moment, each and every one of our kids was nothing but comforting, concerned and very reassuring with Oscar. They let him know that they, too, sometimes get nervous. A few even chimed in with specific times where they experienced the same thing. All the way up and down the line.

The fact that these kids were willing to pick up a fellow teammate in a moment of personal struggle is a testament to the character of each and every one of our children. Not a single one laughed, pointed, or did anything but try to comfort their teammate — and that held throughout the game. They brushed off the mistakes, picked each other up, cheered each other on.

And we saw the results in the field. These are great kids, each and every one of them, and they are going to have a blast this season. If you weren’t there, you missed all the beaming faces and smiles. It was priceless.

Special kudos go out to Luca for his amazing displays of empathy out on the field and in the dugout; he felt a lot of pressure today as the last batter and I’m so happy he felt comfortable enough to tell us as much. He did great at the plate, but their closer just proved to be too much. Eran rocked the basepaths and showed awesome discipline at the plate. BJ was was a stud, walking out there to the mound to start our first game with his usual smile and swagger without sweating it.

Otis caught an incredible full game. Like Buster Posey. And called the right pitches to keep batters off balance. Drew was fantastic on the infield and totally brushed off getting rocked with a homer on his first pitch to close out a great inning for us (that’s huge). Oscar battled back from his nerves to ably man first, make a bunch of outs and throw two full innings of shutout(?) ball. Katie was solid in the infield and showed great baseball instincts, also making excellent decisions on the field and at the plate — you’ll see her on the mound in the next game. Oscar and I recommend watching.

Harrison showed off his huge arm and awesome bat, doing exactly what’s expected from a leader of his caliber in the dugout. Truman covered first like a champ and showed off his mettle at the plate — a tough lefty that you’ll see on the mound next weekend. Edward put on a straight-up clinic with his batting prowess today, and “Sexy Rexy” Solle walked off the field with a well-deserved game ball as MVP. He crushed it at third, at the plate, and on the mound as a reliever when we were in a serious pinch. Huzzah!

And many, many thanks go to what I must say is the best crew of assistant coaches ever assembled. Mike, Matt, Chris, Justin — thank you so very much for making this very special opening day even more special for our kids. You are wonderful people and we're really grateful for your help.

To the Jays!