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Influencers Technology

Why brands shouldn't be looking to marketplaces to find micro-influencers

By Felix Morgan, senior strategist and innovation lead

April 6, 2017 | 4 min read

This week it was announced that Tribe, the Australian micro-influencer marketplace, would be launching in the UK. This is the latest in a string of headlines around micro-influencers and signifies an increasing demand from brands to find new ways to communicate through influencers.

MICROINFLUENCERS

Tribe’s ambition is to remove the friction in this process and make it easier for brands to connect with large volumes of influencers with small audiences. And it's definitely on the right track – the rise of micro-influencers is undeniable, with a recent report demonstrating they deliver a 60% higher engagement rate and 6.7x more cost efficient per engagement than influencers with bigger audiences.

In a world where KSI lives in a penthouse suite overlooking the Olympic Park, Tyler Oakley is being interviewed on Ellen, and PewDiePie is earning eight figures a year, it’s easy to forget why our audiences are so swayed by influencers. At their core, influencers are successful at what they do because they are relatable to their audience.

At its heart, influencer marketing is more human than traditional advertising and communications because it involves real people speaking about real life. However, as the concept of influence has matured, these influencers have become increasingly detached from their audiences, and only recently has there been a counter movement to reinstate that relatability. We’re now seeing the rise of the micro-influencer – individuals with an audience between 1,000-30,000 people who are passionate experts around a certain topic but still entirely relatable to their audience. They’re more effective financially, and by working with lots of micro-influencers simultaneously brands can still ensure the same reach.

However, while Tribe is getting a lot right, I don’t believe a marketplace for influencers is what the industry needs right now. The very idea of a marketplace is built on an assumption that influencer identification should be seen as a media transaction, while I would contest that it should be a human task. In fact, I believe that influencer identification should have more in common with going on a date than with buying a TV spot.

On a first date you wouldn’t decide to settle down with someone immediately just because you both liked speaking about sports – you’d look for something deeper than that. You’d try and find out if your values were aligned, whether you had common ambitions, and you’d make sure you were both looking for some deeper involvement in each other’s lives. That’s a process that can’t be automated – it requires a period of discovery, it requires dialogue, and it requires both parties to allow themselves to be vulnerable.

Social data tells a powerful story but it doesn’t give the full picture, and diving into bed with an influencer just because you like the same thing isn’t going to get you very far. It leads brands down a journey of automating and commoditising something that needs to remain human if it is to be truly valuable.

The allure of identifying lots of people quickly will be tempting, but the true value of influencers comes through deeper relationships and collaboration. As an industry, if we choose to shortcut this process we’re going to deprive influencer marketing of its magic and end up with another decreasingly effective broadcast channel.

Felix Morgan is senior strategist and innovation lead at Livity, leading its Viewpoints influencer product in partnership with Onalytica.

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