In This Chapter

Figuring out which marketing tactic works best for your goals

Making sure you’re measuring what you’re actually doing

Learning from your results

Not all marketing tactics that speak to target customers — particularly ones that happen online — are the same. People often confuse where a marketing initiative happens with what that initiative is designed to do.

Influencer marketing is most often confused with direct marketing. Both are fantastic tactics that can have meaningful impact on your business. But they use very different tactics, accomplish very different goals, are connected to very different parts of the sales funnel, and are evaluated by very different metrics.

In this chapter, we help you determine whether influencer marketing or direct marketing will work best for your goals, and help you learn from the results of your campaign.

Influencer Marketing versus Direct Marketing: Similarities and Differences

As influencer marketing has become more popular, it has also sometimes been confused with direct marketing (also known as direct response). Direct marketing programs include display ads, text messages, ads in periodicals, email campaigns, and even out-of-home advertising (any kind of advertising that reaches you when you’re not home, like billboards or ads on the sides of buses). Direct marketing has some similarities to influencer marketing:

• Both influencer marketing and direct marketing focus on understanding who and where you customers are.
• Analytics play an important role in both influencer marketing and direct marketing (although the analytics are different for each).
• In direct marketing, as in influencer marketing, there is always a very specific call to action. Except in direct marketing (unlike in influencer marketing), there’s a call to convert to a sale.

The big difference between influencer marketing and direct marketing is that direct marketing is one message to many. It’s the brand talking to the audience, with the intention of compelling that audience to become customers. Influencer marketing is many voices, with a variety of hopefully similar and consistent, but nonetheless individualized messages, to a very broad audience. Figure 14-1 shows how the two types of marketing differ. And Table 14-1 gives you a side-by-side overview of both.

Direct Marketing: Measuring Data and Deliverables

Direct marketing starts with customer data and includes specific, measurable activities. And when we say “measurable,” we mean activities that are measured before activation, after activation, and often during activation.

For something to be considered direct marketing, you must have a call to action, prompting the target to do something very specific — call this number, click this link, buy this right now. Direct marketing is often called direct response, because you’re very specifically requesting a response.

When you design a direct marketing program, you must meticulously identify the following:

• Who is most likely to say yes — in other words, your target customer
• Where your target customers are most likely to be receptive to the offer — in other words, the channel where you can reach them
• When your target customers are most willing to take the action — taking into account things like seasonality or purchase patterns

Back in the day (which really is only a few years ago), the most common types of direct marketing were direct mail, coupons, and good old-fashioned telemarketing. Catalogs and infomercials can also be considered direct marketing. As direct marketing evolved, it became more sophisticated and moved online, taking the form of display ads, email campaigns, and couponing (in the form of online discount codes).

Whichever direct marketing tactic you select, the most important part is measuring that call to action. You measure the activity against your goal — for example, increasing visits to a website by 10 percent — before the campaign, during the campaign, and after the campaign to see whether it worked. This type of result is relatively easy to interpret — the target either does or doesn’t perform the action.

It may seem like direct marketing is more, well, direct and laser focused on the goals of conversion and sales. So, why would you spend time on non-sales-generating conversations and harder-to-measure, open-ended activities that comprise influencer marketing? The answer lies with your customers.

Everybody has become savvy to marketing tactics. We know when we’re being sold, and to put it simply, we don’t much like it. In addition to the issues of awareness and preference, the sheer volume of direct marketing has made it relatively ineffective. Many direct marketing tactics, like display ads, have simply lost their power. People don’t even see them! Click-through rate benchmarks are well below 1 percent — you’re almost more likely to be struck by lightning than to click a display ad.

Email continues to be effective, in the form of value-added newsletters, but the high volume of spam that everyone receives from virus-infected computers has changed what it takes to make it through customers’ email filters, never mind actually get them to open something. As of July 1, 2015, email distribution provider MailChimp reports open rates ranging from the mid-20s to the mid-teens, depending on the industry. Click-through rates from emails range from a high of over 5 percent from senders related to topics like hobbies, to a low of 1.4 percent for emails from restaurants.

Today’s customer is smarter and more powerful. With the rise of social media and self-publishing platforms, people are making purchase decisions because they heard their friends talking about it on Facebook, or they read about it on a favorite blog. They’re gathering their own information and making their own decisions about what, when, and where to buy.

In other words, customers aren’t listening to brands, or responding to their calls to action — but they are being influenced by friends and family on Facebook, colleagues on LinkedIn, celebrities on Twitter, and even dogs and cats with Instagram accounts. The obvious move was for marketers to say, “How do we get these people talking about us?” And that’s where influencer marketing comes in.

Influencer Marketing: Getting the Right People to Talk about You

Influencer marketing is a more flowing, iterative style of marketing. Imagine concentric rings, or ripples in a pond. You send out an idea or message, in the hopes that people pass it along. And although customer data plays a role in designing programs, it’s usually qualitative data (about things like preferred social media channel) instead of quantitative data (about the annual shopping habits of people in a particular zip code, for example).

This main distinction, going from the unilinear direction of messaging (from brand to customer in direct marketing) to the concentric, two-way conversations between brands and customers, and customers and customers, is what makes influencer marketing so special and complicated.

Think of influencer marketing as a multipronged conversation:

• The audience talking to you: In the past, marketing was as simple as brands talking to customers and prospects. Now, that audience can and does respond, telling you when you messed up, suggesting ways to make things better, and celebrating you when you get it right. And they expect you to acknowledge their input, immediately and specifically.
• The audience talking to each other about you: Not only can you talk to customers and prospects, but your customers and prospects can talk to each other about your brand, usually with stunning candor and specificity.
• You and the audience listening to each other: The great thing about all these open conversations is that you have free market research, delivered to in real time. The potentially scary thing is that your prospective customers get to see, hear, and take into account all the same positive and negative feedback that you see. They draw conclusions about the brand, based on the content of those conversations, and how responsive, respectful, and transparent you are.

Always be authentic. Your customers know your brand even better than you do. Don’t try to fool them with fake positivity or by avoiding issues. They know when you’re lying, and they’ll tell everyone.

Consumers know that brands control the content of direct marketing, and that it’s (understandably) biased. When they make purchase decisions, they want to evaluate content from a variety of trusted sources, not just the brand. By working directly with people who are influential — by trusting influencers to be advocates — brands reach an exponentially larger audience, with content that is seen as more authentic and credible.

It’s Not Either/Or: Using Both Influencer and Direct Marketing to Meet Your Goals

Influencer marketing and direct marketing generate entirely different results. So, if you measure influencer marketing using direct marketing goals, you’ll be disappointed.

The way to make sure you’re measuring the right activity is to start with your goals. Is your target customer ready to get right down to business and convert to sales? Great! Design a direct marketing campaign and get ready to count your money. On the other hand, if your goal is to create awareness and consideration of your product in the market, then an influencer marketing campaign is right for you! Get ready to talk (and listen) to people who are excited about your brand and offering.

What about when your program goes both ways? Life is full of gray areas, and marketing programs reflect that. If you have the time, money, and opportunity, your marketing plan will include activations that overlap and support each other.

Here’s an example: Dove #LoveMyCurls is a wide-ranging campaign from Unilever. Part of its larger initiative is to be known as an accessible and body-positive brand for women of all races. It cleverly incorporates a variety of marketing tactics including direct marketing elements like paid search (so people looking for products for curly hair will see a paid link to the Dove Love Your Curls website, as shown in Figure 14-2). This tactic is measured simply by how many people visit the site from the paid link.

On the Love Your Curls website (http://promo.dove.us/loveyourcurls), visitors see an e-book called Love Your Curls, written by Taiye Selasi and illustrated by Annick Poirier (see Figure 14-3). Dove hired Ms. Selasi, a well-known African-American author, to write the text, instead of developing the copy in-house, because her influence lent cache and authenticity to the project. This is an influencer marketing tactic, which Dove could measure by the volume of activity: number of mentions or shares of her name in association with the hashtag #LoveMyCurls.

Visitors to the website, many of whom likely had been pulled to the site via paid search, can personalize and download the e-book. This is a straightforward and easily measured direct marketing type of conversion: how many downloads of the e-book, and how many personalizations of the downloaded e-book.

In addition to the brand-produced e-book, Dove sent samples of their Dove Quench Absolute range of curly hair products to beauty vloggers — women who are influential with other women when they’re trying to decide which beauty products to buy. The resulting videos of influencers using and showcasing the pros and cons of the Dove Quench Absolute products, in a way that is not controlled by the brand, was subsequently perceived as very authentic to the viewers (see Figure 14-4).

This is classic influencer marketing and measured by activity — number of views, number (and sentiment) of comments, and number of shares of the videos on social channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Cleverly, Dove helps those activity numbers by amplifying the videos on their own properties, including the official Dove website, and getting them in front of an optimized group of viewers, brought to the site by direct marketing methods.

This multilayered nature of real-life marketing initiatives demonstrates why it’s so important to evaluate your tactics by the right metrics. Most people would agree that 26,000+ views of a non-celebrity beauty vlogger is great influencer activity. However, if you were to measure it by number of bottles of conditioner sold (conversions), you’d be disappointed. There’s no way to track exactly who saw the video and then went out and bought the product. Fortunately, that’s not how you measure influencer marketing.

Believing Your Results

As a marketer, you must constantly evaluate how effective your efforts are. After all, you’re spending money, with the (ultimate) goal of making more money. Each marketing activity is a step on that journey from awareness to purchase and advocacy.

You have to measure against your goals, because you get what you measure. This is often true … but what about when it’s not? For all the data and metrics, marketing is still more art than science. So marketers make educated guesses about what will work, and sometimes we guess wrong. Or we do something really well, but it works differently from what we expected.

Don’t get hung up on the failure — or success — of your program. One of the great things about working with influencers is that everything is out there in real time. That means you know immediately if something didn’t work, and you can get in there and address it immediately.

Much of influencer marketing happens as conversations. Which means that your response is as important as your initial activity. If something fails, ask “Why?” and “What could we do differently?” and use the answers to inform your next plan.

Very few marketing plans are “one-and-done” activations. Think of any program as a stage in a marathon. Your results tell you whether your tactics are working. If they aren’t, you change them so you can be more successful in the next stage.

Of course, you may be the one in a million that gets it right the first time. Congratulations! The rest of us will be over here, interpreting our results and figuring out how we can do better next time.