Today in Digital Marketing - The Role of "Goldilocks Influencers" in Marketing Campaigns
Episode Date: November 25, 2022In this special deep-dive Black Friday episode, Tod speaks with Simone Wies, co-author of the academic research paper: “Finding Goldilocks Influencers: How Follower Count Drives Social Media Engagem...ent.” ✅ Follow Tod on Social Media (LinkedIn, Mastodon, TikTok, etc.) 📰 Get the Newsletter: Click Here (daily or weekly)✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨ ✓ Ad-free episodes ✓ Story links in show notes ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions ✓ Better audio quality ✓ Live event replays ✓ Audio chapters ✓ Earlier release time ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed 🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad🗞️ Classified Ads: Book Now🙂 Share: Tweet About Us • Rate and Review 🎤 Follow: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page/Group ------------------------------------🎒UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and Courses Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate Producer: Steph Gunn. Ad Coordination: RedCircle. Production Coordinator: Sarah Guild. Theme Composer: Mark Blevis. Music rights: Source AudioSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us. Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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I probably don't have to remind you of this, how many of you have been planning this day
for months now.
It is, of course, Black Friday.
We have learned that Black Friday sucks all of the oxygen out of the air, and almost no
announcements or major developments in the digital marketing space happens.
So today, rather than covering what is a very slow news day, we present a special episode. One tactic that many brands are using today
is to try to boost sales by partnering with influencers.
And for those brands,
probably one of the first things they did
was to check out an influencer's follower count.
Usually the second metric marketers consider
is engagement rate,
because an influencer with a million followers
but a tiny engagement rate
won't
generate the same results as one with half as many followers, but whose audience hangs on every word
they say. How do you know which influencer to hire? And if you're growing your own brand's
account as a sort of influencer on its own, where is that tipping point where engagement kicks in?
New research in the Journal of Marketing tackled some of that. The article is called Finding Goldilocks Influencers, How Follower Count
Drives Social Media Engagement. Zimona Wies is one of the co-authors. She is a professor of
marketing at Guta University in Frankfurt, Germany, where she joins me from now. Dr. Wies, welcome.
Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
Not at all. What is a Goldilocks influencer?
A Goldilocks influencer is an influencer with an upper mid-tier number of followers.
So it's not the nano, like super small influencers,
but it's also not the big celebrity influencers with millions of
followers. Why did you call it Goldilocks? Well, yeah, that metaphor just came from
the general practitioner understanding that we learned about when we were conducting interviews with practitioners on this topic,
that we had one group of people saying, oh, like it's nano influencers now. This is like
the super new big thing in the industry. And then there was this other group that said, no, no,
like you still want to leverage the reach. You still want to go for these really big, yeah, celebrity mega influencers.
And yeah, we went into that research trying to find support for one or the other camp.
And then we ended up in between.
And neither of the two camps really was quote unquote right or like optimal.
Right. And I want to get to your results in a moment.
But can you back up a little bit and tell us what it was that you had set out initially to learn from this study?
Well, yeah.
Initially, we were just interested in better understanding whether.
First of all, what is the role of follower count in explaining engagement because
as i said uh we had um like it all started with one influencer agency reaching out to us
um with kind of exactly this question uh they were um yeah thinking about um so we started
this collaboration then it turned out like to involve many more
agencies and many more experts in the field to really inform this question. And yeah, that
kind of developed into this like kind of massive multi-method study, all with the goal to, well,
yeah, kind of understand whether it's the nano ones or the super big ones. And
yeah, it turned out as something in between. So what is the answer? What did you learn?
Well, it is something in between. So we found that the turning point lies between the often
quoted nano and celebrity influencers at around. So we differentiate between post engagement and story engagement.
We find that the turning point for story engagement is a little lower than for
post engagement and post engagement includes like number of likes or number of
comments or number of mentions.
And we find that the inflection point for these post-engagement metrics is a little bit about
1 million um one million one million followers right okay one million followers yeah and of
course their engagement is a little lower but in the same ballpark interesting so i i mean i'm
always sort of i think criticized by people in the academic world for trying to oversimplify
things but i'm going to attempt it again.
And whatever risk to me that ends up being.
So is it perhaps oversimplification that around a million followers is the right sweet spot to get if you want to maximize engagement in an influencer marketing campaign?
Can it be summarized that broadly?
Excluding the cost structure, right?
Yeah.
But just if you just want to optimize the engagement, that will be the sweet spot.
We also did a follow-up analysis where we somewhat controlled for the additional cost
you have when instructing nano-influencers who are less experienced, who need more help and guidance.
And the premium you have to pay for celebrity influencers
because they get paid disproportionately for their fame and celebrity status.
And if you control for that, we find that the sweet spot is a little lower.
It's still in the rather mid-tier.
So it's definitely not the nanos
in the like tens of thousands.
So it's a little lower once you control
for this more complicated cost structure
of these very small and very large influencers.
Yeah, we've used the phrase nano influencer.
What was your definition in terms of follower count
of what a nano influencer is,
just so people have kind of a base understanding?
So we started with influencers with 10,000 followers
because those are the ones where you can track
their follower behavior.
So 10 to 50 would be like nano to micro
in our conceptualization, yeah.
And you looked at Instagram accounts, about 800 or so.
How do you think your results might have been different
if you'd have studied TikTok or Pinterest or another platform?
Yeah.
So, I mean, what was nice about our data was that we not only looked at post data
and that it was not scraped because one big problem is that if you scrape data,
it's like exposed, curated,
right? Influencers only keep the most successful ones on the platform or might delete some of the
sponsored ones that don't fit their profile, or they will only keep those with high engagement.
So when you just scrape data, you run into a lot of problems in like really cleanly estimating any statistical effect.
And then stories is not publicly available.
So that cannot be used by just scraping it.
So we're like really happy with the data set that we created because it included these
video elements as well as the post elements.
So we hope that these Instagram findings
can then, you know,
like a little more generalized to other forums
because you have both types of visuals
in comparison to only using posts,
like static pictures.
But then, yeah, we didn't do any analyses
on Facebook, TikTok, Switch, and the likes.
We don't have any reason to assume that
the results would be different. Because as I said, we use so many different engagement metrics across
two different media types as in posts and stories. So yeah, there was no reason to believe that
results would hold. Did you study whether consumers consider how many followers an
influencer has in their decision of whether or not to engage with sponsored content?
Yeah, we did one big field study that I referred to earlier, but we also did a set of laboratory
experiments in which we zoomed into that psychological process. And first of all established via a set of eye tracking studies that users look
actively look for that follower quote-unquote signal we call it a signal or a cue that they use
that that followers use to infer their relationship with the influencer and if the user sees that
the follower has a large number sorry the user the influencer has a large number of followers,
this signifies that the relationship cannot be very close because an influencer with millions
of followers won't be able to entertain meaningful or quote-unquote close relationships. So we saw that users actively looked out for this
information by studying their eye movements. And then when people looked at someone like,
I don't know, Kylie Jenner or one of the Kardashians or something and saw that they
have a billion followers, how does that affect whether or not they'll engage with the content?
Do they tend to engage less with massive followings? Do they
tend to treat the sponsored content differently? How does it affect? How does large versus small
follower count affect the user behavior? Yeah, absolutely. It did affect it. We saw that
the user behavior changed and we saw that this was a more, well, roughly linear decrease. So like
you would in engagement likelihood. So you would see that the more followers an influencer have,
the less likely is an individual follower to interact and to engage with the content.
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I know engagement is important because it's an indicator of better results than just an impression.
But does engagement really matter to lower funnel goals like purchase likelihood or conversions?
We would have loved to study this too.
But unfortunately, our data set didn't allow us to test this.
We try to create something that we call a funnel where we start with impressions
and then we assume that a like is easier to do than a comment
because a comment involves more effort to do so.
And we also studied shares and saves,
which we assume, again, are different forms of propagation
because it's some kind of word of mouth if you share it with others
or you save it for another use.
So we studied our effects across a multitude
of these metrics, but not final sales.
It will be great to validate that though.
Right.
What does your gut tell you though?
Well, I assume that it also has an effect on sales because as I said,
we find these very robust findings across all kinds of metrics that we studied. So I assume
that it will also hold for sales. Absolutely. Right. What surprised you the most about your
findings? Yeah, I think it was the super saturation effect that at some point, engagement is actually worse when you add more followers.
So we would have expected maybe kind of, yeah, diminishing return so that we see less of an increase in engagement when follower count increased.
But a decrease was not what we
expected yeah and bottom line in light of your findings what should marketers do differently
in their influencer marketing campaigns from this day forward well first of all, focusing on the sweet spot of follower count and not putting too much emphasis on
the small nano ones or the super large celebrity ones.
And what we also find in our study is that a set of campaign properties can help to somewhat
flatten this, what we call inverted u-shape yeah this this
super saturation and decline after the inflection point which means that and we find that
customization of the content that the influencer posts and the familiarity of the brand that
sponsors the campaign these two factors help changing the curvature, so to speak,
which means of the relationship we find,
which means that it becomes less important
to find exactly that sweet spot
because as the curve becomes less deep,
the relationship is,
you're not so much benefiting from finding the sweet spot because the smaller one becomes more effective and the larger influences also become more effective.
So the entire relationship is less focused on finding the exact right number.
So that was another finding that we hope is useful for practitioners better understanding this nascent social media tactic or managing investments into this.
You had co-authors on the paper. Who were they?
I had two wonderful co-authors on the paper, Alexander Bleier from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Frankfurt and Alexander Ehrling from KU Leuven in Belgium.
Super. Well, it is fascinating research. I'm delighted you were able to share with us.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you so much for having me.
Zemona Wies is a professor of marketing at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Her paper in the Journal of Marketing is called Finding Goldilocks Influencers,
How Follower Count Drives Social Media Engagement.
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slash premium. Well, that will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced
by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island.
Our associate producer is Steph Gunn, production coordinator Sarah Guild, music licensing by Source Audio,
ad coordination by Red Circle.
And you know, not many
people know this, but our
theme composer, Mark Blevis,
is one of the world's foremost
radio personalities.
It's been a sad week in his field.
One of the best passed away.
Poor old Johnny Ray
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I'm Todd Maffin.
Have a restful weekend, friends.
I'll see you on Monday.