Today in Digital Marketing - The Role of "Goldilocks Influencers" in Marketing Campaigns

Starting point is 00:00:00 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,

Starting point is 00:00:32 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

Starting point is 00:00:50 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.

Starting point is 00:01:37 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.

Starting point is 00:02:37 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

Starting point is 00:03:14 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.

Starting point is 00:04:09 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.

Starting point is 00:04:46 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.

Starting point is 00:05:26 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

Starting point is 00:05:51 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.

Starting point is 00:06:15 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,

Starting point is 00:06:43 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.

Starting point is 00:07:22 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.

Starting point is 00:07:44 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

Starting point is 00:08:35 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

Starting point is 00:09:26 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. Yeah. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel,

Starting point is 00:10:18 home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A. 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

Starting point is 00:11:10 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.

Starting point is 00:11:38 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

Starting point is 00:12:26 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,

Starting point is 00:13:28 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.

Starting point is 00:14:12 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.

Starting point is 00:14:45 And if you liked this longer form deep dive episode, consider signing up for the premium Finding Goldilocks Influencers, How Follower Count Drives Social Media Engagement. And if you liked this longer form deep dive episode, consider signing up for the premium feed where we usually have one or two of these a month speaking to marketing scientists about new findings in our field, findings that really aren't covered anywhere else. When you sign up for the premium feed, you still get the daily show, but now you'll get it earlier with no ads, better audio quality and with audio chapters you can use to skip between stories. You can sign up by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com 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

Starting point is 00:15:30 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 sounded sad upon the radio.

Starting point is 00:15:46 He moved a million hearts in mono. I'm Todd Maffin. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday.

Today in Digital Marketing - The Role of "Goldilocks Influencers" in Marketing Campaigns

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