Influence in 2022

INFLUENCER MARKETING GETS AN UPGRADE

The idea of "influence" in marketing has come a long way.

It’s generally been used to describe any way that one person or organization can shift someone else’s behaviours or thinking, but somewhere around the time that we realized there are individuals on the Internet who are responsible for major shifts in the marketplace, we started to use the word "influence" to describe a certain type of content creator.

The most common mistake many of us made was the leap from reach to influence. What it means to influence people and their behaviours hasn’t changed, but because we could suddenly quantity the number of people who were seeing, clicking, and liking content they were exposed to, we made the assumption that the data could be used as a proxy for real behavioural shifts.

As with all new markets, early buyers make poor decisions because of a lack of information, which is totally understandable. Most of us know that we're taking some degree of risk when we jump into something as new as this. When we have no way of comparing the options available to us, we don’t know what others are paying for similar services, and we all feel like we’re being left behind by our competition, of course we’re going to make mistakes along the way.

Today, the practice of “influencer marketing” is starting to professionalize and address some of those mistakes we made as we rushed into this. For example, last week Instagram officially announced the launch of a marketplace they’re calling Creator Portfolio. It will be a space where content creators can build and display a package of their work, including who they reach, what they create, and previous brand collaborations they’ve done. The marketplace will also make it easier to see who has a track record of delivering great work that their partners were satisfied with, versus the ones on the other end of the spectrum.

IG isn't the only game in town, either. While sites that promised varying degrees of influencer-matching have existed for several years, they have typically been fairly limited, acting more like an agency’s portfolio than a true search engine for partnership. Today, powerful organizations like Klarna are getting into the game, promising access to both a “global marketplace” of influencers, as well as “proprietary, machine learning” that will match you with the most relevant creators.

Buzzwords aside, we’ve come a long way from the days of scrolling hashtags to seek out potential collaborators.

The optimistic view is that, because of the increased transparency now available to us, we will all remember what it actually means to be influential. We will set aside the vanity metrics and create mutually beneficial work with people who may have richer connections with tight-knit communities. The trend these days is to call those folks "micro-influencers," but that undersells their importance. The phrase suggests that they are somehow less important, or less valuable than people with bigger view counts, but if we refocus on what it actually means to be influential, we may find that some of the most powerful people have been hiding in plain sight all along.

Of course, that change won’t happen overnight, so in the meantime, the next time you’re considering a partnership with a creator, try to cut through the noise and ask yourself: What is the shift that we’re actually trying to create here, and does this creator give us a greater ability to achieve that outcome?

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Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting