Influencer marketing is big business in the beauty industry. In fact, some of the market’s powerhouses, such as Estée Lauder, have spent as much as 75% of their budget on tapping top talent. Such investments are only set to scale up as the influence of social media stars expands. But, with costs rising at the rate of follower counts, how can brands ensure their money is well spent?
The success of social media campaigns often begins and ends with your choice of influencer – a decision that 53% of beauty brands find problematic. Understanding this challenge, MMI responded to brands’ demands for more strategic solutions. And so, our new data-driven service, influencerCONNECT, was born.
We have long been known for providing insights to the media landscape, based on our total market view of 950 beauty brands in print, online and social media. Now, influencerCONNECT enables you to quickly and effectively identify partners that will help your campaigns soar on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
Essential to strategic campaign planning, it takes you through every step of a successful partnership – from choosing who to work with, to assessing performance once those influencer posts go live. There are four key stages involved: discover, validate, manage and evaluate. Here’s how each of them helps you take your campaign to new heights...
First, influencerCONNECT enables you to find influencers – both beauty and non-beauty – across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. This can be carried out through keyword search and audience filters, which you can tailor to your specific campaign needs. Discover partners based on their interests, demographic, location or gender – a task that’s hugely time-consuming and nigh on impossible to achieve manually. Soon, you’ll have a talent-long list that aligns with your messaging.
Replace ‘gut feel’ decisions with data by understanding the reach and impressions your prospective brand partners can typically achieve. Visible metrics mean you can look beyond (sometimes misleading) follower counts, and compare a selection of influencers objectively. Additionally, you can dig deep into an influencer’s audience demographics on key platforms, including relative newcomer TikTok. influencerCONNECT also helps you spot ‘red flag’ details, such as fake followers or an Instagram aesthetic that jars with your own.
To save you even more time, influencerCONNECT allows you to reach out and connect within the platform, so you can keep communication in one place. This makes it quicker and easier to manage across your team and to activate your influencers from a single solution.
When your campaigns are underway, you can evaluate performance in real-time, track handles, hashtags and URLs, and see the success of your campaign unfold. This allows you to react quickly to what is going on, and instantly identify who is driving engagement, follower boosts, increased reach, and clicks to your site. The performance metrics are saved post-campaign, so you are able to access them any time. Turn them into a report, and you’ll have priceless insights to inform your future strategies.
To book a demo of influencerCONNECT and find out how you can manage all your influencer marketing in one place.