Beyond Myths: Influencer Marketing Is Not What You Think It Is

[Music] thank you for having me today greetings from spain from the sun in barcelona uh it's a great and honor it's a great honor for me uh to be here and to share with you um my and our expertise and i hope that some things that i will share with you right now will make sense to you and to your business and to your promotion attempts on something um i'm working as a chief global growth officer in type factory one of the leading influencer marketing agencies in the world and

speaking about the influencer marketing itself we do understand that this is one of the fastest growing advertising channels for many businesses and for gaming industry and as well and uh when we were thinking about the topic of my speech we decided to make some kind of a homework for you to help you to avoid some mistakes that can be made during your planning campaigns and maybe some your first attempts working with different influencers for solving problems for you so we're going full gas and it's time to break free and i would like to start with uh one of the most common myths that we have then when we're talking about brands and that they should partner with only with influencers who create content that is relevant uh for their niche it

actually doesn't make sense because usually your target audience has many more interests besides your product so it's important to remember and another important thing is that competition in your niche can be very high making and difficult to stand out so we suppose and we advise you to um first of all focus on your audience and find influencers who are relevant not to your product first of all but to your audience first of all and define categories that are regularly related to your industry so um we have some case it's a simple casual match free mobile game with a target audience female 25 plus there were some evident categories for example family lifestyle fashion and beauty and some non-evident coding uh categories for example mystery and horror you can see the numbers for example the cdr and the conversion rate and they were quite low and the return of

investments in general as well as the return of advertising spends was uh quite positive so uh take it to your note and um i think you have to focus on it when you're planning some campaigns um another important point i would like to mention here now is that um advertising should be negative and not very obvious but frankly speaking all of us do understand that commercial is commercial and we don't have to hide it at all but we have to do some things instead for example create eye-catching and engaging ads that speak to your audience and we have to make sure that your ads tell a story first of all that is relevant to your story uh to your audience and we have to take a creative spin and the most important thing is that

we have to leave some space and influence uh for influences for their creativity because uh they do understand their audience uh best of all so uh moving forward um i guess that's the most uh important and my favorite topic in micro influencers are super effective uh well actually not because um uh usually micro influencers can reach a very low number of people and we have to understand it another thing is that working with micro influencers is time consuming so we suppose and we advise you to think in a different way first of all to partner uh both with micro and medium-sized influencers simultaneously uh sushi choose a social media platform depending on your goals we have a huge experience working with micro influencers and we have some do's and don'ts and i would

like to share with you um some expectations for example microinfluencers are easy and fun to work with not actually because they are very choosy the level of responsibility is not very high they often miss deadlines on a regular basis tones of paperwork so we do have to remember it when we are planning some media plans and campaigns using the micro influencers as a core another important expectation is that small channels help to save budgets sometimes yes sometimes no and the reality is that usually um cpm tends to be at least 20 percent higher than then for channels with the average number of views you can see the small table on the right uh side of my slide right now and you can see that the cpm for example for the real views about

50 000 is more is about 500 bucks it's too much uh moving forward um sorry another expectation is that uh micro influencers have loyal high quality audience um the thing is that audience quality is quite questionable uh and uh usually they have a low impact on the number of organic installs which is crucial for gaming business as well but we'll talk about it later definitely and uh moving forward another important myth is that brands should use different influencer for different campaigns working is the edge in the agency i do understand how it is important to provide clients different lists of influencers that they can be used in different campaigns but um finding new influencers usually for every new campaign is time consuming and

too expensive for each side and we suppose doing it in another way for example work together with influencers and make sure that their voice is also heard it's very much important i've already mentioned that we have to provide them some space for their creativity because they know their audience well and also if you see that there is a sudden decrease in your performance you can always stop it we have a quite representative case it was some kind of a mobile shooter with a audience male 25 plus and there were two waves of the campaign and we have made a decision together with the client to use one more time top 11 performers after result analysis and here you can see some table and the comparison between the campaign one the wave one and the wave two uh for example

the cost per install was uh below expectations below 25 bucks for the first campaign it was about 20 and for the second one it was about 24 so it makes sense to repeat some effectively working influencers um another important point for me is creativity doesn't lead to high performance i do remember when we were working about three four years ago we don't even had um a standalone creative team inside our agency because we were not sure how to combine creative ideas with performance ideas with special projects and so on so on so on but we do have to understand and everybody does understand that branson times exhaust their usual performance channels capacity and we have uh to focus on uh different ideas trying unusual ideas to

showcase your brand personality launch different channels and i have provided some cases to you just to show all the variability that we can have using huge creative ideas working with influencers but before the cases i would like to pay attention that there are many types of creative projects with influencers you can make you can start with simple uh collaborations you can make music videos when you are quite experienced you can miss a mix offline and online activations as well use in-game celebrity endorsement and so on so on so on but just to show you a few for example mr beast and his dedicated unique videos ideas for brawl stars and tremendous results about uh 243 million views or one of my favorites uh maxwell created real life fire breathing

dragon for the raid shadow legends and earned about 1 million views as well and one of my favorites as well as tbo makes a tattoo with a rage shadow legend champion and it was an outstanding case by all means and speaking about the mixture of offline and online you can for example launch the uh official tick tock challenge for example for a meek around and dance like me so um another uh important point i would like to uh underline is that twitch usually when we are talking about twitch uh we do believe that twitch is not good for mobile games promotion and mostly focus on desktop but we have to understand that twitch users are interested in games and this is some kind of the epicenter of the gaming community itself and it has many um advertising features and instruments that brands

can use and uh in their campaigns uh to make better performance so we suppose that um when you use twitch you have to start using qr codes to convert desktop traffic into mobile uh also we have to introduce animated widgets and interactive counters to increase engagement rates and so on so and so on and partner basically with influencers for streaming often about mobile games because it makes sense um another important point about bonuses and some motivation for audience many think that if your campaign is performing well a small bonus can attack more attention and increase conversion and it's true and we we have uh to provide some additional value working with influencers for the audience so bonuses can encourage potential users and sell the game via

creator's personal link instead of going to the app store and uh here is the short comparison just to show what i'm talking about uh we have uh two campaigns that promoted the same product with the same geo same game january and etc and uh here are some basic and the most important medium metrics for example reach clicks and you can see that numbers differ greatly um when we use bonuses and we do not use bonuses as well so it makes sense so uh think about it when you will be planning some campaigns maybe to add something extra to the audience um about the concur creators and the cpm itself everybody tries to lower the cpm um and sometimes campaigns with influencers whose cpm is higher than the market average can be very effective and we

have to keep it in mind and first of all we have to pay attention to the content quality and the audience relevance instead of focusing only on cpm and also we have to take some in account that high quality channels are usually more expensive than the average quality ones because the because of the production cost itself so um for example there are simple examples providing uh my thoughts about this because you can see that some kind of a uh average us cpm is 20 25 bucks and using the higher cpm about 33 brings and makes more sense for example the return of the investment for the creparian was about 470 uh moving forward uh the important thing uh how to evaluate the campaign results uh many of us think that

we have to do it just after the campaign ended but all advertising campaigns have a delayed attack and we do have to remember about it and sometimes organic results can be influenced by a paid campaign as well so um my recommendation our recommendation is to take a period about the six months uh to track the effectiveness of the overall campaign and also you have to keep an eye on your app stores ratings and take into account the campaigns delayed effect um here is the uh tree uh that shows the the most important things you have to focus analyzing your campaign on each stage and in each amount for example you can start with some basic measurements results viewings organic traffic delayed performance and so on but don't forget about user-generated content uh don't forget about building

long-term uh relations uh don't forget about users retention and rig engagement as well and also we have some cases for example cross-platform rpg uh with the audience a male 25 plus and you can see the effect of the campaign the k media metrics for example the measurement was about uh 14 days later um after the campaign ended and then you can see the increase after the six months for example uh the cpm decreased and uh clicks uh plus 15 percent as well as the installs plus 16 percent also uh so on so uh give your time give your time to yourself just to analyze it on the um bigger time period uh start from the

end of the campaign and then to the six months it makes sense and another thing that um i would like to discuss it's quite a tricky moment for myself because i'm working in the agency right now but many believe that influence marketing agencies are overrated and lead to additional costs um sometimes happens yeah and sometimes it can cost you extra without any additional effectiveness and but if you plan uh to partner with some influencer marketing agencies you have to focus on some key points uh first of all you have to ask about their client stories and what helped them to succeed we do recommend uh to check the performance marketing skills uh when you're working with any influencer not only inference and marketing agency

uh also you have to check uh what softs they are using maybe some unique technologies that they have and so on because it makes sense that will help you to provide a fruitful communication and to provide good media plans and good strategies for you so um i don't have enough time so i'll be ready to ask your questions here right now or maybe later but i do suppose that don't settle for average and let's do epic together thank you for listening thank you for having me um i'm done hello okay thank you so much michael and not dash apologies for that um today we have a question for michael i know he's not here we can't see his lovely face but um does anybody have a question on the floor hey here we go ah that's much better

hello um does anybody have a question for for michael about influencer marketing from the floor it's not over do we have any from the uh in the in the group what's the one thing there's a q a there there is a q a can tech people open the q a can you click the button that says q a so you can see because i can't see it from here yeah can you see the q and a my clock on yeah for companies who have never used influencer where do you even start how do you select who's right for the company uh well uh the first point is always some kind of a marketing analysis we do have to understand uh about your product about your game about your audience about your expectations and then there will be several approaches on different budgets and different uh periods and then we'll discuss together uh what makes sense to make the first step because there is no universal

answer where we have to start it may be tick tock it may be youtube twitch or everything together so uh there is no unique solution and it always takes time to think and to provide the most relevant solution so okay awesome i think on that note we're probably gonna um we're probably going to say phil thank you and and and farewell it's a shame you can't be here i would love to be in barcelona my i'm going to the summer so maybe we'll drop into maybe next time thank you yeah i'll pop in so thank you so much michael and thank you thank you for having me fantastic okay