How to get the best out of influencers

[Music] so welcome to the holy grill how to get the best out of influences over the next half an hour or so we'll be discussing exactly what it takes to find the right influences get them aboard and most importantly how to get the best results so I'm going to start with you Benedict just as a slight intro to influencer marketing what do you think about when you know when you're looking to do that last year is actually that ending needs to be really really really individual like every game is different every influencer is different so that's what

makes it hard to answer your question because you need to look at a specific case and how to exactly implement that case for instance of marketing and for influencer themselves which pretty much is the answer I guess okay understanding of what influencer marketing is obviously otherwise you wouldn't yeah so thinking about what what influences want I want to turn to such as the the resident influencer just like what you want from a pitch initially I think whenever we're working with brands it's obviously we want to know what the product is ultimately and and how well it fits with with our content and our audience and we object is that brand as well you know is there a particular thing they're trying to raise awareness

of you know what opportunities are there for us to have how much freedom will we have in there just to help us make the decision in terms of whether or not we want to do it you know that sort of process is you know that's the the best thing to allow us to kind of crack on with with a with a pitch and a campaign okay and so you represent the ox' cast which is obviously a huge collective of creators all doing different things and working with different companies how do you decide which brands are right for your particular company all of our all of our channels are their own companies and partners and stuff so we allow them to make their own decisions and it's the same with all the content they make that's how this whole ecosystem is kind of existed is its authentic personal content gaming content if you go onto the BBC right now you won't see any if you go onto channel 4 you occasionally see one and then it dies again the reality is is that those

is a niche piece of content it doesn't work on linear TV it works really well online and there's millions of people doing it and yet we have managed to find an audience with our particular way of doing it and if we stray away from our authenticity and our style and the reason why we're doing it we potentially lose that audience so whenever we're kind of working with brands and doing stuff and any of our partners working with brands you know we have to trust them to make the right decision about their authenticity and their audience because you know we don't want to lose that there's there's no long-term gain for anything like that sure just as a segue from that is there anything that would would put you off working with a particular brand or company anything about their approach or it's it's always tricky obviously you'd like to think for people who've elected to work with you kind of understand who and what you are and the content you make and that's a real aspiration it's

not always the case certainly if the brand is very prescriptive very controlling often that's not going to work well they should go and try and buy some display advertising somewhere you know what we're creating is the messaging through the filter of us again our audiences have come to us because they like the way and our view of the world the lens we view it through and so we often have an idea as to how we would shape that marketing message to better suit our style or content and you know it come across authentic it should be authentic so if a brand seems like it's going to be too controlling as kind of weird as that sounds but if it is going to be that they you know they basically want us to be a mouthpiece for them then then normally that's not something at least personally that I would want to do you know I'm always looking for great partners to work with that kind of allow us to achieve cool things it's not wish fulfillment is what we always aim for with any of our branded things you know

if we've got a big budget let's spend it on the content let's create the best video we can that works well for the brand and that works well for us works well for our audience it's that kind of win triangle it's not a pyramid scheme which I was excited do they wanna see the triangle before I was really disappointed when I didn't turn out to be a pyramid scheme but anyway that's fine it's in the public domain so you guys it's fine okay so thinking about approaching influences how do you find the right one for the job it's the same sort of things really so it's the most important thing as much in the match in the audience so making sure we understand what the client wants and that usually is the messaging but really it's about what audience they want to reach and then making sure those two things will match with what the influencer and can bring in terms of audience and then it's kind of point of view kind of point of view in terms of

what the client will once what's how they want their message to be brought across because as types of saying almost the most important thing is making sure that the content that gets made for is authentic and you know our focus is always on how can we how can we help them create great content because that's what that's what they want that's what the audience is going to want and engage with so the matching part of it there's there's plenty of fairly straightforward ways you can yeah has been commoditized the finding of the influences and that's the easy bit in terms of just finding a list of names who will vaguely match your brand then it's doing due diligence on all of those and making sure the type of content the messages are going to fit well on that channel and for those audiences and they won't be rejected okay so you know you found the right influencer that you want to work with how you know how do you how do you pitch to them that you want to do that how do you get their attention

essentially generally if we don't know them already we know lots of people already generally it's as simple as messaging them by email or social I mean you say I'm email email or social reach out to people okay so I'm thinking about different creative disciplines in this case the odds casting a lot of game stuff would you consider working with brands that are kind of outside of that remit you know there's this food and drink of theirs movies and things like that we do you just exclusively want pictures from developers or companies related to games or would you you know work outside that remit floor we work across lots and lots of different sectors not just not just in games and

we were lots of craters not just in games but for the upstart creators who we obviously work very closely with yeah we're actually possibly more interested in people outside of outside of games where the focus isn't on converting a gamer to download a mobile game for instance it's much more about the partnership to create some great content and that brand can have their brand story around some great content isn't necessarily just about a specific thing pretty much goes in both ways so we actually focus completely on work with gaming brands but what we're doing is we're working less and less with gaming influences so the same principle applies to the other side did you have to see like what kind of similar audiences as

you said you can reach because not necessarily especially when it comes to mobile games like literally everyone is playing games in mobile and not necessarily only the hardcore gamers who watch the chance like the Ox cast will be interested in gaming but there are lots of casual games out there you can actually promote well unknown gaming channels I can on this one actually so I really I have a great big bug bear with people talking about how many millions and billions of gamers there are you know it's like saying like how many people in here like music - like music oh music fans aren't we I could put on some music now and I would love it well you don't know it'd be Huey Lewis in the news but everyone's got different tastes and I feel like people approach you know gaming and gamers and it's like you know millions and millions of billions of people play mobile games they're not gamers they're not gamers not in this

traditional sense and so to reach them you shouldn't necessarily be going down that core gamer route just because you have a game doesn't mean you need to speak to people who exclusively play games often those people don't really care about mobile games in the same way that I don't know what Taylor Swift - some recently I don't so I think it's just one of those things to bear in mind with a lot of different products equally you know just because we create gaming content doesn't mean that's all we can talk about and create content around ultimately we're not journalists we're we're entertainers we're looking to create entertainment around anything but we enjoy we happen to enjoy particular games and that's how we've grown but we also like you eating Donuts and actually that's it you know some people of Voe vastly varied in their interests and your influences you know hopefully they kind of have people gravitate towards them because they have similar interests so it is a very effective way to reach people sorry

that's my rant that's thanks for coming to my TED talk there we go all right so moving forward on to putting together campaigns with influences what is the very first thing that you should do when setting up campaign obviously like what we've talked about setting a target audience likes having a size for the campaign and obviously timing you need lots of time in to prepare for a campaign right so we have maybe I can read right now us hey life in two days well sorry that won't happen you need expectations you need to know which time you like to influence need to take a look at the game need to play it need to take time to prepare the content etcetera etcetera so you need lots of time to prepare for the campaign and ideally to discuss with us what kind of strategies you would be doing where we could find right influences cetera et cetera so yeah it's not like a Facebook

ad where you can go hey like I'm gonna start this now I'm gonna flip the switch then I'm gonna flip switch off right so it's it's different and many especially and performance marketing don't like appreciate that influence marketing is a very unique way to reach the audience that has many advantages but definitely also needs to be treated accordingly it's not performance marketing and people you try and squeeze it down the idea of it just being pawns marketing and whilst their cost per install as the main goal that you're going forward tends to end with a terrible campaign that doesn't work very well because it's just misunderstanding where influencer marketing sits as a marketing channel and there's very good talk earlier by match-made and she said forget a name but number one thing is start with a goal start understand your objective in mind and that is very much where the markets here

or the community manager or the PR person whether it runs the campaign needs to understand what outcomes they're after you know what does success look like for them and then then you can build a campaign me on that but if they're if they're outcomes they want is just the tiniest CPI they can get but this is almost definitely the wrong channel for them absolutely thinking about creative control it can be tempting for a lot of brands so just want to really hold the reins with a with a career or just say you know this is what you're doing this is what you're supposed to say you know we expect this amount from you we're not realising that every campaign is different in every crater is different so how much creative control should a brand really have over creator very little really the whole point is that where they're paying for the influence of that creator over their audience and that is just removed if if the content is not in the style that the

audience is once that they've come in for so yeah it's it's one of those things that they're paying for something on there they're hurting it themselves you know it's just it's it's just the wrong way around I mean a certain spec of control can be asserted because what brands know is kind of what is for example cool about the game you have to keep in mind that probably the influence when in contact about brand will be seeing the game for the first time most likely so definitely brands are we as an agency know how to best like share a light on this game specifically right so we've played the game we know which levels are for example especially cool especially fleshly but in the end the inference will always know best what works best for the fans because they have the connections to the audience they know those people so they should always have the last word on this okay exactly from that how does making sponsored video

content differ from buying just a traditional ad space you can't block it that's the that's the first one you can if it's the message and so I mean firstly is what you're paying for is like the book club you know if rich then Judy say it's a good book I'm gonna buy it you know I they I trust in them I trust them and so I'm buying into that trust and that bond that we've built over many books I've never read any books guys you know display advertising is you know you're just shouting out into the void about what you think is great but if a friend of mine that I talk to for anywhere from 20 minutes to 6 hours a day only they talk to me constantly and I never I can't talk to them because they're just a video or a livestream if they say something to me and they're saying that this is good and they

authentically believe that because I know them I can tell if they're just saying it then that is super effective that's really really powerful and really useful based on getting results from a campaign is there a right way to predict a certain amount of user engagement from a certain creator I mean really and understanding you'd expect as their averages around views and watch time and engagements and looking at not just their usual videos but when they done brand-new videos those are not not falling into the trap of okay there's this greater say on YouTube gets 700,000 views full of our videos so we'll get them to make a dedicated video but those 700 thousand views come because they're playing fortnight and your dedicated video is on a mobile game and then being surprised when it gets 50,000 views you

know it's that sort of thing of understanding the channel and the audience not just looking at some top-line subs average for monthly views bridge engagements that kind of thing digging deeper on that kind of content okay it was the best way to calculate a return on investment on a video or a piece of content I think it has to be part of your wider you're wider campaign makes something it's it's what I find what often happens when people say it hasn't worked for them is they'll pick one or two influences and they'll have a very small budget and then they'll be surprised when it doesn't happen coming back to the idea it's not performance marketing it's not money in and you know what results you're gonna get out of it if that's the kind of marketing you need you need to be using other platforms it should be part of your marketing mix probably a large part and should put the

headline part of it and then use a lot of that content for the rest of your marketing but again it comes down to the start point of what were your what were your goals you should be tracking everything you possibly can track and there's lots of ways to track things but you've also got to remember that most people aren't following links and descriptions of YouTube videos even people who then go on to take that action when we've tested this it's about 10% of the people who will take an action will bother to click that link in the description and you can make it go higher and lower by doing focal call outs instead of overlays by the way you talk to the audience around partnering with with the brand you can make that amount of people that click but you've also gotta remember this is this has to be an awareness piece as well and that lots of people will need to be have that brand put to them you know five six seven eight nine times before they'll make that purchase and you've

got to remember that when you're evaluating the campaigns I think what's really important in this regard is that you actually try always to create an engagement with the followers and fans of the influence that should always be the main goal and it's a great way to actually measure the return on investment way better than for example the tracking link that which we all know isn't click that much really so you can't just based a success of the campaign right furniture and clicks and tracking link so what we always try to do is we and get a hook inside the game that we want to promote for example that influencer will create clans inside the game where the fans can can join them and then you can see like how they're engaged then we have clan wars between the influences that's pretty much for standard YouTube video but you can also do campaigns on social media like Instagram for you and provide contests that the influence of society fans can do like have them like some

creative arts drawing stuff that then can be again used by the game's creator to expand their gaming space and that's really where you can see like many many many many of the engaged fans coming in from influencer marketing I think when era now where there's less sort of just you know influencer marketing isn't really a one-time thing you know just pay somebody to do video and then never return to them again a lot of influences are partnering with companies to do you know repeat promotion with the same thing or the same game or whatever how would a brand keep her keep it creative coming back on actively wanting to do that because again brands are on always looking for low CPI's like that's that's always the the big hole out there and obviously if an influencer will work

with a brand for a long time that's more sort of reengagement campaign right we will get to use this back into the game get the fans back and you won't see that cheap CPI's as you might have or might not have seen when an influencer does the first content piece on a certain game so that comes back to their an initial question from my perspective there's there's brands that create good products and there's brands that create good products that convey really well to audiences and of that there's an even smaller subset which are ones I like and sometimes some of those also want to pay me and that's what we call the the dream and once you've got the dream and it's working and it's winning for everyone then that's a no-brainer and trying to create those situations it

can happen if that original targeting and pairing works upfront if you have the right person with the right game it will naturally just make sense to return to that if it's always performing well but as with all things there will be a time when everyone in our audience kind of knows that and there just comes a time when when that has turned but certainly I mean for certain brands will work with stuff like for example at Blizzard you know we visit now for seven years and it's across a variety of different products but we always know those products of good will always work really well we rent a clean massive fans of them but if they've got budgets we can create bigger easier products promotions for them and it just it it seems to always work for everyone and so that's just good I think when the products are good it's just infinitely easier and obviously that's the easiest thing in the world for me to say is I just make a

really good game problems but I mean those sorts of scenarios can be really useful yeah it depends on what what the needs are so I think for the classic sponsorship where you tie yourself to a brand and that's going to run across a lot of your content whether that's just a logo or shoutouts or you go to events with them that can be a really good partnership between an influencer and a brand that tends to be or it works best as something that there's a high ticket purchase that is not something someone's going to click on something and buy so expensive in our world expensive computer tricks that kind of stuff but otherwise outside of that it's cars and those sorts of things that are not not very quick buys when it's when it's a game a launch game and someone's just gonna buy it and when they brought it that's the end of it then those partnerships don't really

work so well they should be the sort of partnership so that should be fostered really not through a page it completes a campaign but through a community team that has really great links with influences and gives them you know it just builds that rapport with them but there are lots of games that will have new updates that you want people to buy so that's where building a relationship or with someone who will then come back and reactivate an audience makes a lot of sense as well I've run out of prompts so I want to move back to what you said about working with blizzards and obviously working with companies that you're big into what was your under so one of the biggest campaigns that you've done and why why it was so good yeah I guess so I think one of the more recent ones we did with Blizzard was around what of Warcraft and we we partnered up with salted food so they're a fantastic

group of food youtubers they make amazing content where they you know their chefs and just passionate guys around food and the the gist of that video was we taught them how to play World of Warcraft and then they went away and baked things from the game in your life that we then ate and judged because obviously we played this game for 10 years so I know what you know the ball would taste like you know it's just intrinsic and so for us that worked really well it was great for a lot of audiences out there it was kind of what we always aim for with collaborations where you get a bit of a kind of Marvel Cinematic Universe where it's really cool when suddenly spider-man's there and so dire man and they're in the same space it's crazy because I watched him over there I watch him there now they're in the same space so so those sorts of kind of partnerships can work really well but again it kind of adds a further kind of challenge to the the marketing guys in trying to find not only suitable people for the products

but then suitable people for each other in terms of collaborating and creating content but for something about that then involved us having you know six or seven people involved on the Yogscast side four or five on the salted food side that was a big video on our channel because on their channel a lot of social on the side and it's one of those things where truth be told in the room we would have done that if we weren't paid those are always the best ones and on some of the more ambitious videos pretty much all that we've got paid has gone into the video but that's okay that's good that's really fun for us you know we've done promotional stuff for like World War two games where we've had a tank and we've driven around in a Sherman tank like doesn't want to do that that's amazing so I think it's it's always a question of you know the the content with anything we make we're always trying to entertain the audience and hopefully grow an audience and so

anything we make if it's going to kind of push people away that's probably not a good video to make and that's not meaning that anyone's winning at that point so if we can use a brand's budget to create something that helps grow us that's then again that win-win-win okay can I put the same question to you Benedict it's a particularly impressive campaign that you've done and explain why it was good I think my favorite campaign was actually with so you have like some cool characters fighting against like different different enemies and there are like lots of lots of crazy characters where like the ninja had big like hair and whatever and we had the opportunity for them to design a

cat for the game that was actually been implemented so we had a contest on social media on Twitter and Instagram for all the fans of don't forget so they did a YouTube video where they played the game and start this contest and said to follow us that they should submit their content ideas for a new battle cat for the game and like we had huge resonance on social media like several thousand cats were created and were submitted to us and as a winner and that cat has this by now in the game is playable and has been used sort of us we brought yokes cards together with for game grumps and then we recreated British Bake Off with them challenging

each other that and chaos ensued rather than amazing baking obviously that was a lot of fun and that those although the branding for the game I mean it was for Jurassic world evolution nothing to do with cooking but it lets a little awareness of people who would never have clicked on anything to do with that came before and but also those videos were great so they are last year there some of third in the top 10 of both of those channels most viewed videos of the year and when you can get that magic mix of his pointed content but it's amazing content than the audience loves that's when there's been this stuff really starts to work okay thank you perfect so just to surround up what is one piece of advice that you would give to everyone left in the room sort of help their influencer marketing game and how to take you know influences the way that

they should be treated I would say kind of either do your research or work at someone who does research people who've been burnt through previous attempts at influencer marketing it's been because they've done it wrong where they've gone with a big headline number that means nothing either subscribers or or views or anything of that it's all about relevance you need to properly understand what it is you have what it is they have and whether or not those two things would achieve the goal you run so if you can define those things your budget then will define how many of those people you can work with but but truth be told just figure out what it is you have from what it is they have to take it easy it's people's business you have to see like influence our people that the fans of people in jeans

sometimes nice happens sometimes and don't as Ori was mentioned don't make inferences to machine stuff like don't say exactly you should say that but let influencer campaigns often take a natural flow if the contrary gets that's creative and then you should stick to that and not say ok but we need to know Tommy exactly right there and we need to say exactly that but rather take it easy let campaign flow let the influence do the stuff with both of those I mean I think set out to make great content is just the best way to go about it ok it's everything I've got time for has anyone got any questions for these gents I've got the mics I will do the running so

you guys have spoken a lot about relevance the right audience how do you know what your audience is like and what do you know or how do you about the influencers and match those so we actually we obviously have a lot of analytics both on twitch and YouTube which will tell us kind of audience demographics breakdown locations genders all of those kind of different elements but I think truth be told they are reflections of the influencer if the influencer is very sweary they're probably quite okay with sweary stuff if the influencer is very much into memes and reviews and so for that they probably find that sort of content interesting as well so really it's knowing kind of if your product is a certain thing the a mobile game that is a competitive and social is trying to

figure out who out there is into competitive social mobile games and what sort of person is that and then trying to narrow that down into the the actual influences are out there and it can be a very arduous task if you're not yourself consuming that sort of content but that's we're working with an agency that already knows a lot of those things or is already doing those things well how to do those things can save you a lot of time and effort or just issue you have a better hit rate when you actually get around so kind of press the button so it sounds like you kind of just have to manually do it and look at demographics yeah yeah basically yeah there's there isn't a there's no API call that really kind of shouts about who and what someone is later yeah cool okay hey so if you're not a big company with this marketing department and all this kind of thing you just a bunch of guys

you made a fun game let's say like we thought oh I bet that guy's on hatful would actually have a great time what would be the best way to contact them do they check it's I think it's just yeah hat film hat films yogscast calm eye hits all three by all means like I think a few people have asked like two influences only do stuff that they're paid for no no it's only the thing is is if I make a let's say a Minecraft video I know my audience will watch that I know they will like that that's good business if you come to me and say hey she want to stop doing your good business and do my thing I'm like well no like I'll tell you what how much do you make I will cover your loss so if you just do that it's a win-win everyone's okay even then oh I don't know it's probably gonna hurt my momentum because everyone else out here is still doing fortnight in Minecraft and why and I think people once they get around the idea that you know to disrupt the machine that is I say fortnight you've got all these people out there

getting all these views and impressions and revenue from doing something even then it's about making good games and that way then yes you don't have to pay or if you've got a game you know people are gonna love so like with hat films if you had a currently they're on a big they call it family games but I do know in monopoly and some of that if you had games a family based game it's called BFF or Die okay so it's togetherness exactly that sort of stuff like that kind of with a bit of kind of cards against humanity' or a bit of jack box kind of fun those sorts of things if that makes good content yet that's great even then it sometimes is a risk yeah and so sometimes they'll look at it and be like yeah it's great we should probably just do another one do you think they would kit so like I don't know if you know Merton Louise you do the logitech video so they did a video and it somehow it's become the most popular game on their channel with like a hundred thousand views do you think other people will like the Hat phone rise or whoever would would think oh

that cool if I if I point that out would they think that's a good thing what should I not miss sometimes no I mean it doesn't to say it it just depends on how relevant or actually you know it would be on their channels to their audiences yeah yeah because they often different however youtubers and twitch streamers they follow trends so if they're seeing like hey all these guys are getting all these views doing this thing we could do that that'd be fun yeah I think it doesn't hurt to highlight that similar guys who did this and they saw really great views and their audiences loved it so check it out see if it's something that works for you and then that's where sometimes just give them the extra nudge you know paid content can help and often it doesn't mean that people will only ever play that game from there on in if they're paid if it works for them they're gonna keep playing it kind of get a load of channels to play my game and organically and if they don't then

maybe I'll pay them and I think those the wrong mindset to set out on influencer marketing path with I think they are different strategies that you should have and should be channels that you think your game is perfect for and you should work pretty hard to build a relationship and get them to play your game and then not at a point which they don't offer to pay them because I think your shortchanging your you're gonna do a paid strategy your paid strategy in terms of how you're how you're going to approach that and how you're going to get the most out of it I think they are they're separate separate channels to go down and I genuinely think they shouldn't be toned down paid route unless you've got a good enough budget to spread to spread the risk around a little bit if you've only got a few thousand pounds you shouldn't put that whole part into until one influencer to play your game and get paid for it it's too big a risk I'd put that money in having a really good community manager who spends a lot of time reaching out to lots of different channels and realizes

there's though they hit rate might be smaller lots of them do not read their emails I spent time reading every single email that came in to your cast and most of them are terrible that's why people don't read them it's not that they're rude or you know they they haven't got the time for it really it's just a kit Cent shitload of just terrible terrible emails and so it's not worth anyone's time going through all that kind of stuff so email is a tricky way to turn alright so within the paid content world of this are there different ways that you guys get paid or is it generally speaking a specific business mom I know you you were talking about performance marketing this being a sort of a different mindset but do you sometimes agree to to get involved on a

kind of per action type basis or is it always like some sort of flat fee up front kind of situation point of view it's almost always a flat fee and sometimes an agency will take we'll take some of that risk but from a creator point of view they're doing the same they're doing the same activity they're taking the same risk they're taking the same amount of time to create the content so they need to they need to get paid the flat fee for it and sometimes an agency will take some risk and we'll we'll do it on a performance base not really our point of view is pretty similar in that we're spending the time doing the work and so it's a little bit flat fee generally I mean most working on flat fee basis we've have actually some influences if they really like game again and if they're really involved and if you really think the game will as well

etcetera agreed to work on a CPA so cost per action but that is really dependent on the influencer because obviously they will invest the time to do the video and obviously they need proper return on that right so in France it takes the time to play your game to produce straight content then it's their job and it's fair to compensate them like just for the effort itself and then if they know if they're security they usually also make great content out of that what's it and is there is there a relative range of what that flat fee can be I mean is it is it very widely ranging or is it sort of a within a typical tight window yeah I mean yeah ranging from channel to channel from game to game you know if you've got a particular type of game if I'm feeling like that's a bigger risk for me you know I like the game but I

don't if my audience will you know I'm happy to say mr. good game I enjoy it but is it gonna make good content am I going to miss out load of views is it going to hurt my next four videos because people haven't tuned in again because of YouTube algorithms etc then that might be somewhere where you know I'm not gonna take that risk unless it feels like less of a financial risk and obviously then other channels it may not be a risk because it may be right in their wheelhouse that's the sort of stuff that they love in fact if they'd be delighted to do it and they would be cheaper so it's kind of vary depending on your products and the people that's actually a bit of a problem because many publishers approach us and want to know okay what I've seen you work with influence X what does he cost like can you name me the prize or something like that but price for influence that are very individual so that's always something we we don't we're not saying okay these are influences and these are

their prices for content because that's not how it works right influences sometimes you may not want to do something with your game at all because they don't think it's a great fit on the other hand if we see great fit on the in front side they might actually do it for very very reasonable price so it thinks very a lot you have to look at again the individual influence and the individual game so that's what we actually don't like go out there and say okay these are influenced that designer price okay can I have a run overflows for these two agents [Music]