Influencer Marketing in Asia: An Interview with Aaron Brooks
Aaron Brooks
April 21, 2017
If you’ve never used this service before, or have noticed the term ‘boosting’ thrown around more often, you may be wondering what the benefits are.
Below we walk you through the key reasons why you should be amplifying your creator content, and what building out an influencer marketing strategy with recurring boosting activity can do for your bottom line.
When amplifying creator content, we typically see CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) of between $1 – $4 USD, depending on which market/s are being targeted. This is an extremely cost-effective way to extend the reach of your influencer activity and improve the value of your investment in creator content.
Even a small investment of $2,000 AUD boosting ad spend could deliver your campaign an additional 400,000 – 500,000 impressions across Australia, and even more in markets with low-cost CPMs such as the US, UK, Europe, Middle East, and SouthEast Asia.
Check out how OPPO capitalized on efficient placement costs to drive mass awareness.
When boosting your creator content via a programmatic ads platform, such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or any other social app, it opens the door to the full targeting powers of that ad platform — amplifying the campaign well beyond the followers of your selected creators.
One of the benefits of using the Vamp platform is that you can see the location and demographics of each creator’s following before selecting them. You might cast a perfect group of creators, with 70% of their followers located in the country you want to target, and 60% fitting the gender or age parameters you’re intending to reach.
However, when amplifying via an ads platform, you can ensure that 100% of the reach will fit your exact audience profile. This is extremely valuable for brands with any specificity to their target market. For example, a beauty brand wishing to reach women aged 25-40.
Learn more about the effectiveness of targeted boosting with Estee Lauder’s case study.
Amplifying via an ads platform also allows you to leverage the mountains of data each platform collects from its users, and add layers of detailed targeting on top of your demographics. This can come in the form of interests broad and niche, or more personal attributes like behaviors or job title.
For example, the aforementioned beauty brand may want to hone their targeting further to reach users with interests in ‘natural products’ and ‘skin care’, as well as users whose recent browsing activity shows that they are ‘engaged shoppers’.
Similarly, the power of ad platforms allows boosting to reach any custom audiences your brand may have developed. For example, directly targeting users who have engaged with any of your content or have displayed high intent. such as visiting your website or adding a product to cart.
Creation of ‘lookalike’ audiences also allows for targeting of users who, based on all that data collection, are most similar to customers who have purchased previously. A clever shortcut to finding your next customer.
These highly powerful targeting capabilities go a long way to ensuring your creator content is not only achieving top-of-funnel objectives, but also generating new revenue.
See how powerful targeting capabilities helped Huawei drive strong results across the globe.
It’s usually difficult to demonstrate any bottom-of-funnel metrics from organic influencer activity, beyond implementation of UTM tracking links that can be added to the creator’s bio or to their Stories via the link sticker.
But boosting enables a call to action (CTA) button and website link to be added directly to any kind of content, allowing all actions driven by the boosted content to be measured. This measurement can be handled by in-platform tracking such as pixels, as well as any third-party tracking or attribution or analytics of your choice.
By having a direct link to your website and integrated tracking, it takes your influencer campaign beyond the ability to drive awareness and engagement outcomes, unlocking mid-funnel (traffic) and bottom of funnel (conversion) objectives, leading to sales, registrations, or app installs.
Having this connection in place is key to getting your website data feeding back to the ad platform algorithm, and allowing for the most effective optimisation.
Discover the valuable results achieved for Gap via effective tracking and measurement.
This is the most important reason why you should be adding boosting to your influencer activity, as it combines all of the above factors.
Whilst your creators should be selected for their content quality, audience, and affinity to your brand, once the organic content is live there is no controlling who it might reach and the actions they might take.
Amplification allows you to select your objective, whether it be engagements, link clicks, or sales, and the ad platform will aim to maximise outcomes against this objective at the lowest cost possible, by placing the content in front of users within your audience who are most likely to take that action.
Beyond this, it allows you to test variables such as target audience (e.g. males vs females), ad placements (in-feed vs Stories) or content (static image vs video), assess which is most effective for your brand, and ensures your budget is delivered efficiently to the strongest combinations.
Optimisation is where Vamp’s experience and expertise lies, and it can prove the difference in what your creator activity is able to achieve, and ensures outcomes are maximised.
Discover the huge value of Vamp’s ongoing partnership and optimisation with West Elm.
Boosting ensures more:
As outlined above, there are many factors that go into executing an effective boosting campaign. From high-level objective and budget, through to targeting, content selection, measurement, and optimisation.
Amplification via an ads platform serves up seemingly endless data points, including every aspect of your campaign’s delivery, performance, and audience segments. From gender and age to what kind of devices were used.
This vast and valuable data can be analysed and distilled into key learnings, which can be used to inform the next round of activity. With each campaign, the data leads closer to the most optimised sales funnel.
Vamp’s gold standard approach is to build out an influencer marketing funnel from the top down, and our strongest results to date have come from brands who have trusted Vamp with this process.
The approach involves starting with topline objectives such as awareness and engagement, before progressing through the funnel to drive website activity and, ultimately, conversions — learning and optimising along the way.
At each stage, the aforementioned variables are split-tested, with the data assessed to gain insights as to what the next phase should look like, whilst removing any friction points.
By the time the partnership reaches the conversion phase, the process ensures the right creators are being selected, the most effective content is being produced, audiences are highly honed and primed with intent, and the touchpoints are delivered with effective saliency to drive action.
Once the funnel is built, it is a matter of seamlessly reaching new potential customers, and pushing them through with fresh content.
The ultimate outcome is ensuring that strong return on investment is achieved, and then improved upon with each activation.
A client example of Vamp’s recurring boosting activity paying dividends is Russell and Bromley. The UK-based fashion brand has used the Vamp platform in conjunction with boosting on multiple occasions, setting out to drive awareness, consideration, and intent to purchase their fashion accessories.
After working towards a conversion campaign for their SS20 activation, the boosting achieved a strong ROAS of 7x. For the following AW20 conversion campaign, two top performing creators were re-engaged and audiences were honed further, and the ROAS was increased to an excellent 11.8x.
Outcomes such as these are achieved and measured through expert amplification, and with recurring activity ensuring ongoing improvement to the brand’s influencer marketing strategy.
Recurring activity delivers:
If you want your influencer marketing to reach further, and even drive profitable ROI for your brand, get in touch with Vamp today.
