Out of the box influencer strategies to accelerate awareness for your startup

Published September 18, 2019

Kamiu Lee
Contributor

Kamiu Lee is CEO at Activate, an influencer marketing technology platform and agency that partners with brands and influencers to tell engaging and compelling stories across social media at scale.

For new brands, growing awareness and gaining the trust and credibility of consumers are two of the most important yet challenging marketing objectives. As an added constraint, most startups don’t have the budgetary flexibility to activate mega-influencers and celebrities that have national attention at their fingertips. However, new research from ACTIVATE found that smaller-tier, more accessible influencers are a top choice for marketers – they enable brands to tap into niche communities and offer superior engagement rates.

Surveying over 110 brand marketers, PR professionals, social media managers and agency executives, we found that 64 percent of marketers are choosing to utilize micro-influencers very often, as opposed to larger creators, mega influencers and celebrities. We also found that more than 44 percent of marketers are repurposing influencer-created content following a sponsorship, a practice that extends the ROI of an influencer campaign and can help startups attain valuable visual assets for future marketing use.

While mega-influencer content rights are often negotiated to steep rates, those of smaller tier influencers are more affordable, as the influencers themselves also benefit from the added exposure.

With this in mind, when developing an influencer campaign, it’s critical not to feel constrained to the most popular creators, and instead think out of the box and consider what factors will be most important to the audience you’re specifically trying to reach. When being thoughtful about how you’re implementing influencers, smaller creators can be just as impactful as their larger counterparts.

Let’s go through some of the most impactful emerging influencer strategies, to grow awareness, without growing debt.

Key influencer casting strategies to drive targeted impact

Bloglovin’ becomes Activate and names Kamiu Lee as its new CEO

Published April 11, 2018

Bloglovin’ has a new name, new funding and a new CEO: Kamiu Lee, who previously served as the company’s vice president of strategy and business development.

It sounds the rebrand and Lee’s promotion are both part of a growing emphasis on the company’s influencer marketing business, where it helps advertisers find influencers who can promote their brands and products. In fact, the new name Activate comes from the company’s existing influencer marketing platform Activate by Bloglovin’, which was built around its acquisition of Sverve two years ago.

“Activate, from a commercial standpoint, is what represents who we are today,” Lee told me.

At the same time, she said the company will continue to support the Bloglovin’ product, which allows readers to find and follow fashion bloggers. The two sides of the business are tied together because it’s “a way for these creators to get discovered, and so it continues to be an audience development tool … for them.”

Lee told me she’s actually worn a number of different hats at Bloglovin’ since joining four years ago as the company’s first monetization-focused hire. With her experience across the company and her current focus on business and strategy, she said it seemed like a “natural step” to take the lead for “the next stage of the company.”

Meanwhile, Bloglovin’s outgoing CEO Giordano Contestabile will remain involved as a board member and advisor.

Lee acknowledged that Activate faces plenty of competition from other influencer marketing companies, but she said its approach is distinguished by the richness of its data (Activate isn’t just scraping public data but also getting direct access to the influencers’ own analytics), as well as its “real care for the content and the influencers.”

“It’s really easy to completely cater to the brands, and to a certain extent, if the dollars are there, the influencers will follow,” Lee said. “But in order to be really sustainable, you need great content, and you need to really understand the influencers.”

She also pointed to the size and breadth of Activate’s influencer network — it’s worked with 75,000 influencers to create 6,500 pieces of content per month over the past 12 months. This allows brands to create campaigns that combine content from, say, a single top tier influencer, 15 mid-tier influencers and 100 micro-influencers.

Activate is also launching a new service called Activate Studio, which supplements its existing self-serve product by supporting brands that don’t have large social media teams of their own, helping them develop and manage their influencer marketing strategy.

On top of its other news, the company has also raised an undisclosed amount of new funding from Northzone.

“Within the marketing and advertising industries, we see the incredible value to be captured by influencer marketing,” said Northzone’s Par Jorgen Parson in a statement. “Activate’s unique relationship and dedication to their influencers and industry-leading expertise make them an obvious front-runner among companies competing in the space.”