What The F*CK Is a Micro-Influencer?

If you have a pulse then you probably also have an Instagram feed. That feed is probably a mix of one million pics of your high school friend’s babies, gratuitous selfies from your newly single friends, vacation photos from boss and his partner, and celebrities hawking their collagen teas and skincare regimens. Somewhere in between all those things is another category of social media mavens, called micro-influencers. WTF does that mean? Much like social media itself, the definition is a little bit nebulous and full of room for interpretation, but in a nutshell, Micro-influencers are a group of people with higher volumes of followers than you or your best friend, but less followers than Kylie Jenner or Chrissy Teigen. The exact number of followers varies across experts, but typically between 5K-50K is a good ballpark. The key is not the volume, but rather that these influencers are extremely influential in their niches with followers that are HIGHLY engaged across social media channels. These people are more grassroots, and community based so there is a level of authenticity and relate-ability that is often lost with the mega influencers.

Why use micro influencers?

1. Scale: Rather than putting all your eggs into one celebrity basket, you can diversify by leveraging multiple micro=influencers to reach those same audiences at scale (and without the $500K/post price tag)

2. Authenticity: While this group of influencers may have smaller overall footprints, they have strong power of their group and are able to communicate

3. Flexibility: Big ticket celebrities will usually have more stringent guardrails. Leveraging a smaller scale influencer or group of influencers could give you more creative flexibility

Top Trends to Watch in 2019

1. Marketing Funnel continues to shift away from from one to many to one to one

2. Content is king and consumers are demanding that brands are providing value

3. Chatbots are on the rise and providing a way for customers to interact with advertisers without the hassle of speaking with an actual human

4. AI is becoming more pervasive and is helping to sharpen targeting and the consumer experience

5. Security and privacy are top of mind

6. Voice search is on the up and up with voice-based sales projected to reach $40B in 2022!

7. Video is being optimized to user preference, so vertical video formats are on the rise (because who wants to constantly flip their phone sideways just to watch their cute puppy videos)

8. Visual search is increasing making the consumer experience as easy as taking a picture of an objective in order to find information about it

9. Shift from celebrity influencer to micro-influencers as consumers are growing increasingly skeptical of celebrity advertising

To Bot or Not to Bot?

With the rise in smartphones comes the fall of the desire for verbal human contact. How many times have you let your phone ring only to text back the caller immediately after? If you aren’t jazzed about talking to your best friend on the phone, then you likely are way less jazzed to talk to a customer service rep from your TV provider or bank on the phone. Enter, chatbots! Messaging apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger started the chat trend and have facilitated adoption of chat from a personal standpoint and have begun using their technology for pushing out advertising. Other giants like Amazon have started to use chat technology for custom service. I recently forgot to include a quart of strawberries in my Amazon Fresh order and in a panic chatted up a representative to help make sure my missing fruit found its way into my order. How to know if you should incorporate chatbots into your business? The technology is still relatively new, so before jumping into chatbots, make sure it fits into your overall type of business and also your target audience’s consumption habits. If your product or service is targeting senior citizens and has complex instructions, perhaps bots are not the way to go yet. If you are slinging cheeky tee-shirts to millennials… get with the bots immediately!

ITP Shifts to Favor Privacy: How The Cookie Crumbles

As a marketer, the more data, the better. As a consumer…not so much. Having grown up as a digital marketer, I am 100% comfortable and a fan of all the tracking that has been available. With that, I know my friends and family who are not in “the biz” have always been thoroughly creeped out by the depth of data being shared with advertisers. The classic example is the shoes you have been eyeing but haven’t pulled the trigger on following you around on your internet journey (aka retargeting).

The United States has always been one of the most open countries when it comes to data exchange compared to Europe or other cohorts, but that has been changing. The biggest shift happened the past month with Apple’s ITP restrictions. Basically, what they have done is cut down the “shelf life” of cookies which have been the number one way advertisers have been able to anonymously track and identify users (no PII of course).

Why should you care? While ultimately the experience and outcome will remain the same, the attribution piece is what will change. Sites will see inflated unique users and activity because duplication will be more frequent. How can you combat this will depend on your objectives and the types of data you have available. If you are in an industry where you have access to 1st party/CRM/known data, you can use this to replace cookie-based data. Another option is modeling. While this isn’t a one to one tactic, it will allow you to use patterns you have seen in the past to make inferences on behavior.

There is not a one size fits all solution for this situation, so it is important that you consider your specific business needs and data availability, tech stack, etc. before making any drastic changes.