Influencer Marketing is a phenomenon on the rise. The broad sweep of it focuses on social media celebrities – chiefly those who have a sufficiently large following on Instagram, Twitter etc.. This leads to Influencer Marketing budgets being, in most, cases being spent on a limited number of celebrity influencers.
I believe there is a case for deepening the reach of influencer marketing by using a significant portion of the Influencer Marketing budget with “micro influencers” also known as “seed agents’ through what are known as “seeded marketing campaigns” (SMC).
The effects of SMC are likely to be even more pronounced in the case of relatively bigger ticket, complex, high-involvement products.
The key dimensions of a SMC are:
- How many seed agents (as few as a 100 to as many as 20,000)
- When (before/ after launch)
- How long the campaign should run (between 4 to 12 weeks)
- What (seed agents being given the full product, several smaller samples to share and a brand information booklet).
The selection of seed agents is based on a set of selection criteria which could include:
- Demographics
- Prior campaign participation and performance
- Stated preferences for products and brand
- Stated personality measures
- Perceived motivation judged from open-text application form
A SMC agency might have a panel of seed agents from which it recruits appropriately for a given SMC.
An important point that has emerged from the experience across successful SMCs is that the word-of-mouth (WOM) action resulting from successful SMCs are driven largely by person-to-person real world interactions and not online interactions.
This is in contrast to celebrity influencer campaigns that are largely driven by large social media followings.
The effect of SMCs are tracked through “receiver surveys” with those contacted by seed agents. A survey of 43,000 receivers from 36 SMCs found that less that 3% of the response to contacts were negative and more than 90% were positive.
Therefore WOM measurement of SMCs focus on volume instead of valence similar to the GRP type measures for mass media campaigns.
The increasing use of SMC have resulted in specialised SMC agencies becoming an integral part of the marketing communication ecosystem in developed markets. Some of them are BzzAgent, Trnd and The Insiders.
The SMC agency game seems to be at the intersection of market research and marketing communication in terms of the skill set required. Given the size and complexity of Indian markets it is quite likely that world-class SMC agencies will emerge from India whose home experience could be leveraged into they, in time, becoming global players.
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