Welcome to Pinpoint, a weekly digest for marketers and leaders. In every issue you’ll find timely industry news, perspectives from experts, actionable marketing strategies, and links to other articles and resources worth reading.
In this week’s issue:
- How the relationship between brands and influencers is evolving
- Will scent branding actually become a thing?
- An email marketing tip from one of our experts
Strategy of the Week
The Creator Economy is booming. According to Adweek, marketers using influencer marketing are estimated to rise to 72.5% in 2022, up from 55.4% in 2019.
It’s clear that the relationship between brands and influencers is not going anywhere anytime soon, but it is evolving, and here’s how:
Today, brands are much more committed to building long-term partnerships with the influencers they hire to promote their products and tap into target audiences.
In the past, brands were much more likely to launch one-off campaigns with many different influencers, but that strategy is becoming less popular and less effective.
Why? It all comes down to authenticity.
In a recent article from Adweek on the topic, author Emmy Liederman writes, “At this stage of influencer marketing, brands are scouting out long-term influencers who can establish allegiance to a product in a way that followers trust.”
Authenticity is a big deal to consumers—they don’t like partnerships that look, feel, and sound phony.
To get ROI from influencer marketing, brands now have to be willing to establish deeper, more meaningful relationships with fewer creators.
To be successful, brands can’t think as transactionally as they once did in terms of hiring influencers to plug products. Instead, they need to think of creators as long-term, contributing members of the team.
Want to make the most of your influencer marketing program? Try Grin, an all-in-one creator management platform designed to help you build more authentic, brand-boosting relationships with creators.
Links We Love
Each week we ask our team to help us curate five newsworthy articles or events that you might have missed. This week’s top picks:
- Instagram is finally letting users see posts in reverse chronological order again.
- Lululemon enters the shoe game and joins a handful of other startup shoe brands working to give Nike and Addidas a run for their money.
- YouTube showcases the top ads from campaigns that ran on YouTube Connected TV screens in the past year.
- Star Wars legend Mark Hamill uses The Force to (finally) claim his own name on Twitter.
- Scent branding could be a thing in the next few years, thanks to a startup working to bring scent technology to AR headsets. This has us all wondering: What unique scent will you choose to represent your brand? Tell us here!
GrowTal Expert Tip
Have you launched any A/B tests lately to try to improve email performance? There are a lot of variables that can be tested to uncover what motivates your audience to engage and act.
Not sure where to start?
Here’s the approach one of our top email marketing experts, Amy Mangueira, shared with Playbook Media CEO Bryan Karas this month when he asked her:
“You need to start with the first micro-conversion, which is OPENS, and move your way down the line. So typically with OPENS we test things like send time, subject lines, and from name, and we test those each individually until we start to get a winner’s log going and we start to understand what works.”
We love this concept of micro-conversions because it forces you to think more strategically about each of the actions you need email subscribers to take before they can reach the stage when they are on your website and deciding whether or not to purchase.
Want to see the full 30-minute interview with Amy and Bryan? Watch it this week on YouTube
Until Next Time
As always, let us leave you with a quote from one of the greats:
“No matter how many customers you have, each is an individual. The day you start thinking of them as this amorphous ‘collection’ and stop thinking of them as people is the day you start going out of business.”
— Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder of HubSpot
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