Today Mattr, the leading technology enabled full service influencer marketing provider, expanded the capabilities of its influencer marketing solution for highly regulated industries (HRIs) by adding an automated compliance monitoring feature for influencer content. All of an influencer’s campaign and non-campaign content and comments can be monitored both during and for several months after the campaign for non-compliance. This feature joins Mattr’s controlled content review feature for legal teams announced last year.
“The content and comment monitoring feature makes influencer marketing an attractive option for brand teams”
For years, enterprise brands in HRIs such as banking, finance, healthcare, insurance, and pharmaceuticals, have struggled to deploy influencer marketing programs due to the legal restrictions they face in marketing their products and services. They have to pay very careful attention to what is said and not said in their marketing campaigns, making it difficult to allow external influencers to play any role in building their brands or supporting sales. Often times, providers of services like influencer marketing need to provide periodic data audits of social content and all of the associated public comments.
Mattr’s content and comment monitoring feature provides compliance assurance for all enterprises, but especially those operating in HRIs, by giving them more control and insight into the content developed by influencers they partner with.
Once a client marks the draft influencer content as approved for publishing, its URL is added to Mattr’s solution, where the live content and comments both reside. When the system catches a pre-defined keyword which would suggest non-compliance, an alert is issued to the Mattr team and client, who can then view the suspect comment in the Mattr platform and take appropriate action. In addition, all comments can be easily downloaded from the platform on demand.
Additionally, all actions throughout the process are stored in the blockchain, providing total transparency into the content development process, reviews, and finalized content. This leaves a detailed audit trail, which is very important for HRIs.
“The new content and comment monitoring feature in our influencer marketing solution brings the highest level of assurance to our highly regulated clients possible,” said Jack Holt, CEO of Mattr. “All too often brands are forced to take a ‘hope for the best’ approach, and that unfortunately doesn’t work for many, like those in highly regulated industries. The content and comment monitoring feature makes influencer marketing a new and attractive option for their brand teams, while not becoming too overbearing for the influencers.”
About Mattr
Mattr is leading the way for revolutionary insight into influencer audiences. Mattr searches beyond celebrities to discover brand-aligned mid and micro influencers with like-minded audiences. Our dedicated account and community management team brings ease and end-to-end assistance to the entire influencer campaign process. Learn more at http://www.mattr.co.
It is natural as a company that delivers full-service white glove influencer marketing campaigns to want to put the client’s wants above all else. As with all advertising, clients call the shots and it is up to you to make their wishes come true. Keeping the client happy ensures a successful campaign and a return of business. But, it’s important to remember that in influencer marketing there are two sides to every campaign. You have the client on one end and the influencer on the other – who btw keeping happy also helps contribute to great campaigns. The difference between influencer marketing and other advertising mediums is you have TWO sides with brand images to stay true to. Balancing the creative control is something we have discussed in the past, but we want to take a deeper look at why caring for your influencers and developing long lasting relationships is only going to benefit every campaign.
Where to Begin
Before even beginning the campaign, you can already develop a relationship with your influencers. How? By taking your time in choosing them. Let the influencer know not only how this partnership is beneficial for both parties but also why you and the brand find them to be a valuable partner for your campaign. A brand wants an influencer that is excited to work with them, and an influencer wants the same thing! It helps when influencers know they were chosen carefully and why their brand fits perfectly into this campaign (and why this campaign fits perfectly with their brand).
The Process Will Be Smoother
Open communication and availability are both ways to create a smoother process during your campaign. And, in an industry full of human mistakes, delays, and roadblocks, a smooth process keeps all parties involved happy. Remember, influencers are humans; a part of influencer marketing is that unexpected issues will happen, but with strong relationships and clear communication you can pivot those issues and work around anything that comes your way. Constant communication between you and the influencers means there is less room for misinformation or misunderstanding certain aspects of the campaign. When you are constantly speaking with your influencers through every step of the campaign, they are more likely to fully understand the objectives and be able to create exactly what the client wants the first time around. It is also important to be available to them as much as you can for their questions or concerns. Hop on phone calls with them to discuss content ideas, guidelines, restrictions, nice-to-haves, etc! Becoming an easy-access, understanding, and transparent contact for them during the campaign helps avoid any confusion or disconnect, which means less room for errors in content, reshoots, or tons of edits from the client–saving you all time and stress.
The Relationship Becomes a Win-Win
Taking the time to build these kind of relationships also helps it to feel more personal and less “businessy” between you and the influencers. When you go out of your way to make the campaign experience nice for an influencer, the favor will be returned. Give a lot and usually you will get a lot in return. Influencers might not be so eager to take down links to the product page or might throw in an extra Instagram Story or promote your product on extra social channels. When an influencer is excited about working together they will go the distance to keep the client happy. A great influencer loves to hear that their post provided true engagement for the brand. They care that the brand loves what they see, and that they gain genuine traction from the post. So not only do these solid relationships create less confusion and better understandings, they can also lead to you getting more out of the campaign than you intended.
Content Will Be Better
The client is always right. But, when it comes to knowing the audience you are trying to reach, the influencer is an expert. Influencers study and take note of the content they put out that does well and, more importantly, the content that doesn’t. This is especially true when it comes to sponsored posts. The beauty of influencer marketing is in its authenticity, and in order for a sponsorship to come off as authentic you have to let the influencer’s voice be heard and recognize them as a third party in the campaign. Influencer campaigns should be a true partnership between the influencer and the brand, rather than the brand dictating exactly what influencers post or how they post it.
An influencer is going to be happiest when they feel trusted to showcase the brand in a way that feels genuine to them and matches their own brand, so it is important to be open-minded every step of the way and encourage the brand to do the same. You will find that it is no coincidence that the happier influencers create the better content. So, not only is your content going to come off more genuine, but it’s also going to be…better. More times than not, when an influencer is excited about a campaign and feels like they have some control in the process they will take their time in order to create the best content they can in return.
Another pro to having influencer create such fantastic content is being able to repurpose on your own social channels. It’s almost like outsourcing some of your creative work. Some influencers create content that could come straight from a magazine, so why not take advantage and use on your own channels? If you give a little, then they will give a little. And that compromise is the sweet spot between an incredible post and genuine traction for a brand.
Potential For Brand Ambassadors
We know keeping the client happy gives potential for a long lasting partnership, well the same is true for influencers. If the brand is happy with the influencers and the campaign, and the influencer is pleased as well, that is how brand ambassadors are born. Brand ambassadors are one of the most important things that can come from influencer marketing campaigns. Take this article from Forbes about the key to staying successful in influencer marketing is creating strategic partnerships with influencers rather than being just a few plugs on their social feed. “Ninety percent of industry experts agree that to succeed in the long-term brands will need to take authenticity and value of content they’re receiving more seriously.”
Even if the influencer and the brand decide not to work together in future campaigns, if you’re working with the influencer as an agency, you now have a healthy relationship with the influencers and can leverage their brand for other campaigns that fit well with them. Creating long lasting relationships and truly knowing and trusting certain influencers can save you a lot of time in future campaigns.
Conclusion
Creating and maintaining healthy and close relationships with influencers is one of the best things you can do for the success of your campaign. Communication, transparency, trustworthiness, and flexibility are all ways to keep influencers happy. Happy influencers make for a smoother process, better content, going the distance, and the potential for becoming ambassadors. Brands and influencers need each other. Don’t forget to remind your influencers that they are valued in campaigns and not just another medium for sponsorship.
About MATTR
MATTR is the only full-service influencer marketing provider with detailed audience insights from PersonaMesh™. We go beyond demographics into psychographics such as values and interests so that your influencer campaigns align with your campaign targets.
The influencer landscape can be a risky one to navigate for marketers. One of the most beneficial parts to working with an influencer marketing platform is making use of technology that will vet influencers for you. You may find someone that appears to be the perfect profile, but digging deeper can tell a different story. Technology in influencer marketing has come a long way and we are now able to identify fraudulent activity on influencers’ pages. Becoming a professional influencer has become an extremely sought after career for millennials and gen z, and there are extremes they are willing to go to to make that career work. Don’t be too alarmed but do go into your influencer discovery with eyes wide open and be aware of the risks. Here are some of the biggest red flags to look out for when vetting and leveraging influencers.
1.Purchasing Followers
Purchasing followers is perhaps one of the biggest things to watch out for in the industry. It has been around since the idea of being paid as an influencer has existed, but recent over-saturation of influencers as well as intense competition has driven even more influencers to make poor decisions. However, there are many tools out there now to help ensure marketers aren’t partnering with these kinds of influencers. Even without technology, there are easy ways to see if this is happening. The simplest way is by calculating the ratio of followers to likes as well as the engagement percentage. If a influencer has 15k followers, but is only receiving 60 likes on an image when we would expect around 300, the numbers don’t add up. If engagement is anywhere below 1%, especially for micro and mid-level influencers, it’s best to double check if followers are being bought. When working with a platform like Mattr, you can view how many followers have been purchased and where those followers reside. These are ghost followers, purchased to show that high impression number but not really doing anything on an influencer’s page.
2. Buying Engagement
Unfortunately, the dishonesty doesn’t always stop with influencer reach. Some influencers have gotten wise with fake followers knowing that brands and agencies are now looking more at engagement than reach. And also noticing if followers have been bought. Their resolution for this is to purchase engagement. We’ve done an experiment on just how easy it is to purchase likes and comments for your page. Anyone can do it and it only takes about 10 minutes. You can do the same calculation as with bought followers but in the case, use the inverse. So if you see extraordinarily high engagement on a low follower base, the influencer may have bought likes. Another easy way to look for this is to read some of the comments. Do they even relate to the post? Bots are setup to automatically comment on posts, but don’t always match up with what is being posted about. The last manual way is to check out the quantity of likes and comments on posts over time. Check engagement rates for the last year and find the average, rather than just look at their last few posts. Is there a huge spike in likes, but just on their last two posts and yet their reach remained the same? Maybe a couple weeks ago their average was 100 likes an image but now they are getting 2k; this could be an indication that these likes are not real.
3. Faking Content
Another watch out, is influencers who fake their content in order to gain followers and increase their status. These followers and likes may now be real, but it’s because the audience believes an influencer to be living a life that isn’t actually based in reality or genuine. Certain “influencers” have stolen content from others’ profiles, created fake realities, and in some cases even photoshopped or straight up completely fabricated travel images to be seen as a top tier travel influencer. This can sometimes be a hard issue to combat. The best way to ensure an influencer’s content is real is to study them: check their blogs and other social channels and make sure they are legit with their audience before moving forward. Does their blog provide more details to their travels? Do they images that don’t look to over-the-top edited? Read what their audience is commenting and see if they are engaging back.
4. Too Much Sponsored Content
Although this isn’t necessarily an indication that an influencer has purchased content or engagement, a red flag to watch out for before choosing to partner with an influencer is making sure they don’t have too much sponsored content. When an influencer is posting sponsored content all of the time, everyday or every other day, it can become white noise to their audience. It becomes apparent that they don’t feel strongly about these products but rather that they’re willing to take any deal they can. These people usually have well-deserved low engagement rates, as well.
Not only is their audience not taking notice of sponsorships, the influencer will lose credibility with their followers. It can come off as dishonest when they are posting new products constantly, especially if those products are competing brands and an influencer has now contradicted their loyalty to a certain company.
5. Faking Sponsorships
I don’t know if we thought we’d ever see a day where an influencer would actually fake sponsored content in order to be taken more seriously, but that day is here. Certain influencers have actually made up brand partnerships in order to gain credibility. Like faking content, this can be a difficult red flag to catch right off the bat. But the more research you are able to do on an influencer, the better. Question their brand partnerships if they look fishy. Faking sponsored content may have good intentions, but it can also show inauthenticity.
Conclusion
Becoming an influencer is like becoming famous nowadays, and many people are willing to go too far to make that happen. Whenever activating your own influencer campaign, you want to ensure that you’re choosing influencers who are authentic and genuine – and honest. If you are just running a few campaigns a year and are willing to take the time, you can run these manual “tests” on an influencer’s profile. If you are a brand or agency looking to work with a lot of influencers often, you will want to find the most genuine and authentic ones around, so look for these red flags and work with platforms that give you the technology to dive deep into influencers’ accounts to ensure their credibility.
About MATTR
MATTR is the only full-service influencer marketing provider with detailed audience insights from PersonaMesh™. We go beyond demographics into psychographics such as values and interests so that your influencer campaigns align with your campaign targets.
Dads are different nowadays. They’re staying home with the kids, cooking, cleaning, buying groceries and medications. And these young dads are different: two thirds (66%) of the millennial dads surveyed value high quality products compared to 45% for moms. But that’s not all – 80% want a brand to listen to them and value their opinion. This compares to just over half the men surveyed who don’t have kids. So these guys can be passionate about your brand.
Dads are shouting at you and want you to acknowledge them. The best way? Hire other passionate dads to pitch and advocate for your brand! If you need help, we’re here for you. Take a look at the four accounts below, which range from 1,500 to over 200,000 followers. All have unusually high engagement rates and solid authenticity. As with all Mattr recommendations, we check to ensure their audiences are organic and not bought.
So dang cute! This couple has twins and are exceptional photographers. Unlike a lot of dads on Instagram, most of their posts include the girls – Christmas, Halloween, or just lounging on the sofa watching TV.
Coming in squarely as a mid-range influencer, he also sports a crazy high 15% engagement rate.
Similar to burtonbanksbuffaloe, Devon and Rob have two young children, produce superb photography and are..beautiful people having fun with their kids. Even though their reach is over 200,000 Instagram followers they still have a terrific engagement rate of over 5%.
Maybe the sweetest Instagram of the four, Josh Rodriguez is an Austin blogger who loves craft beer, bbq, but most all, his three young kids. Josh’s feed overflows with Texas authenticity: friendliness, food, and tons of smiles. You’ll love it!
With a quickly growing audience of 3,000 followers and an engagement rate around 5%, Josh will work hard for you and offers a great way to reach hyper-local audiences.
Need a smile? When you get bored of scanning the “mademesmile” subreddit, flick over to Mark’s Instagram. You’ll be grinning ear to ear along Mark and his three kids as you live with them and their huge smiles. You can tell how much care he takes with his posts when you see the consistent quality of his pictures.
Mark’s account is smaller at under 1,500 followers but sports an engagement rate of over 10%, which nets you the same engagement as an account of nearly 10,000 followers with average engagement.
In absolutely every campaign Mattr managed last year, our brand teams wanted to expand their market. Try a Dads campaign or just add a couple dads in your next Moms campaign. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results!
