LONDON: There are numerous reasons why marketers might choose to use influencers, and while the idea of multivariate testing is probably not uppermost in their thoughts this can prove very effective.

According to Jules Lund, founder of influencer marketing marketplace TRIBE, brands should think less about the reach that celebrity influencers offer and more about the engagement that micro-influencers can bring.

Speaking at the Marketing Week Live exhibition earlier this year, he highlighted a TRIBE analysis of Instagram posts which showed that, following a change to the platform’s algorithm, “micro-influencers that have under 100,000 followers attract far higher engagement than those with over 100,000 followers”.

And for those with under 25,000 followers, engagement had increased 50%. (For more details, read WARC’s report: Buy or nurture? Two approaches to using micro-influencers.)

“It is far more powerful than ever to fill your campaigns with an army of micro-influencers versus one or two or three top-tier influencers with over 100,000 followers, because the smaller the tribe the more potent the influencer,” he stated.

TRIBE’s marketplace allows advertisers to post a brief and micro-influencers to pitch their ideas along with a fee. If the advertiser likes the pitch it can buy it; and if it does particularly well it can go on and buy the content rights for use in a wider, mainstream campaign.

There are some obvious benefits of this approach, including the speed of response and the volume of content a brand can generate for use across various platforms.

Another was demonstrated by Omo, the Unilever-owned detergent. Lund explained how it asked for pieces of content mimicking six of the brand’s mood board images, got a hundred back and was able to pick the top-performing ones to put money behind.

“Influencer marketing was the perfect multivariate test,” said Lund. “They were able to see the one that goes ‘wow’, that's over-indexed, it’s resonated.

“So what they do is they take that image and then they apply motion and they put some graphics on it, so you’ve got this emotional connection.”

Sourced from WARC