Social Media Week prides itself in being one of the world’s premier conferences that brings together digital marketing professionals from over 50 countries to share ideas, insights, and strategies for how to advance their businesses and brands.
The second-ever Social Media Week Manila on 11-12 November featured top industry experts and brand leaders from some of the top companies in the world, including AnyMind Group’s influencer marketing business, CastingAsia.
Being one of the leading influencer marketing platform and solutions companies in Asia and globally, CastingAsia provides marketers with a powerful platform that enables the activation, management, tracking and reporting of influencer marketing activity, including the attribution of influencer marketing initiatives to business results through the recent launch of cost-per-action (CPA) capabilities. Marketers in Asia are also able to leverage on in-market expertise for strategy consultation, cross-country best practices and influencer management (for more complicated campaigns).
For influencers, CastingAsia offers a mobile app that enables users to receive campaign opportunities, find out how campaign posts are performing, and receive payment. Through the CastingAsia Creators Network, influencers in Asia and beyond can tap on local expertise including influencer growth consultation, account optimization, video production and editing, brand collaboration opportunities and more.
In the third session of Social Media Week Manila, Siwat Vilassakdanont, Managing Director of CastingAsia Creators Network, shared with attendees how the influencer marketing landscape has evolved.
Before the era of social media, it was common to find celebrity endorsements, where a celebrity was paid to endorse a certain item. Next up came the wave of bloggers, where written reviews provided audiences with an in-depth glimpse into a certain product, service, location or business.
Next up came the era of macro social media influencers and YouTubers, amassing followers as they developed more content that resounded with their audience. This was then followed by micro and nano social media influencers, providing an arguably more authentic voice to what a business or organization is offering.
One thing though, is that all these have lasted till the present – however, with tools like the CastingAsia Platform, influencer marketing has entered into the era of accountability, transparency and attribution – providing marketers with another addressable and accessible outlet to reach their ideal target customers.
Marketers today now have access to richer insights into influencer profiles – an important factor when choosing not just an influencer, but the demographics of an influencer’s followers. There is also a much higher volume of historical campaign data, providing marketers with deeper insights into what has performed for them in the past.
The evolution of influencer marketing models has also brought rise to more attribution in influencer marketing, including the ability to track users from influencer marketing campaigns that convert on a website or landing page. This new wave will inevitably lead to an evolution of how influencers develop their content.
We will increasingly start to see the increased sophistication of content from influencers, and how they pitch their content to their followings. There will be greater demand for content that actually encourages user action, rather than just posting well-organized and visually pleasing content. This is also where video content rises in importance, being a more effective medium to persuade audience action.
Another evolution we will see is the shift of high-profile personalities: celebrities, musicians and athletes, towards social media platforms and YouTube channels, effectively diversifying their profile portfolio. The rise of personal social media channels for high-profile personalities has been going on for some time now, as they make the jump towards their own personal accounts. These are not agent-built ones, but are a result of these high-profile personalities wanting to engage with their fans more closely, providing followers with a deeper glimpse into their lives, and adding a new dimension to celebrity endorsement as well for marketers, providing much more data-driven metrics for a successful endorsement. Some examples are of Keisuke Honda and Hidetoshi Nakata.
In summary, we’re now in the era where we have evolved data insights and opportunity, evolved influencer marketing models, leading to evolved sophistication of influencers and high profile personalities.
Influencer marketing is already in the next era, are you?
