Jean Naim

Influencer Channel vs. Brand Channel – A Comparative Analysis

Brands often turn to idols and opinion leaders in an attempt to persuade their target customers to adopt their products and services or adapt their ideas and behaviors. Whether to ...

Brands often turn to idols and opinion leaders in an attempt to persuade their target customers to adopt their products and services or adapt their ideas and behaviors. Whether to create a unique connection between the brand and its customers or instigate product adoption, marketers have always relied on trusted voices to deliver messages to their audiences, regardless of the channel of distribution. Many marketers have adapted their endorsement models to a data-driven medium through channels that offer maximum measurability; this promotional tactic has now been packaged under the “influencer marketing” label.

In our previous blog post, we discussed the trust, the authenticity, and the effectiveness generated out of influencers as an advertising channel. This post goes deeper into the effectiveness of influencer marketing in comparison to brand channels, where the majority of social advertising dollars today are being spent.

Here is a comparative analysis on syndicating brand messages through influencer channels compared to brand channels, depending on the desired objective.

Awareness

In terms of brand awareness, marketers examine effective ways to penetrate the market and increase the familiarity of the target consumer with the brand’s products. Reach, frequency, and video views are some of the most common brand awareness metrics. Influencer marketing is a cost-effective way to generate awareness: Brands running Facebook and Instagram video views campaigns to generate awareness in the GCC market might experience an average CPV that ranges from $0.02 to $0.1 when targeting a well-defined audience from their own channels.

An analysis on several content creator campaigns that we ran has yielded a CPV that is 80% lower than brand-distributed content, powered by the much higher potential to generate organic views.

Engagement

In terms of engagement, influencer content is likely to generate more audience interactions than content syndicated by the brand. This is due to the fact that people tend to get influenced by human recommendations before making a purchase as the trust relationship they have with other human beings is stronger than the one with companies trying to sell a product in order to increase their profit.

Going back to the MENA region, brand channels can gather an engagement rate ranging from 1.5% to 6% on their Facebook and Instagram engagement campaigns while creators and digital talents can accumulate engagement on a single ad with a rate that ranges from 7.5% to 11%. The cost of engagement (CPE) for influencer paid media campaigns ranges from $0.004 to $0.03 while it varies greatly for brand channels depending on the message, the call-to-action, and the targeting and might reach a value of $0.50 per interaction.

Organic engagement is also an important metric to monitor when considering influencer marketing campaigns. The engagement rate for organic posts is large for micro-influencers and it could even exceed 20%.

Customer acquisition

Social platforms provide options that allow marketers to create ads that enable brands to acquire potential customers from influencer marketing campaigns by converting them into site visitors, newsletter subscribers, or social followers. The most common ways to acquire audiences are social campaigns that redirect users to the brand’s website, campaigns that track on-site submissions, and campaigns that retarget users based on previous exposure to branded content. A finding from Twitter and Anallect in 2016 deduced that 40% of people say they’ve purchased an item online after seeing it used by an influencer on Instagram, Twitter, Vine, or YouTube.

As more brands move into e-commerce, and as technology develops to streamline the processes and management of end-to-end influencer campaigns, will influencers become the primary acquisition channel? Time will prove it…