TWELVE | Take It All! The Potential of Social Media and Influencer Marketing

By the end of 2024 it is projected to be worth about 24 billion dollars, 622 million of which in Germany alone. Influencers have a hand in shaping the shopping behaviour of 85% of Gen Zers – and even 9% of baby boomers. And in 2023 the platform HubSpot found out that one in four marketing managers had already worked with influencers.

Despite these impressive facts and figures, influencer marketing is often still viewed with a critical eye or not really taken seriously. And even if most people around me have come to understand the relevance of influencers, we still hear far too many comments in the agency along the lines of: “Why should we pay this 20-year old guy so much money?” or “How did the Hawk Tuah girl make it so big?”. (Which, by the way, is a very interesting question that might well deserve an article of its own.)

But let me change perspectives so that I can give a rational response to the criticism. Let’s look at influencers and their channels from a media point of view. The creators’ media data provide us with information in black and white about their reach and the sociodemographic attributes of the communities that we could potentially get through to. And even during a campaign, it is possible to track exactly who has been reached and what has been achieved.

Not many media – other than social media – can offer that at such a speed and with such precision. So are people still asking why a creator with 3.5 million followers is charging as much for a video as the price of a full-page ad in Germany’s biggest daily newspaper? Unfortunately, yes they are. We see real people on the influencers’ channels. People we can identify with and who feel approachable to us. For that reason alone, we view them more critically than we would something abstract like a display banner.

On the one hand, they are a media instrument because they contribute a certain reach and performance that we can predict and evaluate. And on the other, they are testimonials because they are brand ambassadors, multipliers and the face of the brand or cause. And thirdly, they are content creators, because in most cases they produce their content themselves, which a lot of people don’t realise and which ultimately saves on production costs. Armed with this knowledge, we can approach influencer marketing in a much more targeted way and integrate it into our own marketing plan. But that’s not all...

Sure, most of them earn their money either from promoting products and services in different ways or by showing ads before their own content. And that’s totally fine and legitimate of course. After all, it was their content and their personalities that made them influencers in the first place, and it was only later that the placements that they are now earning a living with came their way. But many influencers also use their reach to drive forward and support important social issues. For example, we enlisted the help of over 20 influencers to draw attention to the European elections on behalf of the European Commission in 2024. And many ministries we work for have since realised that there are certain target groups that they can only reach via influencer marketing. For the successful ‘Rainbow Wool’ project by Serviceplan Cologne, we managed to get influencer, singer, icon and Netflix star Bill Kaulitz on board as patron, and also won the support of a number of other influencers. Without them, this extremely important project would never have generated so much attention.

When we launch an influencer campaign with our clients, we always need to find out what our contacts on the client side know about influencers and what their expectations are of them. And by the same token, we also have to interact with the influencers whohave made it into the final selection and work out in each case how we can make the collaboration successful together. Yes, we book a certain service from them, for example two feed posts, four stories and the rights to promote the contents – and that comes at a certain price. But we, as an agency, and our clients are both responsible for making the most of these collaborations and giving the influencers the creative freedom they need to design their content in a way that really appeals to their communities. If we restrict them too much, we run the risk of the content falling flat and ending up being overlooked in the creator’s feed. But, on the other hand, if we approach them with an open mind, they will be more likely to create content that will continue to appeal to people on their channels even in the long term.

Influencer marketing can play a role in any campaign or cause as long as it is designed, managed and implemented with the required care and attention. From promoting products and services to employer branding and socio-political issues, influencers can be deployed in a variety of ways and for any thematic niche – and it can be a lot of fun working with them. The challenge lies in finding the right well-known (or semi-well-known) personality and getting them on board for a campaign.

P.S. Shameless plug alert! Excuse the self-promotion, but we were asked to advise the developers of fictional German TV series ‘Bad Influencer’ on the technical and content aspects of influencer marketing and contribute our own perspective. The show, which sheds light on the world of influencers in a satirical way, is available (for our readers in Germany) to watch in the ARD Mediathek.

First published in TWELVE,  the magazine by Serviceplan Group for brands, media, and communication.