In this piece, Barbara Soltysinska (pictured below), CEO, indaHash, tells RetailTechNews how retailers are leveraging influencer marketing, the benefits they are seeing from this adoption, how to measure success in this area, and the future for the vertical. 

RetailTechNews: Can you explain what indaHash does?

Barbara Soltysinska: indaHash is an influencer marketing platform that connects brands and agencies directly to micro and mid-tier influencers to create original authentic branded content campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. The costs and complexity of creating campaigns with mid-tier influencers is prohibitive, as it is hard to reach them individually to negotiate and curate content – indaHash makes this efficient, cost-effective, and scalable globally. While content marketing with influencers on media such as YouTube requires time-consuming, detailed negotiations, indaHash offers a ready database of influencers, whom brands can select according to factors such as age, gender, interests, and number of followers.

What benefits are retailers seeing from adopting influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing has expanded exponentially over the past few years. We’ve seen the industry go from a one-off marketing tactic to an essential part of most marketing plans. It is reported that influencer marketing can generate from USD$4.50-12.50 (£3.50-9.74) return on investment for every USD$1 (78p) invested; and the influencer marketing industry is estimated to be worth USD$10bn (£7.79bn) by 2020. What is leading to this exceptional growth? Perhaps it is the fact that people trust other people. According to Nielsen, more than 90% of consumers trust word-of-mouth and user-generated content more than traditional advertising. In a recent campaign we ran with Gap, the average engagement rate was 3% and reached over 1,000,000 followers.

Is influencer marketing only for large retailers?

A common misconception is that you need a big budget to do influencer marketing. However, if you do it right and don’t spend your dollars on big names, your influencer campaign can be just as successful. Brands are now expanding beyond using the A-list celebrity or digital star to working with mid-tier and micro-influencers. They have enough popularity to influence people’s purchasing decisions, yet consumers trust them because they are providing honest recommendations. Micro-influencers have a small number of fans (in comparison to for example celebrities), but most of these people are 'super fans'. We have found that influencers with over 500,000 followers have an average engagement rate of 3%, while micro-influencers with between 5,000-10,000 followers have double the engagement rate of 6%. Micro-influencers are easy to access and much more affordable than their macro counterparts.

Barbara Soltysinska, CEO, indaHash

Smaller retailers and e-commerce brands that are worried about costs can take advantage of influencer marketing through value-exchange programmes such as indaHash Deal. These allow retailers to work with influencers by exchanging discounts or products for influencer content. The brand offers the influencer a discount or free product and, in exchange, the influencer posts about the brand. This is a great opportunity to trial working with micro and mid-tier influencers, at a very low cost to the advertiser.

Another common myth is that you need a lot of manpower and resource to manage an influencer campaign. Previously, setting up and managing influencer campaigns could be labour intensive and time consuming. From finding the right influencers to managing the relationship and measuring the results, building a robust influencer strategy was a challenge and many companies didn’t have the resources or expertise in-house to handle it. But, as the industry matures, we are seeing the development of tools and platforms that simplify the whole process and bring automation to influencer marketing.

Can influencer marketing be measured?

Influencer marketing is actually quite easy to measure – as long as you know what you’re looking for. In the highly measurable world of digital media, marketers often fail to define their influencer marketing KPIs. That’s why the first step is to set metrics based on your influencer marketing goals such as reach, engagement, traffic, or conversion. Then, you simply track these metrics using influencer marketing platforms and adjust your campaigns based on the results.

Digital tracking technology gives marketers the ability to measure the number of downloads, sign-ups, click-throughs, and website traffic produced by sponsored content. At a campaign level, marketers are running brand and sales lift studies with external research partners like Nielsen to study the direct sales impact influencer marketing has on in-store retail sales.

There is a lot of talk around influencer marketing fraud. How can brands protect themselves from it?

Given the booming black market for fake followers, marketers have to do their due diligence. A common misconception says that there’s no way of detecting fakes, but that influencer marketing myth can easily be debunked. There are a lot of people with large followings, but discerning whether their following is legit or if they’ve bought followers or likes requires marketers to examine their follower and engagement growth.

Brands can protect themselves by working with platforms that monitor influencers’ social growth, the verbiage used in their followers’ comments and, importantly, the quality of their engagement. That way, if anything out of the normal occurs, they can investigate the suspicious activity. Influencers, marketers, and platform companies all own a piece of the problem and need to work together to solve it. The first step is educating yourself on influencer fraud and how to combat it.

What does the future hold for indaHash?

We recently launched our new product indaHash IQ – powered by Amazon Rekognition.  

indaHash IQ finds, analyses, and categorises millions of images and videos from our 870,000 global influencer database, to ensure more accurate partnering of influencers and brands. Through the use of deep learning, indaHash IQ combines visual search technology with existing search capabilities to create a ‘super search’ – one that includes both facial recognition and textual context to provide a high-percentage match between the creator and the brand. We no longer have to rely on influencers self-annotating their posts through hashtags and mentions, but can find relevant influencers based on what items we recognise in the images themselves.