Following on from influencer marketplace pioneer Social Soup’s recent event, Influencer Upfronts, Marketing Mag spoke with founder and CEO Sharyn Smith on the state of the influencer market, navigating successful influencer partnerships and what brands can expect for the future.

Marketing Mag: Both brands and influencers have objectives and desire to provide a great engaging platform for their audience. How do you ensure these partnerships are mutually beneficial for both parties?

Sharyn Smith: It comes down to a few layers. When we’re working with the big macro end of the spectrum where clients are paying quite large sums of money to access an influencer’s content creation abilities and audiences, it all comes down to a clear brief – what’s the job that this influencer needs to do?

Creators at this scale are quite professional. We brief them like an agency and then work very closely with them to produce initial concepts before we begin content creation. The brand will sign off on the concept, but we are also very conscious of the brand not dictating the creative direction – it has to come from the creator while really sticking to the objectives and the key message set.

The worst thing that could happen is a creator delivers a piece of content that either the client doesn’t like, or doesn’t hit the objective. We’ve found when we’re working in the more micro influencer space, the goal of the campaign is diversity of content, culture, life stages – all of those sorts of things. We always have a general creative brief, but we hand it over to the creator to interpret and provide feedback on what they feel will work best for their audience. 

There’s a lot less handholding than you’d expect because we’ve made sure that we pick the right creators upfront. When you know what they’ve created in the past has worked, it’s probably going to perform again. Creator selection is essential in making sure we deliver on all of the things that the brand wants.

MM: What does the creator selection process look like?

SS: If we’re looking at scaled micro campaigns within our network of micro creators, which is thousands and thousands, we’ve collected a lot of data that enables us to tag them with a vast amount of information. So when we’re looking for a particular content type, style of video or category, we can quickly go to the people that best fit that criteria. We then layer the brand lens over this process: does this creator fit with the brand in terms of personality or values?

We have a lot of analytics from the backend of the platforms where we’ve connected to an API. From here we can look at everything that a brand has done in the past. Some of the data is qualitative and some of it is quantitative.

With this data, we’re looking very deeply into an influencer’s content, their content style, aesthetic and of course their analytics because there are actually a lot of creators out there who aren’t that influential. I think that’s the skill in what we do – the science and the art are actually differentiating between who really has influence and who doesn’t.

MM: Social Soup data shows that informative content converts better than entertaining content. Why do you think this is?

SS: There’s a big difference between being entertained by something and being influenced by it. I think the industry might be getting a little bit lost with this. Brands often think they need influencers who are entertaining because they’re going to get the attention and therefore the engagement. In reality, while these audiences are being entertained, they’re not necessarily being influenced.

Entertaining content isn’t, by and large, the number one thing that our research found people are being influenced by – but creativity is. The content therefore needs to be informative, but it can’t be boring.

Aspirational content was also second from the bottom. Pre-COVID, influence used to be about brands and people whom others aspired to be like – consumers wanted that lifestyle or they wanted what those people had. But now, we’re in a world of relatability, so those two things together – being informative and relatable – are what actually influence people. So what we might be doing on TikTok – doom scrolling and being entertained – definitely drives viewership but isn’t necessarily where brands need to be in terms of their influencer content.

MM: What role does/will artificial intelligence (AI) play in influencer content?

SS: I believe AI is really important because it will help people create content – and that makes it really exciting. From a creator perspective, if you’re leveraging the AI tools out there to help you edit and create elements like voiceovers, then this can accelerate the market.

Personally, I follow a lot of fashion AI accounts and I love it. I don’t care that it’s not real because it’s creative. Soon, I feel there will be fully AI-generated accounts that we’re happy to watch and view.

Right now, AI is like the world of influence: it was once a ‘wild west,’ and while parts of it still are, overall, it has matured and professionalised as regulations are now in place.For AI-generated content though, we definitely need to have disclosure and there are proper ways of doing this. As long as it’s labelled and creators are not trying to hide its use, then I do believe more people will accept it.

I saw an interesting quote the other day that said: ‘We didn’t stop watching Jurassic Park because the dinosaurs weren’t real’. We know the dinosaurs aren’t alive in the film, but because it’s entertaining, we accept that. I think this is what will happen in the world of content and influence as well.

MM: How do you measure the success of campaigns?

SS: We design a system of measurement around success. We receive all of the platform metrics that everyone can view on unique reach, views, saves, likes and engagement, but that really only tells us half the story. We conduct more holistic measurements around brand uplift studies by examining the creators we work with, their audiences and the pre-campaign and post-campaign impact.

It goes back to the old world of measurement – making sure that we’re putting rigour around data. We often have creators post surveys to their audiences before sharing brand/partnership content and we then create ad sets of those audience members who viewed or engaged with the survey content. When you put this type of measurement in place, I think company managers and leaders should really take notice because these are incredible data points that you can’t get from any other channel.

MM: What does the next phase of influencer marketing and partnerships look like?

SS: Influencer content is only increasing in impact, and its role in marketing campaigns – from a budget allocation point of view – should rival that of out-of-home (OOH) advertising. I feel this area is underinvested in, given the results that can be achieved.

I compare OOH to influence because when you drive past a billboard it’s visible in your environment. Social media and influence are then kind of in-home media. I think the future of influence is where we appreciate the multiplying effect that influence can have on other media channels.

I can watch a TV commercial or listen to a radio ad, but unless it’s made relevant to me or linked to a context that I understand, like influence or people, the impact of the media isn’t fully achieved. So from an industry perspective, I do think we’ll start to appreciate the effect influence has on amplifying other media channels.

We’ll start to know more about what’s actually genuinely influencing people, rather than just relying on big numbers. The continual rise of grassroots and micro ascendants who create relatable content and build real connections, and the ways that brands harness this in a scalable way, will have the biggest impact. 

Sharyn Smith is the founder and CEO of Social Soup, a pioneer in the influencer marketplace. With more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Smith engages the latest technology to connect influential consumers with brands. The company’s Influencer Gateway technology and engaged influencer community uniquely position Social Soup to create influencer campaigns tailored to objectives covering micro peer-based influence, through to high-reach macro influence.