ABOUT LUCIA: Linkedin | TATAM Digital |

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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

📚 Picking the right influencer for a brand.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Why the audience matters more than the influencer.

🧶 The endless categories of influencers in the digital world.

📋 How much control is exerted when directing influencer campaigns.

📮 What does the testing process look like in influencer campaigns?

💳 When to hire an agency to manage influencer marketing.

🪤 The measurement challenges involved with influencer marketing.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth:

I’m excited to welcome Lucia Aguilar to the Mobile User Acquisition show. Lucia, welcome to the show.

Lucia:

Thank you very much for inviting me.

Shamanth:

Yeah, I’m excited to have you, because you’ve done some very interesting work around influencers for performance, which is something I’m excited to dive into today.

The last time we spoke, you shared how the choice of influencers is not always expected or intuitive. Can you walk through the process you use to pick the influencers for a brand?

Lucia:

The people that work in marketing for a long time, including me, thought about influencers as the face of the brand or an ambassador of our brand. So it had to be perfect. 

It has to be in line with our brand guidance and representative of the brand. What we’re forgetting is that when we use influencers to promote our services, we’re actually buying their audience and not necessarily their face.

So to work with influencers, it is crucial to understand the target audience. We can understand that through YouTube. It’s not necessary that you’re going to have the perfect influencer, because they’re not your brand’s face, they’re actually talking to an audience.

For instance, we worked with an app that is for couples. Once you are already in a relationship, you may need some help or guidance. 

At the beginning, the first time we ran a campaign, the client wanted only influencers talking on YouTube. It was not great, because the audience of these channels were probably 18-year-olds. 

So you have to really understand what the audience is and separate that from the influencer itself.

Shamanth:

That’s an easy pitfall to get into because I’ve certainly seen a lot of brands and products that say “we want this person as the face of our product”, which is not exactly the way to look at it. 

Is there any example that comes to mind where the audience was totally not what was anticipated? And what was the audience instead?

Lucia:

When working with clients, we often encounter fixed ideas about what should work on their channels. For example, we also work with a language-learning app. And when we started, they wanted to have travelers and polyglot families. 

Travelers aren’t very cost-effective because you have to wait for the traveler to travel to the destination to use the language that you learn on the app. So it took forever. When you want to open up an influencer marketing program as a user acquisition channel, you need to be able to scale it up. So we tested all these travel influencers and we also tested a lot of influencers in very different verticals. The other verticals were performing way better than these travel influencers that we weren’t so keen on from the beginning.

Shamanth:

Can you share how you think about defining the different categories or verticals of influencers to target for a product, if you were to work on a campaign?

Lucia:

We have more than 500 categories and subcategories. For example, we are now working with the horses category. The people that take care of horses and breed horses and train horses, and this category is working extremely well for some very premium high-end products.

However, we’re always discovering new categories and sometimes it’s not explicitly stated by influencers on their platforms. But some of them are more like lifestyle and blogs. And within lifestyle, we have over 100 categories because it’s not the same if you are into lifestyle, but you have something important that you are doing and you’re blogging on that. 

If you have nothing to do and you’re showing – “what did I do today, I went to the supermarket, and I cooked dinner for my kids.” it’s really tricky. It’s also tricky when we have to analyze performance. Because what we do at TATAM is we’re very focused on how the different verticals and different collaborations work. 

Once we understand one category that works, we want to double down there and invest a lot more.

For example, ASMR is a category that works wonderfully with many of our clients. But it’s not the same. Not all ASMR are the same, we have subcategories within the ASMR category. 

You have relaxing sounds, focus sounds, sensual sounds, fun sounds. So we have to understand where the performance is coming from and if there is a category that is always driving good performance and steady performance.

Shamanth:

When it comes to influencers themselves, what does the process of directing them look like? What kind of guidance do they get? How much control do you exert? Do you let them do what they want? Can you talk us through what the process looks like?

Lucia:

Yes, for many years, I’ve been promoting that we let the influencers create themselves because that’s how they became these moguls of social media.

What’s happening in the last few months or years, is that the ads on every single platform are being standardized and they are receiving very fixed briefs. They are not channeling their creativity to the ads, they are just doing something very plain and very boring.

So instead of letting the influencers create whatever we want, I now try to guide them into channeling their creativity within the ad. We’re working with creative people to create better briefs, in order for us to have better ads that are more organic and more fun to watch.

Shamanth:

In fact, we make UGCs with actors, not so much influencers. But we feel the same thing to be true. Because if we don’t give any guidelines, they don’t know what to make. It may not actually lead to conversions and performance. So we’ve certainly seen and learned this, something very similar in our work with actors.

Take me through the process of working with an influencer. If there’s a brand or a product that wants to use influencers for the first time. What does the testing process look like and how did the process change? 

Let’s say you see this category is working really well or it’s not working so well. Or maybe the influencer is working well. The category is not working out well. 

Take me through the process of starting to test a product to grow the product’s performance.

Lucia:

To start with influencers, out of 20 collaborations, 5 are likely going to be a total flop. 5 will not perform anything, 10 will work more or less of what you expected, 5 will be outstanding and they will really drive everything in your mix of media.

So sometimes you need some tweaking and expertise in order to get those 5 outstanding ones. Sometimes you get lucky and the first 5 are amazing. Then you want to scale that up, and you don’t get that much success. Building an effective acquisition channel takes time and patience.

In the beginning, nobody needs an agency to start, to see and to test. Brands can do it, and people can do it directly with their own products. They can reach out to influencers and try to do it. 

It’s very labor-intensive work because you have to reach out to influencers, convince them, negotiate with them, brief them, approve their content, and pay them.

That’s when you need an agency, once you prove that this channel works for you, and you want to scale it up. But before that, you can do it by yourself. Reach out to influencers who resonate with your product and have compelling stories to share.

If you’re already a consumer of your own product, you may already be following influencers within your niche. Establish a good relationship with them and effectively explain your product as it is important. The influencer has to test it, try it, use it, and like it. Otherwise, the ad will look very fake and not great.

Shamanth:

What you’re suggesting is really to use a DIY approach in the beginning till you understand what’s working. And only afterwards you really double down on having a more organized effort, perhaps working with a partner like you guys. 

A lot of campaigns you guys work with are performance-based. So obviously, there are challenges with measuring performance. I think one of the challenges is that not everybody clicks on the link. 

The other is, there are iOS tracking issues and iOS tracking policy changes. 

So talk me through how you recommend measuring influencer performance in the presence of these challenges.

Lucia:

We cannot track the impact of influencer campaigns with 100% accuracy, as we don’t have any technology, as of now. But we can use the tools that are available on the market like AppsFlyer, Adjust, and Branch to track the installs and conversions of any app. 

We publish those papers. You can find it in TATAM. We have an organic uplift paper where we explain this test we did in markets where our clients weren’t doing anything.

So we were able to just do influencer marketing there to see how many clicks or downloads were tracked, and how many others were organic. But they were actually a non-trackable performance of the influencer marketing campaign. 

We can measure an impact of 3 to 10 times more of the actual installs that we see on the tools. So we can estimate and that’s something that you have the confidence to show to the C level, or CEOs of the company that this user acquisition channel is working and it’s under-tracked.

So if there are 2 assets, maybe you can say with certainty 3 times more is what you are getting, if they are more relaxed and they trust the impact of influencers, you can say 7 or 8 times more. 

We also have to think that everything that we do online is just the tip of the iceberg of what branding stands for. We have brand recognition, brand love, and a lot of attributes on the brand and we are just tracking conversion like installs, which is the tip.

But we have to know that all the work that we do with influencers and with this acquisition channel will impact building a bigger iceberg and having our brand out there and having our brand recognized.

Shamanth:

There’s also the downstream impact because I ran influencers when I was in-house with a company. We saw on YouTube that one month, three months and six months after the video was live the views were going up.

Lucia:

We call that the long tail effect. We have another paper on our website that you can read. It has been proved already to all of our clients that 50% of the revenue comes in month one, and you can expect the same amount in the following nine months. That will certainly bring back the revenue again. So you can double their revenue from month one with certainty and you will see for sure that sort of performance.

Shamanth:

Yeah, which is why I think looking at a seven-day attribution window is not meaningful.

Lucia:

If you say a seven-day attribution window from the date I clicked on the link, then yes, sure. But the thing is on YouTube, people are still watching content that was published two and three years ago. 

That’s how we get those sales and that’s the kind of evergreen content that we’d like to promote.

Shamanth:

Yeah, so the key is to understand what are the unattributed organics. Maybe get a multiplier and get a model in place so that you can truly understand what the unattributed organics are. After the iOS changes, a lot of channels are in that same position now, not just influencers.

Lucia, we’ve covered a lot of ground today and this has been very fascinating to me. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap. Can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Lucia:

I’m Lucia Aguilar. I’m the CEO and founder of TATAM Digital. You can find us on tatam.digital, or you can write to me at lucia@tatam.digital and I will be happy to chat with you.

Shamanth:

Excellent. We will link to all of that in the show notes. I’m sure people will want to check out the papers that you referenced. 

Thank you for being a guest on the show.

Lucia:

Thank you.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

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