ThisThat on Influencer Marketing’s Full-Funnel Power

Welcome to Influenza Marketing Talks, your go-to podcast for everything happening in the creator economy and beyond. Brought to you by Cure Media, the leading and award-winning influencer marketing agency that has been shaping the industry and helping brands grow since 2014. Every week, in just around 15 minutes, we sit down with leading voices in the marketing industry to uncover the latest marketing insights, dive into consumer behavior trends, and unpack the power of influence marketing. I'm Zana Oudmark and I'm the head of marketing here at Cure Media. Today I'm joined by Max Osborn, founder of this stat, the leading brand-leaf solution in influence marketing. In this episode, Max shares key insights from their latest report that positions influence marketing as the top-performing channel across the entire funnel. We discuss why the channel deserves a bigger share of CMO's budgets, what's holding many brands back from investing more boldly, and how measurement must evolve to prove long-term brand impact. Hi, Max, and big welcome to the podcast. Hello. Thank you so very much. So before we start, can you just tell the listeners about yourself, this stat, and what to do? I'm Max. I am the founder of this stat. This stat is the brand-leaf authority inside influence marketing and a growth partner for some of the fastest, growing, most exciting influence marketing agencies and brands out there in the world. A bit about myself, maybe to add to that as a bit niche. I used to be a snowboard competitor between age 15 and 19. I used to live in a really cute town called Lindau, which is in Germany. It's an island on a lake surrounded by the Alps, very lucky. And then when I moved to Scotland, age 15, I had a bit of an unfair advantage having lived in the Alps for a couple of years, and I pursued that, and that was a very fun period. And then I moved into more data science backgrounds and eventually landed here at Brand Lift with this stat. Amazing. So this stat recently published a report showing that influence marketing is the most effective channel across the entire funnel. Can you break down how you conducted this study and why are these insights especially relevant for marketing leaders today? Absolutely. I think it's perhaps useful to give some context as to what Brand Lift is because we've been using Brand Lift data. So Brand Lift is a methodology to measure how effective marketing is. It's a survey-based methodology. You would survey two different groups, one group that have been exposed to campaigns or campaign activity, and one group that has not been exposed. You'd ask some questions around awareness, consideration, intent, advocacy. We very much hope that those that have been exposed are more aware, more likely to feel something, more likely to want to buy, more likely to recommend the product and so forth. And so we came to market about four years ago offering a unique approach which is referred to as natural exposure. It means that we can actually find those that have naturally been exposed to the content in the real world. Those that have been exposed to the influencer content, those influencers' communities. And so when we've been measuring Brand Lift, it's been the true impact versus if you go to a legacy research firm, they might simulate or force the exposure. We are in a position where we've got over five million opinions directly from influencer communities and so we have a lot of data which we can create benchmarks. But something that we did quite proactively from the very beginning was design our ad recall question slightly differently. Typically when someone asks an ad recall question inside a Brand Lift survey, they would ask, do you remember seeing ads or do you remember seeing influencer content for this brand? Rather than that, we asked, where have you seen ads for this brand? And the options would include influencer content or branded content or radio, TV, billboard, all the different channels that were active for that brand at that given time. There would also be an option of I didn't see any ads. But what that allowed us to do is now look within those that have been exposed to the creator content filtered by those that recall seeing the influencer content. But equally within those that didn't see the influencer content filtered by those that have recalled seeing ads elsewhere. And that allows us to be able to create not just benchmarks for influencer marketing, but also benchmarks for other channels. And that puts us in a position to be able to show exactly just how much more effective influencer is to other channels throughout the full fund. Interesting. And what were the results, what was the difference if you are to summarize it? I mean, overall, it proved out to be more effective across the full funnel. When you're looking at awareness, it was 2.3 times more effective than other channels. When you're looking at consideration, it was 1.6 times more effective. When you're looking at action intent, you're looking at 1.5 times more effective. When you're looking at recommendation rates, it's 1.6 times more effective. So you could say like the hero winner is more at the top funnel, but it really proved out to go throughout the entire funnel. And there's been a lot of really interesting learnings actually going deeper into that data as well. Can you share some of them? Yeah. The way in which influencers drive the funnel is quite different and really there's actually in case to be made that the whole of marketing is shifting and they are at the forefront of driving the shift. There's one standout KPI where influencers were a lot more effective than other channels and that was associations anchoring a specific association to a brand. There are five times more effective than other channels when it came to that. Something that we do at this that is not just measure the lift, i.e. what was the lift in awareness, consideration, intent and advocacy, but we understand what drives people through the funnel. And when you're looking at trying to understand what moves someone from becoming aware to now moving in market and considering, it's all about relevance. We speak of relevance in industry quite a lot, but actually what is relevance? Like, how can you actually measure that? And the way in which we measure that is we ask two questions within our survey. One is we ask them, what do you associate most with this brand? And those exact options, those might be four core associations for a brand, we would ask them separately, what's most important to you? And those will be the priorities, the consumer priorities. And when consumer priorities and brand associations align, that's relevance. And so the way in which influencers move people into the funnel, move them from merely becoming aware to actually considering buying this product or this, from this brand is relevance. And then they continue to push through moving from relevance to how they then drive someone from considering to taking action is they're very persuasive. And the way in which they persuade people actually builds love that makes them want to recommend, which is the true power of influence. You're not just an effective ad that gets someone to want to buy something, you're sparking a ripple effect. You're getting people to speak to their community and expand that story. So we have all this proof and both you and I are influence marketing nerds and ambassadors, but it's sometimes so frustrating when decision makers still don't understand why influence marketing is such a critical channel to reach the audiences out there today. So you mentioned as well that this state, I should encourage the most to invest more boldly into the channel. What would you say are the blockers or obstacles preventing this shift? Why aren't CMOS investing more into this obviously working channel? It's a great question and everyone's asking themselves this question. Certainty, comfort, it's a big shift. The industry has scaled massively. We've moved out of this early stage innovator era into mainstream. And what happens with that is that budgets grow. We're taking it up to 10, 20% of global marketing budgets, sometimes even up to 50% and moving beyond that. When you're moving at that volume, a spray and pray mentality isn't enough. You need to have certainty. You need to, the stakes are too high to fly blind. But the thing that makes influence marketing so successful and it was unpacked in these benchmarks is not just that they are more effective. It's how they drive the effectiveness. And it's a real shift of moving from an era of effectiveness or an era of personalization to an era of community where it's all about influence and that will take time. It might take a good three years to push them all through that and that's definitely a battle that we're fighting. We're moving from a very media centric world into more brand centric world. People can have to rewire their nervous systems. They're going to have to rewrite KPIs within job specs. There's a lot of stuff that's going to have to change. But those that are making those bets, they're winning massively, massively. And so, yeah, if you don't keep up, you'll get left behind and if you don't move fast enough, you're not going to grow enough. Yeah, things are changing right now and it's also interesting to see that not only the landscape is changing the playing field, but also the people in the decision making positions are changing. So, younger people are stepping up within organizations and when that happens, you can also see that these people understand the channel from another angle because they have grown up on social media. So that will also influence a lot. Fully agree. Fully agree. I mean, you see like Gymshark is a really interesting brand to have grown from out the UK and they just, not even just pioneered influencer marketing really, but pioneered a whole new business model. Yeah. About 30% of my recall does me right of their revenue goes through affiliate links back to their creators. That's a huge chunk of their business model. No other businesses, definitely not legacy business operate like that. You'd have to completely transform the whole company. They've really pioneered on community flywheels and understanding how to operate in this new era and it works for them and people that are jumping on that. I mean, look at road selling to L4, over a billion, only having launched just about three years ago. It works for those that understand and those that make the moves. Exactly. Those who dare. In influencer marketing, one of the most discussed challenges it has been that forever is proving this longterm brand impact beyond these impressions and views. As an expert in measuring, how do you see the role of measurement evolving and what should brands demand from their influencer partners today if they work with an agency or some kind of platform? I love that you asked that. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast? Go ahead. This notion that brand building is long-term and performance marketing is short-term is bullshit. Our clients, they use brand measurement to optimize their performance and so it's like, how has that happened? Well, we've built the tools such that you can do brand lift within hours. Historically, when you're working with a legacy research firm, you're waiting months. Yeah. Eight weeks maybe at best if you're trying to find like a scrappy upstart that copies their process, maybe four weeks, but just rewriting the infrastructure. Same methodology, nothing crazy new, but just using technology to do things better quicker and allows people to be more agile. Our clients, when they use us in that way, they're understanding why are people becoming aware? Is it entertaining them? Why are they considering? Is it relevant to them? Why are they buying? Is it persuasive? What messages do we need to anchor? How does this differ for different consumer priorities and so forth? Is the message that we're using believable? Do they agree with what we say? All that kind of stuff, you can now measure in real time and all that stuff is brand building. Those things lead to brand equity. Those things leads to having a stronger brand, more trust and everything that you're looking for when doing long-term brand building, but we're seeing that in a community era having an effective ad is no longer enough. You need to spark that ripple effect and to be able to spark that ripple effect, you need to build brand. So coming back to your question of what should they be demanding from their partners, they should be demanding that they have evolved ways of measuring brand. You should be able to measure brand like you measure performance. You should be able to have brand metrics that CFOs understand. Yeah, I think that's one of the big mistakes that many are doing, that they're not speaking the same languages to really prove the effect. And now with AI coming up, I guess you are working with that a lot within your platform as well. What are the biggest changes right now in terms of how you do things with AI? I mean, there are multiple ways in which you can use AI and there are multiple ways in which we use AI. So firstly, I hinted at how we collect data in a unique way, which is natural exposure. Now natural exposure is very much the gold standard, the best kind of data that you can collect. It is a lot more expensive. It is complex and time consuming. You have to integrate into all the different platforms, amplify content with pay to be able to collect that data, get access from creators and so forth. So if we're trying to give real time results, it's not going to work that way. But we do have over five million opinions that we've collected in that format and during this time we both have built up a training set from simulating exposure and forcing exposure. So we have approaches in which we can collect data in a simulated or forced environment and then re-forecast what that would look like in the real world. So that's one way of using AI. Something else we do is looking at causal AI when studying what has moved people through the consumer journey, trying to understand what the actual drivers are. And that was stuff that helped us unpack what moves someone from awareness to consideration, from consideration to intent, from intent to advocacy. For instance, understanding what moves someone from just buying something to advocating for it. It's all about love. It's a fun word to be able to champion. The glove is beautiful obviously, but it's like how much love do you need for someone to prefer your brand over another and what makes them fall in love with you and why might they love competition and is there room to conquer market share? Is there not? All of that kind of insight we can get much quicker using AI. There's a bunch of other stuff that we do too. We operate as both, we've got SaaS offerings, but we also operate as a service offering more like a consultancy basis. And our insights teams or strategists and data scientists, given the tools that we built in-house are able to operate three times more effectively than your traditional researchers. That means they can handle three times the amount of work, but it also means that from a client's perspective, it's 10 times easier because you don't have to speak to three more people, three more project management context, switching all of that jazz. It's a lot better of an experience and I think in the agency world, people will have to compete with that and start finding ways to be able to move more and be able to handle more. Based on all these insights that we've talked about, for brands, for the CMOs that are still not investing enough or not understanding the critical impact this channel has, what's the number one insight from your study that you think they can't afford to ignore? We have over five million opinions. This is statistically significant. You can't deny this data. It is from the best data in the world that you can get when it comes to brand lift and it's shown that full funnel influence marketing is more effective than other channels. It doesn't matter whether it's awareness, consideration, intent, advocacy, full funnel. So there's one thing to remember. Influencer is the best channel across the full funnel. That's all they need to hear. Thank you so much, Max, for sharing these insights. It was a pleasure to having you in the studio. Thank you so very much, likewise. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Influencer Marketing Talks. 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