Startups: Here’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Influencer Strategy

A concept for any early-stage digital platform or marketplace that will help you get to a Series A faster

Last year, after leaving BlogHer, the digital influencer media company that I co-founded and was acquired, I wrote a piece in response to brands I’d encountered who held misconceptions about how to work with digital influencers.

In short I said in the piece: Influencer marketing is NOT about convincing or paying people with huge platforms to try your product and talk about it. THAT is a short-term tactic, not a strategy.

Since then, I’ve advised and/or consulted for a dozen early- to mid-stage startup marketplaces and platforms and learned that the misconceptions are not with corporates only. Many startups have also placed outsized reliance on digital influencers to jumpstart their nascent brands.

It starts innocently enough: Someone’s brother’s girlfriend’s neighbor’s hairdresser knows some big name, who said they would be open to a conversation. This tenuous connection somehow makes it onto the pitch deck as a major component of go-to-market strategy and would I help figure out what to do with this connection, and find more like it? After all, my previous company consisted of a network of powerful digital influencers …

The digital influence that our network yielded was powerful, without question. But what enabled us to leverage this influence on behalf of brands and sponsors and scale to 100 million monthly uniques was the platform we built in support of these influencers, which enabled them to monetize, promote their own platforms, and build their own influence. This was our win-win mechanism, and one that so many early-stage platforms are missing, or misunderstand. They conflate a few highly-placed connections with real early-stage traction, and influencers with Influencer Community.

What is an Influencer Community?

The Influencer Community consists of the product- or service-providing side of any marketplace or “gig economy” platform. And it’s different than “readers” “subscribers” “customers” or “unique users”. The Influencer Community is a smaller, more powerful user base with even more skin in the game than a typical user. For BlogHer, the Influencer Community consisted of the bloggers who monetized their platforms through ours, who attended our conferences to learn best practices and network with other social influencers, who needed us to professionalize, and who ultimately brought us those 100 million unique monthly readers.

Without an Influencer Community, you cannot attract a larger audience. You cannot scale. When startup founders ask me for an “influencer strategy” what they really want is an Influencer Community Strategy. They just don’t know it yet.

So then, I don’t really want to reach Digital Influencers to build my new brand?

To be clear, an Influencer Community may include digital influencers, but social platform is not the defining characteristic of one, unless of course your platform or marketplace was built to serve digital influencers, like BlogHer’s was. Influencer Communities may consist of service providers, experts, local merchants, “gig” professionals, basically any market you are enabling with your platform.

Understanding the difference between Growth Hacking and Building Influencer Communities

Understandably, many early-stage consumer startups are focused on overall reach and consumer conversions; their investors are often focused on the outside concentric circle (see above). And they hire “Growth” Marketers who are adept at building audience off of small, targeted media buys on Facebook or Google, some well-placed PR mentions, and low-cost (or free) content to enhance SEO. And many of these companies are turning to digital influencers to support all of these efforts.

But if these startups fail to address how they will serve the Influencer Community—what tools are needed to manage it, the services they offer it, the influencers that really apply to that community, and how to market to and incent them—the influencer strategy fails.

Companies that build for Influencer Communities at the outset don’t have to boil the ocean by relying on a teeny marketing budget to get scaled traction. They win advocates who, in turn, bring in users who, in turn, bring in more advocates to the Influencer Community who, in turn … you get the idea.

Growth hacking may get users to your platform. A vibrant Influencer Community is what gets users to stay, and, sooner or later, to spend.

How do you build an Influencer Community? Behold the Magic Middle

Back when we were scaling BlogHer, 10 years ago, we noticed a core group in our Influencer Community of bloggers with growing, small-to-midsize audiences that were hyper-engaged—we called this group the Magic Middle.

We may have been better-known in the market for our Superstar bloggers, but in terms of performance for advertisers and sponsors the Magic Middle hit it out of the park. Their audiences, while smaller, were more likely to share content, and more interested in sampling and providing coveted reviews.

And, perhaps most important: The Magic Middle relied on us and our platform more than the Superstars to build their brands. They linked our success to their own; and they took care of others in the network by co-promoting and sharing best practices. Looking back, I don’t believe we could have scaled to 100MM monthly unique visitors without them.

This concept of the Magic Middle is hardly a new revelation. At this point, 71% of brands are bought into influencer marketing*, and the prevailing philosophy is to engage Superstar (read: expensive) influencers periodically while leaning more heavily on the Magic Middle (also known as “Microinfluencers”) to support Superstar content and build the bedrock of everyday engagement.

And yet this distinction is often lost on startup founders, who are building their marketing strategy around the larger consumer marketplace (who are expensive to attract and keep) and SuperInfluencers, who are expensive and ephemeral.

SuperInfluencers have their place in a growth strategy, but they are not THE growth strategy. When the singular goal is to reel in one or few as customers, endorsers, or beta users, you and your business have a problem. Here’s why:

1. Superinfluencers don’t need you.

I’ve met founders who will wholeheartedly disagree with me. “I spoke with so and so Superinfluencer, and he’s totally in to help.” Usually we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out a way to make hay of the connection with “so and so” instead of building a sustainable user community.

Which leads me to my next point about SuperInfluencers…

2. SuperInfluencers break business models. Back in 2005-2007, when a number of blog networks, including our own, had launched and received Series A funding (enough to start paying people), we found ourselves in an arms race with other publishers for influencer talent. Competitive networks offered top bloggers guarantees, monthly payments that they paid influencers upfront to ensure these SuperInfluencers stayed in-network. These guarantees were critical for branding purposes, and to help networks confirm their traffic. But we made the decision upfront not to offer guarantees and to focus instead on building the mid-size influencer base.

How did this play out? All networks experienced initial attrition—we lost some of the bigger influencers in our Magic Middle to competitors who offered guarantees, and we saw many of them come back six months to a year later, when their guarantee contracts expired and the network could no longer sustainably guarantee payment. Our biggest influencer, one of the largest in the world, joined us specifically because of our reputation for building quality relationships and focus on serving the influencer.

And many in our Magic Middle, who back then were just starting to build their brands, became trusted advisors and comprised the new wave of SuperInfluencers. They stayed with us because we built our brands together. 

Should you never consider working with a SuperInfluencer? Of course not, but consider the stage your business is in. Once you’ve achieved scale you become much more interesting and useful to a SuperInfluencer. And they are much more willing to work with you on your terms. You can re-enforce each other’s brands, and you don’t have to raise another round just to keep them engaged.

Founders of platforms and marketplaces: If there’s anything that I hope you leave with it’s a new view of your client base. It’s not just a mass of demographically linked consumers. It’s much more complicated than that—and yet it’s also much simpler in that you don’t have to build relationships with every single new user at the outset. You have to win over your customer community.

*RIP Influencer Marketing; Here's What's Next, Brian Solis