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Dear ‘Influencers’,
Hello – hope you are ok. You’ve taken a real battering in the media recently and to be honest, you deserve it.
Influence is defined as ‘the capacity to affect the character, development, or behaviour of someone’ – and frankly you just don’t.
People have wised up to the endless campaigns that you are paid to promote, that you have no idea what or who the products or services are about. You have within a very short time burnt-out the candle of your networks through abusing their trust and faith in you, and instead – people are beginning to turn to those that they trust – their friends and family and close network for advice and guidance.
And that’s the problem now. How do brands engage with these advocates of their brands and avoid the perils of paying for ‘influence’ and ending up with lots of footfall wearing out the carpet but not buying anything. And that why we created Kindred.co
As a brand dipping your toes into the influencer market is expensive and risky. It can deliver either amazing returns and results – because you found the right influencer to promote your products. Or it can end up being a bit like the side of a bus, loads of views, little or no conversion. Brand building if you will, but completely un-targeted.
But you already have the answer to the above problem. You are sitting on it. Your best customers. Brand communities will be 2020’s biggest area of growth in marketing. Those brands that adopt and adapt their best clients to help them find (influence so to speak) other customers will win.
Some big brands are already doing this very successfully. Calvin Klein already has 7,000 advocates for their brand – converted from their customer base – to help them promote exclusive deals to their social bases. Kindred does this for you automatically and without friction. This is true advocacy and is the future of this industry.
It ticks three boxes and where the entire industry must head to win. True advocacy from brand fans. True peer to peer – remember we now trust our friends and family, in effect micro and nano advocates, more than anyone else. And finally, it has clear and present sales metrics.
But what about influencers? What will happen to them? Well, we still love the authentic ones here at Kindred. And we have given them the tools to activate their army of followers through us to do good and give back. Engaging and converting their audience to a sales channel that the followers also benefit from is the way forward. And influencers have a role to play, albeit a different one from a few short months ago.
2020 – Brand Communities. It’s a thing.
Aaron Simpson,
Founder of Kindred
