Adrianna ("AG) Bevilaqua, Sherri Langburt and Heidi Nazarudin joined #SMTLive on November 10 to talk about the future--and the present--of Influencer Marketing. Baby, it's come a long way since the early days of SMT - or even what we fondly referred to as "Mommy Blogging."
For one, as evidenced by the fact that Nazurdin, formerly an investment banker, and now the blogger on TheAmbitionista.com is advising the likes of Vanity Fair and Saks, successful bloggers are the new celebrity endorsers. But with a difference: as AG and Langburt pointed out, they tend to be more flexible and more creative with their sponsors. Further, although their fees are going up and up, they often understand digital marketing better because they grew their own sites, and have a better grasp of how to use that understanding to provide sponsor value.
Langburt is the brainchild behind BlogMeetsBrand, a platform for engaging with bloggers,(and with whom we've been collaborating to produce a business-oriented platform launching very soon). BlogMeetsBrand has baked into its technology a simple way to reach out to the best bloggers, to engage with them in an authentic way, and to measure their content on the back end. That's a deceptively simple explanation of a platform that continues to include new features for effective influencer marketing. During the webinar, Langburt detailed how the platform works and the many ways that it has taken the sweat out of word-of-mouth.
AG spoke of how important influencer marketing has become, not just at MBooth, her award-winning, on-the-rise agency based in New York, but generally, as an important line item in the marketing budget.
There are many great slides here in the presentation and I encourage you to take a listen.