by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, December 15, 2017

Influencer marketing has been around for years, but since January 2016 the trend has climbed near to the top of Google Trend’s chart. In fact, this gradual climb in the past 12 months now has Google categorizing the keywords “Influencer Marketing” as a “breakout” trend, meaning that the search term grew by more than 5,000% in a specific amount of time.

Seth Kean, chief executive officer at ROI Influencer Media, which recently inked an exclusive partnership with StatSocial, said the trend has driven a larger brand strategy for marketers working with display, search and other media to reach consumers and business-to-business professionals.

ROI Influencer Media works with celebrities. The partnership with StatSocial will enable advertisers to gain insights into audience numbers of those influencers.

The latest partnership with StatSocial stems from advertisers’ need to gain more information about the influencer’s social media audience. Although a great deal of data exists about the influencer, very little is supplied to brands about their specific audience on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

The data includes age, gender, household income and ethnicity, along with interests and the other brands they follow.

Kean says there is even a difference in the behavior and makeup of a person, based on the platform people use to follow an influencer. StatSocial makes running this data possible.

For example, Target may want to reach young moms, and it has historically been simplistic to match influencers to young moms. Just because the influencer is a young mom doesn’t mean their audience follows the influencer for information on parenting. It also doesn’t mean those consumers will shop at a specific Target. The data will identify the age group and other brands they follow, as well as the top 100 interests of the consumers following the influencer and the type of information they are looking for.

Kean says ROI Influencer is also working to achieve “predictive success” for brands.

He called it a “search engine for influencer data,” because a lot of the information has existed for years, but it has remained siloed. It’s about tying engagement with the insights that come prior to the start of the campaign. He says it will make the outcome “almost predetermined … and the days of guessing should be long gone.”

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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