According to SimpliLearn, Influencer Marketing (using influencers to promote your brand) is the most effective customer acquisition channel of all.
That makes perfect sense in today’s social-centric, famous for 15-megabytes world – if you’re an influencer with a community who dwell on your every word, you can gently encourage your fans to follow your advice and buy the products you recommend. Think Oprah Winfrey, but on a very small scale.
However, unless you’re already a world-renowned YouTuber, Instagrammer or Tweeter, chances are that you don’t have many following you.
Instead, you’re going to want to track down key influencers relevant to your market sector, so that they can share your brand messages with their devoted followers.
Whilst there are a few tools such as Klout and PeerIndex that track influencers, they’re inevitably US- or UK-centric and aren’t particularly useful for identifying NZ digital celebrities.
So how exactly do you find local heroes-with-a-following?
A. Traditional Media
We would be remiss if we didn’t first point you in the direction of good old-fashioned Kiwi print and broadcast media. The media world may be in transition but newspapers, magazines, radio and television still have more readers/listeners/viewers than their digital counterparts.
The barriers between church and state (i.e. journalists and advertisers) is lower than it ever was — note, for example the prominent position of the “Brand Insight” native advertising section on the front page of nzherald.co.nz — but as the wall comes down, prices go up.
It’s no longer so difficult to get journalists to write about you, as long as you’re willing to pay. If not, then the barriers are as high as ever.
B. NZ Influencer Marketing Agencies
As you might expect, where there are buyers and sellers who don’t necessarily know each other, intermediaries have sprung up to connect the two groups.
Influencer marketing agencies come and go, you’ll need to Google the latest players), but here’s one that (at the time we last updated this post):
And The Social Club’s self-description?
Our mission is to bring authenticity, consistency & transparency to Influencer Marketing.
Much of the inspiration for The Social Club came from our own experience within the industry. Coming from marketing and digital backgrounds, we had all worked extensively with both influencers and brands. We’d seen just how successful these collaborations could be, but we’d also all noticed just how much could be done to make the influencer marketing process more transparent, efficient & effective.
A lot of great stuff was happening, but we recognised that the process just wasn’t quite right, and most people seemed to focus too heavily on large scale influencers, forgetting about the reach and connection that smaller, more localised influencers can harvest. So, over a beer and a few yarns, The Social Club was hatched, and here we are.
We’re committed to helping New Zealand and global brands scale the storytelling process: by bringing efficiency, fairness & transparency to influencer advertising.
Our community of influencers are working alongside brands, as well as agencies, to help with brand awareness, new product releases, event promotion, sponsorship arrangements and subtly amplifying existing campaigns & competitions.
Whether you’re representing a New Zealand household name or a local cafe, in Auckland or Te Awamutu, touch base with us and see how our community can help.
C. Social Media
Social Media, of course, is where most non-traditional Kiwi Influencers hang out. It’s beyond the scope of this article to step you through how you can find Kiwi Influencers on X (Twitter), TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube (although Lesson Nine of our Social Media Marketing online training course does just that). But we encourage you to explore for yourself.
