Can you really build a business using social influencers only?

That’s what entrepreneurs Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic asked when they set up HiSmile, their teeth-whitening dentistry startup. After generating $10 million turnover in just 18 months you could say they have something to smile about.

They credit the glowing results from their teeth-whitening business to just one thing: social-media influencers.

Engaging a massive superstar like Kylie Jenner can have an immediate impact on the business and drive awareness through the roof. But it takes big bucks and guts to commit that much money to just one channel. The ultimate task is to turn those likes into sales.

How did HiSmile get started?

Nik, 21, and Alex, 23, bootstrapped HiSmile using $20 000 of their personal savings. Much of this was spent sending their $79.99 home whitening kits to influencers, convinced it was the best way to reach their demographic of 15- to 24-year-old women.

They were clear about their target market from the outset, ‘It’s important for us and our marketing team to understand who the 15- to 24-year-old female is looking up to and looking at for inspiration — who are they looking at for their look,’ Nik explains.

‘We don’t believe in forcing a product down people’s throats and saying, “You must buy this!” We’re not trying to sell as such. We’re selling a lifestyle.’

Nik predicts his company will turn over an additional $40 million by the end of 2018. They’re using celebrities to increase awareness quickly and doing well with it.

Transparency and trust — the new currency of marketing

Marketing is different now. Consumers are savvier and have instant access to peer reviews, comparison sites, celebrities and CEOs. The claims advertisers make have never been under greater scrutiny. The dreams that the Mad Men of advertising spun have far less power than they used to. In the not-so-recent past, we believed their claims that ‘this face cream will make you look younger’; ‘this dress will make you look slimmer’; ‘this car will make you feel sexier’.

We bought those products but they didn’t deliver on the promise. We didn’t look younger, slimmer or sexier but we didn’t have an outlet to complain. Now we do. It’s called social media. It gave the ‘little people’ a voice. Social media also gave power to those with large social networks: people who blogged about products and told their followers what products they liked and what products they didn’t. These bloggers now have enormous power and, with one post or tweet, can make or break a company.

After all, if our favourite blogger, one we love and trust, tells us that the hotel they stayed in is terrible, are we going to believe them or the glossy commercial we see on TV telling us otherwise?

Those bloggers have become ‘influencers’ and they are turning the advertising industry on its head; any brand worth its salt knows they must engage with the key influencers in their industry.

You don’t need millions of followers to be an influencer either. Having an audience of 3000 engaged and devoted followers can be far more powerful than having 300 000 disinterested or fake fans. This rise of ‘micro bloggers’ — people with small but engaged fans — enables smaller brands with smaller budgets to get their word out to the world very cost-effectively.

The rise of the micro blogger

As A-list influencers are increasingly co-opted by the big end of the commercial world, the centre-of-influencer gravity is shifting towards micro bloggers. This is where we find people such as photography blogger Darren Rowse, baking blogger Lucy Mathieson and travel blogger Anna Whitehouse. The non-celebrity social influencers. Real people who express genuine joy, actual outrage and authentic vulnerability. And, happily for the brands, they come at a lower cost and with a more engaged audience.

These micro bloggers are foundational to how the social influencer movement began.

Real people. Real opinions

Anna Whitehouse, founder of Mother Pukka, the parenting lifestyle brand with 141 000 followers on Instagram, believes this change in approach is being driven by a desire for real experiences. She says, ‘Ten years ago, when I was sent on a press trip as a journalist, I would write about the place in terms of function — rooms, food, view, friendliness. Now I write and vlog [which is like a blog, but on video] about hotels and travel experiences in a more personal way.’

By using social media to show not just a glossy image but, instead, a warts-and-all diary of travel, Whitehouse is forging more emotional connections with consumers. She explains that there was a shift from simply answering the question, ‘What does this destination offer?’ to ‘How do I feel here?’

‘Travel companies we’ve worked for want to know about our experience instead of getting an obvious puff piece that sells the place,’ she says. ‘On a recent trip to Martinhal Resort, a Boomerang video of my daughter beaming as she’s chucked in the air by my husband in the swimming pool made them more bookings than a lengthier blog post “selling” the facilities.’

Making big from baking

Lucy Mathieson is a baking blogger from Victoria who has turned a passion for cooking yummy things into a profitable business. Her blog, Bake Play Smile has only been in operation for four years and yet she has over 110 000 followers on Facebook and counts Tip Top, San Remo and Tefal as clients. The blog generates an income of over $100 000 per year which means she’s been able to quit her job as a primary school teacher and can focus on building the business.

‘It took about a year for it to take off and I didn’t really make any money from it until then,’ Mathieson says. ‘It’s all about trust. Brands trust me, and they know I understand what my audience wants. Having said that, I need to maintain the integrity of my blog, so I am selective with the campaigns I choose.’

You need only engage Mathieson if you want the truth. She only accepts campaigns that she knows will be a great fit and that she can talk positively about. If she loves a product or a brand, she’ll happily tell her audience all about it, but if it’s not something she believes in, you won’t see it on her website. That’s the honesty her followers rely on and it is the reason why the market for micro bloggers has exploded.

Social influencer platforms

The rise of social platforms such as TRIBE and Srunch means consumers can directly connect with their celebrity, mini celebrity or micro blogger of choice. That was unheard of before. Likewise, the brand can also connect directly with their consumer. That was also unheard of before. When I worked for impresario Harry M. Miller as a celebrity manager, our cache — in fact, our reason for existence — was we had the ‘ear’ of the celebrity. No-one got access to the celebrities unless Harry said so and certainly no-one got that celebrity’s endorsement without paying big dollars. This brokerage model, of course, is not new. All forms of gatekeepers use it: actor agents, model bookers, real-estate agents, stockbrokers.

What’s changed on the celebrity front is that we can now get direct access to these celebrities through their social media account and personal brand websites. Everyone is accessible — heck, I can tweet the President of the United States. The very idea of a gatekeeper seems quaint now, almost laughable.

So, in other words, we’re moving away from the traditional sales approach where we got force-fed a steady stream of manufactured concepts designed to sell us the dream. And we’re moving towards the role of real people writing real opinions about a product they really use. It’s this new wave of influencers that is powering this shift from sales to influencing.

The marketplace as gatekeeper

The gatekeeper’s role has returned in the form of the marketplace. Companies such as TRIBE move in, formalising the influencer arrangement and helping broker the deals between the influencer and the brand.

Unless you’re a top-tier marketing agency, trying to co-ordinate, book and manage an influencer campaign can be time-consuming and expensive. TRIBE harnesses Other People’s Stuff (in this case, their networks and databases) to help brands find customers.

How small businesses can use influencers

Influencer marketing is perfect for big brands wanting instant content, but it’s great for small brands that are starting out, have no database or can’t afford AdWords and other traditional forms of advertising.

Jules Lund says genuine engagement with followers is the top priority for brands searching for effective influencers.

For us, it’s all about engagement — getting those important comments, likes and shares. It’s also about ensuring that the content our influencers create is original, unique and of the highest quality. Whilst we know big businesses appreciate what an influencer can do for them, we are increasingly seeing smaller businesses engage with social media influencers because it enables them to reach new audiences cost effectively. Micro influencers charge less than celebrities because they don’t yet have the audience, or the broader public awareness outside of their online tribes.

How one mention can make a difference

One mention from a respected influencer can make a massive difference. For Matt Barrie that came in the form of a passing comment by the Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of The World is Flat. Friedman gave a commencement speech for a leading university on how technology enabled things to get done more quickly and in that speech and subsequent interviews, mentioned how it was now possible to get a prototype made in China, have it manufactured in Vietnam, and you could then engage Amazon to distribute it and use Freelancer to get the logo done. Barrie said that the mere mention of Freelancer by this luminary figure caused the blogosphere to ‘light up’ and put Freelancer on the map.

All or nothing? What works best

HiSmile founder Nik Mirkovic says, ‘We’re spending money in different places rather than limiting it to just the one platform, like Instagram. So, we’re really trying to go hard on all the platforms that we think suit our target market, so for us it’s Snapchat, YouTube and Musical.ly.’

Marketing expert Adam Franklin from Bluewire Media warns social media marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for small businesses.

‘Social media marketing is important and it’s valuable to a lot of businesses but it should not be portrayed as a magic pill that will instantly transform a poorly performing company,” he says.

Social media may be the best way to reach a young demographic, but Franklin insists it isn’t the only way.

Be careful before pouring all your marketing spend into social media as you may find it just fills the coffers of Google and Facebook and has no impact at all on your sales. The best solution is to integrate social media with other media choices and ensure your website is the mothership that all roads lead back to.

Radio is still going strong and flying along according to Daryl Mitchell, head of sales at Melbourne radio station Light FM.

Social is important but when combined with radio, it’s absolutely potent. We use our Facebook page to complement our clients’ radio spend so the client gets two bangs for their buck: they get a radio advertisement and we also promote their offer on our Facebook page. So clients are loving how we’ve been able to blend those two mediums so effectively.

Social influencers are a new and exciting tool in a startup’s arsenal of ammunition and can provide access to a new source of prospects quickly and cost-effectively. Once those new prospects hit your website they’ll need to be dazzled and delighted with what you have to offer. The words you use on your website will go a long way to helping you do that. Coming up are some tips on how you can write powerful headlines for your website, blogs, social posts and other content.