Influencer marketing, in some ways the baby of the digital marketing world, having its own set of words and phrases that many marketers are not so familiar with yet. On top of that, there is an array of confusion around the exact meaning of the words and how they should be used, many of which are being used incorrectly or interchangeably. It’s really hard to keep up! But don’t worry we’ve got you covered with our handy dandy influencer marketing buzzword definitions.
You can refer to our glossary at any time to refresh your knowledge on the confusing influencer marketing jargon, or you can use our glossary to prove your friends wrong, rather like when you end up having to google the rules of Uno. I kept telling them you can’t put a ‘plus 2’ on top of a ‘plus 4’! Anyway, we dove-in deep and pulled out the best explanations for these mysterious influencer marketing buzzwords in order to help our ever-growing community. Enjoy!
A
| Agency There are two kinds of agencies that play a role in influencer marketing – the talent management agency and the media agency. The media agency which can also be an advertising, marketing or public relations agency represents the brand and runs influencer marketing campaigns on behalf of the brand. The talent management agency recruits and works alongside the influencers. Both types of agencies act on behalf of their respective client and work on running influencer marketing campaigns and/or seizing opportunities for their client. |
| Application Program Interface (API) Essentially, Application Programming Interface, also known as API, is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. For example, if you wanted to tweet this article using the handy little bar on the right, that’s possible because Twitter’s API talks to our blog’s API and they communicate to make it work. |
| Audience In influencer marketing, audience can either refer to the legion of people following an influencer or a brand’s target audience that they want to reach and appeal to. Successful influencer marketing happens when the target audience of a brand matches closely with the demographics of the influencer’s audience. |
B
| Benchmark A benchmark can be used when making new goals and setting out decisions for campaigns. Benchmarks are reference points that can be used as a bottom line to measure against, and help determine success or failure. |
| Blog A blog is a medium where a writer or even a group of writers share their views on an individual subject (us at primetag writing to you right now on our blog). It normally includes text with additional images and/or videos. Influencers can use a blog as one of their channels to share content and become a dedicated blogger. |
| Blogger Blogger is someone who creates content on a blog about specific topics of interest. Bloggers can blog as a hobby or as a way to make a living through ads, products, coaching, or some other paid offering. |
| Brand Mentions Brand mentions refers to the number of times a content creator has mentioned a brand, company and/or product in their online content. These mentions can be paid or organic. These mentions affect a brands reputation, so it is important that mentions are positive and as genuine as possible. It is also important to monitor them. |
| Briefing In influencer marketing, a briefing (sometimes also referred as brief) is used to clearly explain the details for a campaign including requirements and deliverables, among other important information, to ensure the campaign is a strong and promising reflection of the brand’s message. This brief is crucial for ensuring that the influencer understands the context and meaning behind the campaign, which means that the brand’s expectations for the campaign can be met. |
| Budget The amount of investment to promote a brand/product/service during a specific timeframe and channel. |
C
| Call-To-Action (CTA) A call-to-action is a commanding word, sentence or phrase that encourages the viewer to perform a desirable action. In influencer marketing, this call-to-action is important for enticing the audience to act and therefore benefit the brand involved. Certain call-to-actions could include limited time discounts and discount codes, links to websites or encouraging subscription to a newsletter. A prime example of a CTA can be seen on Instagram stories, when an influencer writes something that will prompt you to swipe up and go to a website. |
| Click-Through-Rate In digital marketing the click-through-rate indicates that out of the number of people who viewed a piece of content, the proportion who then clicked. This is displayed in the form of a percentage and can be used to show the success of that post, if traffic generation is the main goal. |
| Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) Cost per Acquisition can be used as a pricing model where you pay an Influencer a percentage of the revenue for each customer acquired or it is a way to measure your campaigns performance based on the number of customers acquired vs. your investment. |
| Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Cost per click can be used as a pricing model where you pay an Influencer for the traffic generated via clicks or swipe ups or it is a way to measure your campaigns performance based on the cost of the influencers vs the number of clicks he generated. |
| Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE) Cost per Engagement can be used as a pricing model where you pay an Influencer for the Engagements generated via Likes, Comments or other types of engagement. It can be also a way to measure your campaigns performance based on how engaging the content was vs. the cost of the influencer. |
| Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) The cost per lead metric measures how cost-effective your marketing campaigns are when it comes to generating new leads for your sales team. In addition, this metric, similar to other metrics, can be used as a pricing model, whereby the brand/agency would pay the influencer based on the amount of leads they garner per campaign. Lastly, the metric can determine performance by comparing the investment made in a campaign vs. the number of leads generated. |
| Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) Cost-Per-Mille, also known as Cost Per Thousand is a marketing term used to denote the price of 1,000 advertisement impressions. It can be used as a pricing model to pay an Influencer based on the number of impressions achieved or as a way to measure your campaign performance. |
D
| Demographics Demographics refers to useful and important pieces of information on the audience of that content creator. It includes information like the age range, gender and geographical location of the audience members. It is critical to ensure access to real or verified data in order to plan your campaigns. A key issue in the realm of influencer marketing is estimated data. To learn more about estimated data and its effects in influencer marketing read our insightful blog article here. |
E
| Earned Media Earned media is media coverage as a result of a marketing campaign and/or press release, whether that be word-of-mouth marketing or user-generated content or PR campaigns. The media coverage is unpaid for and therefore earned, hence the name. The media coverage can be positive or negative. |
| Engagement Rate An engagement rate is a metric that measures the level of engagement that an account or piece of content is receiving from. Factors that influence engagement include comments, shares, likes, or the number of people who view the content. |
I
| Influencer campaign/influencer marketing campaign An influencer marketing campaign is similar to other marketing campaigns in which Influencers are the messaging vehicle to bring a specific desired outcome. |
| Influencer Marketing Influencer marketing can be defined as a scalable form of word-of-mouth marketing. In contrast with traditional advertisements, influencer marketing feels more genuine and trustworthy. Influencers create content featuring their opinions and thoughts on a brand, product, company and/or service in order as a form of promotion. |
| Influencer Marketing Platform There are 6 different types of influencer marketing platforms. Some can be to connect and collaborate (marketplaces) while others are just for discovery. Some may just focus on helping you manage the relationship with influencers (CRM/IRM), some focus on measuring (measurement) the results of the campaigns and then there are end-to-end platforms or hybrid tools that mix more than one function. |
| Influencer Selection Influencer selection refers to the process of applying criteria in order to choose an influencer or group of influencers to reach out and collaborate with. The criteria being used must align to the brand or campaign goals. |
| Instagram star/Instagrammer An Instagram-star also known informally as Instagrammers are influencers who frequently publish content on the social media platform Instagram as their main vehicle of outreach. Instagrammers can be very successful on the platform and create some unforgettable influencer marketing campaigns. We even took a deep dive into some of the most memorable influencer marketing campaigns of all time on Instagram: Fashion Edition & Beauty Edition. |
K
| Key Performance Indicator (KPI) A key performance indicator is a value used to measure a certain aspect of a digital marketing campaign, in order to measure goals and therefore the success of a campaign. Some examples of KPIs include return on investment/influence, cost-per-acquisition and cost-per-click. |
L
| Like A like is a button featured on websites and other online platforms which users can click to indicate that they enjoy the content being provided. On social media platforms such as Instagram, the likes, comments, saves and shares on a post combine together to show engagement, this rate can show how active and interactive an audience is with an influencer. |
O
| Organic reach Organic reach refers to the number of people who see a content without any kind of paid distribution. |
| Owned Media Owned media refers to the channels and communication resources that a brand owns to promote its business. It can be anything from a social media or company website to an image, infographic, video or webinar. |
P
| Page-views Pageviews is a metric used to show the total number of pages viewed on a website. In google analytics, repeated views of a single page are also counted. Pageviews can give an indication of how popular a post or page is, but having a high number of pageviews for a post doesn’t necessarily mean it is popular. Therefore, this metric must be put into context contrasting it with other metrics such as: time spent on site and bounce rate. |
| Paid Media Paid media refers to any media coverage and advertising that requires the purchase of space to promote a brand to larger audiences. Paid media can be part of a brand’s strategy to increase coverage or traffic. When a brand pays an influencer to talk about their products, that is paid media. |
| Paid partnership The generic expression of “paid partnership” refers to when a brand and an influencer establish a relationship in which the latter promotes the brand and or products/services of the former, in exchange of compensation. On Instagram, a ‘paid partnership’ occurs when an influencer shares a post or story on the platform and tags a business account as a Business Partner. The paid partnership tag appears at the top of the image or story where the area/location normally is displayed. |
| Paid Reach In contrast to organic reach, paid reach is when you pay to distribute content to a specific target. |
R
| Reach Reach in digital marketing refers to the total number of users who have viewed a specific piece of content online. If someone views a piece of content two times it means that the content had as a result: 1 reach and 2 impressions. |
| Return On Investment (ROI) The Return On Investment (ROI), is the received/earned value garnered as a result of the investment made into a marketing activity. Examples of these marketing activities include influencer marketing campaigns. This key metric can be used to assess the cost-efficiency and success of a marketing activity, in other words are you getting enough bang for your buck. |
S
| Share A share is a form of engagement used on social media to display a user’s post onto your own audience. |
| Share-of-Voice The Share of Voice is the level of participation of your brand or company in a given channel, such as social media or blog. It reflects the level of participation in the conversation versus your competitors. |
T
| Target Audience The target audience is a specific group of people within the target market of a certain brand, product or service, and whose marketing message is aimed at. |
| Tracking Links A tracking link is a normal URL with tags appended to the end. These tags are used to trace back the source of generated traffic to a website and therefore measure the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign. |
| Traffic Traffic refers to the amount of people being sent to a website. In influencer marketing driving traffic can be a primary KPI and will therefore include a direct link to the website along with an encouraging call-to-action prompt. |
U
| Unique Visitor (UV) Unique visitor is defined as a metric referring to a user who visits a site at least once within the reporting period. |
V
| Views Views refer to the number of times a piece of content has been watched. It can be a video content or a website. |
Y
| YouTuber A Youtuber is a video content creator who regularly publishes videos on Youtube in order to transmit ideas, inform or simply entertain its users. They often collaborate with brands in order to promote their product and services in their channels. It is currently considered a profession. |
