At ThisThat we’re pretty infamous for being no BS kindsa people. So, if you’re an influencer marketing agency and still using Brand Uplifts which recruit respondents via panels and take an age to actually get created…. we need to have a chat hun.
Let’s start with the basics.
What even is a Brand Uplift?
AW! Glad you asked. Simply put, it’s a way to measure the impact of an influencer marketing campaign for a particular brand. Were people more likely to purchase the product after interacting with the content? Has the campaign led to a change in audience sentiment? Was it positive or negative? Technically speaking it measures the success of your campaign using lift measurements among those exposed to the campaign’s content versus those unexposed, for the campaign’s KPI – that’s key performance indicator for any noobs out there. And a key performance indicator would be something like brand recall, purchase intent or recommendation intent.
Sounds pretty good right? But, there’s a fundamental issue within market research and the influencer marketing space. Brand Uplifts have not been built around influencer marketing and its needs and especially capturing Gen-Z opinion.
So, what’s wrong with how current brand uplifts are run?
More traditional market research companies – we all know who we mean here, no need to name names but rhymes with BIELSEN and Fantar run Brand Uplifts using methodologies from the 90s… and not in a cute way.
They recruit respondents via panels, which involves a lengthy screening process to find audiences exposed/ unexposed to the content, consequently by the time the data has been gathered the client has moved on and often no longer cares… Which is not great for bizness. Further to that, panels rely on actually quite untrustworthy data within the influencer marketing space: “claimed following” and “claimed exposure”. Translated, respondents will simply be asked “do you follow x influencer”, and “did you see y content”? I don’t know about you, but I would struggle to remember all of the creators I follow on Instagram and whether or not I’d interacted with a certain piece of content…. Social media is an incredibly saturated space! And our brains are constantly consuming images, videos, reels. Trusting that a respondent will remember the influencer or the content begins your analysis from a fundamentally pretty shaky foundation.
Ok then, traditional Brand Uplifts are bad… so how is ThisThat different?
Recruit via social ads
We recruit respondents via social ads. Panels are dead and recruiting via social is the future. We can target audiences through whitelisting. Not only does whitelisting save time by skipping the lengthy screening process, it also provides trustworthy data that you can rely on, as we hyper target the audience who engaged with the influencers content in the exact time frame in which they shared the campaigns creative. Further to that, we’re able to target audiences by any social ad definable trait: pages they follow, behaviours, interest, location, age group – go as niche as you’d like. This starts your analysis from a far more reliable space and you can trust the data here.
Gen-Z engaged effortlessly
We’ve built the world’s first fun surveying platform (wild, I know). ThisThat’s social media embedded surveys are built in a gameified way with GIF's, reactions and videos, so Gen Z and young millenials actually enjoy taking part in our surveys. We’ve found there is a 10x conversion from ad reach to response which enables response recruitment through social ads. Our ads are so effortlessly integrated on social media, that respondents barely even notice they’re taking part in a survey.
We tell you why a campaign was successful
Every Brand Uplift, including ours measures the standard lift measurements: brand awareness, purchase intent and recommendation rate. These are the basics that tells you the “what” of a campaign: “how successful it was”. But we are unique in that we dig into the “why”, why a campaign was successful. We run brand perception testing, creative testing and audience and influencer testing so you can really understand which elements of your campaign contributed to its success, and feed into how you run future campaigns.
Extra special sauce:
Brand perception testing
Understand the relative perception of your brand against its competitors in any given industry, down to a numerical degree. It’s actually the same maths they use to rank chess players. (Shout out to any Queen’s Gambits fans!)
Creative testing
We use this to measure different touch points across your funnel and understand why your content was successful (or may not have been) in the campaign. This allows you to optimise campaigns going forward.
Audience testing & influencer testing
This is included in our Insight + package. This is our juiciest offering and something which only ThisThat offers. For audience testing, we can isolate and understand which target group was most successfully impacted by the campaign. We’ll make sure that these traits are facebook ad definable so you can actually use this information to target certain audiences for future campaigns.
Influencer testing allows us to isolate the impact of individual influencers, rank their performance and isolate each influencer’s audience, giving you rich insight into their buyer behaviour and brand preferences.
Our unique tech in Brand Uplifts will strengthen your position as a top tier influencer marketing agency, able to prove the viability of your business strategy for that brand and giving you bragging rights for your influencer and audience selection. Not only that, experience a three week brand uplift experience from the initial kick off call to the results. We give you insight fast that could optimise a campaign at a midway point, or feed into the marketing machine for the next campaign. Now that’s some kinda magic. Check out our Brand Uplifts page to find out more details. And remember kids, data doesn’t tell you s•••, insight does.