Influencer Marketing - Explain Like I’m 5
“Explain Like I’m Five’ or ELI5, is an idea that started on Twitter (#ELI5) and spawned the “Explain Like I’m Five” subreddit. ELI5 takes a complex idea or concept and goes through the mental exercise of simplifying it in a way that a young child can understand.
In this BENlabs take on ELI5, we’ll hit on some common — and not so common — terms relating to marketing, influence, and AI and do our best to distill them into simple terms without losing too much of the nuance.
Define Influencer Marketing in ELI5
Influencer marketing is when businesses pay people who are popular online to tell other people about their stuff. It’s a bit like when you talk to your friends about something you like. If you like a certain toy, you might tell your friends how much fun it is because you really like it and you think they’d like it too.
Influencer marketing is the same idea. The difference is that it’s not just friends talking to each other. Instead, the company that makes the toy would pay people who have lots of social media followers to talk about the toy.
The people who have lots of followers are often called “influencers.” When companies pay them to talk about their toy, that’s called “influencer marketing.”
The company pays the influencer to talk about the toy because the influencer’s followers trust what they say. If a lot of people see the post and if they trust the person who’s saying the toy is good, these followers might buy one for themselves.
There’s another important thing to know about influencer marketing and that’s something called “authenticity.” When you talk about the toy, that’s an “authentic” recommendation: you really do like the toy and that’s why you’re telling your friends about it. If you didn’t really like the toy but only said you liked it because someone gave you money, that would not be authentic, because you’re not really telling the truth.
And in influencer marketing, as in life, people have a way of knowing when we’re not telling the truth.
Influencer Marketing Made Simple
The BENlabs team uses proprietary AI tools to help make influencer marketing smart, scalable, and successful. From finding the perfect content creators, automating A/B testing content, copy and CTAs, and surfacing clear, predictive analytic insights early, when they can make the most difference, BENlabs is here to help.
