Why influencers should start their own lifestyle brands

Influencers are great at creating world-class content, but most influencers are less business-minded than they think. Let us tell you how influencers should act to receive 50 to 100 times more financial value, and at the same time, become more authentic in their content creation.

Let´s start by defining what an influencer is. We don´t believe influencers are the traditional Instagram stars only. To us, an influencer is generally every person or community with a digital following, independent of channel or area of expertise. It´s simply a person or community with high trustworthiness and a digital reach, which makes it possible for them to influence people. This could be the traditional fashion star on YouTube or Instagram, but also the bird-watcher with his or her niche podcast, or the fisherman talking about the latest fishing gear in his or her newsletter. The thing that unites every influencer is that they create world-class content - content that brings great value to their following.

Influencers have historically monetized their following in mainly three ways:

(1)

By receiving free product gifts that hopefully would be promoted by the influencer.

(2)

By charging for marketing services to promote products and services through the influencer’s channels.

(3)

By creating inauthentic collections for product companies, selling these through the influencers channels.

We believe influencers are here to stay, but that the way influencer marketing is performed is developing rapidly. All of the approaches above are only creating a short time value for the influencer.

How would an influencer not only increase both the received short- and long term value, but also monetize their following in a more authentic way? The answer is by creating their own product brand company. This way the influencer not only receives short term incomes from the company profits but also gets to build a long term company value. The thing is that this approach gives the influencer a 50 to 100 more value in terms of $ in the long term. It is also less artificial and much more authentic, and creates fluid content that is more genuine to the influencer than someone else’s brand ever will be.

There are many exciting examples of how massive value has been build by influencers who chose to start their own product companies. Kim Kardashian, as an example, has reaped the benefits of starting her own brands instead of doing collaborations. We will examine these success stories is separate blog posts ahead.

If you are an influencer that gets excited about this - get in touch with us! Fashion Tech Group develops, manages, and scales authentic product brands for category-leading influencers who want to establish their lifestyle brand. We offer a seamless procedure regarding the concept, production, logistics, marketing, operations, and e-commerce solutions. We are the go-to partner for you to realize your dream.

Interview with Scope founder Sebastian Lindén

Sebastian Lindén is the founder of Scope - a Google for finding influencers. Scope makes it easy to search, filter and find relevant influencers through its search engine. It is currently used by high-achieving companies such as NA-KD, Ideal of Sweden, and other influencer marketing heavy companies.

Hey Sebastian! Why did you found Scope?

Hi there! Scope started as a side experiment that we did in the evenings. As we signed more customers that used us on a daily basis we realized that it required our full attention. Coming from mobile games, we found the influencer industry to be very interesting but also flooded with a lot of lazy actors.

We saw how recently founded brands grew fast relying on influencers as their core business (Nakd, Ideal of Sweden, Stronger among others). They did the work with influencers in-house. Most tools dated back to 2010. We wanted to build something for these brands to use on a daily basis and figured that working in-house starts with a great influencer search.

Rumors say you basically live at the office - is that true?

More or less! We found a spot that we like a lot, why live somewhere else?

What are you guys currently working on at Scope?

Lately, we've been working on Lookalike, a new feature that makes the process of finding new relevant influencers faster. In one click a Lookalike segment to your list is created. It's very exciting - we've seen that some brands find 50x more influencers with Lookalike.

Let's say that you want to find 70 female micro yoga influencers from France. With just 15 influencers, Lookalike will find you similar influencers to the ones from your initial segment. And this goes on for any category, male or female or if you want to find from a specific location.

Here's an update of what we're working on.

What has your greatest challenge been so far?

Give all customers the help and time they deserve. This is tricky when our ambition is to build for scale, as we're committed to keeping the team small - with the approach to automate things along the way. This means that the work we did with less than half of the customer base needs to be done with the same resources, and that's the case month over month.

How do you think influencer marketing will develop in 2019?

It will get even more saturated - which means more influencers, more brands, and more tools. Bigger brands that previously have relied on agencies will bring the work with influencers in-house as they validate the channel.

The most successful brands in 2019 will build robust long-term influencer strategies. They will hire in-house. They will know their audience and have the guts to stay specific and focused. The less successful ones will aim for wide audiences, write bad emails, and deliver poor products. They will not be as focused as the best players.

And how about over the next 3 - 5 years?

As brands will learn about their methods of working successfully with their audience and influencers, we will see more media channels evolve within the influencer marketing space, such as Podcasts, Youtube, and other formats. Influencer networks and agencies will only be used by bigger corporations. Influencer market places will struggle to work at scale and in different countries. So not only more competition among brands and tools, but also more competition among influencers.

Is there anything you can recommend?

Don't follow what everyone else is doing. Try to do the opposite.

Finally, tell us something most people don't know about you!

I can stand on my toes like a ballerina? Not too useful though.