Rise of Non-Branded Content. Fact: Modern Consumers are wary of… | by LLMs | Lazy Lemons & Mints Studio | Oct, 2023

Fact: Modern Consumers are wary of branded content.

A group of people may love a well-known brand based on their experience and vouch for it in their circle of influence (CoI), even if they don’t fit in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) model.

But the same group may absolutely loathe another well-known brand based on an existing bias, piece of news, or poor personal experience. And it becomes very difficult to change this perception.

Times have changed. Customers are smarter and have better access to news, alternatives and are more likely to protest unfair practices and poor experiences with your brand. Most importantly they are influenced by their peers in the proximity known as social media in making their purchasing decisions.

Newer companies have it tough getting a foot in the door in this environment. Consumers no longer make their purchasing decisions linearly. They want to compare prices and features, they want someone they trust to recommend.

And it is here that the traditional methods of targeting customers with Ads begin to give diminishing results.

Trust through Celeb Marketing
People want someone they know and trust to recommend new products for them to use. i.e. put a face they trust in front of the brand. And we’ve seen the shift towards this in the past decade.

From Multi-media ads featuring celebrities, we’ve come to the public social media feeds of the celebrities and icons containing those paid promotions.

But it’s simply not enough. For 2 simple reasons –

1. Wide but limited reach — While celebs do have a massive fan following and a bigger influence on their followers, they are still in the mainstream. They still can’t breach the personal feeds of people who don’t follow them. Even repeated posts will reach just as many people as followers they have.
2. High cost — Celeb-led ads are by tradition costly and out of the reach of many new businesses. The cost paid doesn’t even guarantee sales. Just reach. While the reach with a trusted face is great if it doesn’t convert to sales newer businesses would not have a great time using this method.

Trust through Influencer Marketing
This phenomenon has already led to the rise of Influencer Marketing. Where brands want to reach a wider more targeted audience and get more revenue.

Sadly even typical influencer marketing suffers from the above problems too. And given influencer marketing as an industry is still in a nascent age, there are hardly any standards.

Problems, problems…

Influencers are varied and unique by nature of their continued existence on the social media circuits but that leads to more chaos than order. And such chaos is historically bad for a new business.

New laws or guidelines come into effect suddenly, Social Media Platforms change their algorithms unannounced and no one really knows how it works or shares that into the public domain.

Hence Social Media Managers at new businesses have to now work as talent acquisition specialists and become capable of sailing the oceans that haven’t even formed properly yet.

Fortunately, it’s not all doom and gloom. we still have performance marketing.

A Solution, maybe…
(It is a Legitimate solution, It may fit your brand needs)

Frankly, a 25 year old method that led to the rise of Amazon and many more e-commerce names. A subset of performance marketing is known as Affiliate Marketing.

It’s an open secret for most players in the e-commerce space but not many new businesses seem to be using it successfully.

The idea behind affiliate marketing is simple, find someone with a Circle of Influence and help them monetize their influence in their own circles. This way you get to reach not just a few major circles of influence or reach.
1 influencer of 10k reach has 1 monetizable circle
whereas, 100 affiliates of 100 reach give you 100 circles with 100 potential buyers.

Even if 1 convincing voice is not enough for them to choose your brand. Think 10 people in your chat groups recommending the same toothpaste. That’s the power of affiliate marketing.

Moreover, you as a brand can turn your own happy customers into happier brand ambassadors by enabling them to become your affiliates. Give them a metric driven incentive and the tiny trickle of commission would keep work for you as a silent sales engine that take barely any gas but works with exponential returns.

Let’s take a look at some pointers of note:

1. You pay them only after they have sold products for you.
2. You don’t need to employ them, they use their own voice and mediums to bring traffic to your store.
3. They are self-motivated to sell, so you don’t have to spend time or money to train them for the basics.
4. They add their own face value to your brand and products when they recommend them.
5. They are the citizens of the “attention economy” hence they are better at changing their pace with the pace of the industry.
6. When they resonate very highly with your brand you can then extend a longer, more beneficial contract to them and boost your marketing game with automatically vetted resources. #FreeTrail4SalesTeam
7. The content they make doesn’t need to (absolutely should not) scream your brand name, rather it should guide their followers to your brand as a good solution or alternative. — almost textbook non-branded content.

It’s about the lowest liability sales boost one can employ easily in today’s day and age.

It’s not all sunshine and roses just yet.

1. You typically have to find these affiliates yourself
2. and manage them.
3. Handle returns
4. and payments
5. and sometimes even sending samples
6. and telling them what they can share on social media and what’s confidential.

it’s also a long list…

one that generally leads to hiring managers in your marketing teams solely to deal with this outsourced sales team.

Note: Still shorter and lower risk than existing alternative.

Hoping for better solutions:
But fret not. There are definitely startups coming up to solve those problems. I’m hopeful some of them will eventually take note of this opinion piece and either link to their existing products or get inspired to build new products to solve the problems in getting started with affiliate marketing.