Free Consumer Study Report – The Power of Digital Influence: What inspires and influences Swiss consumers

More than 85% of the Swiss population can be reached on social media and 40% follow influencers. Can they be influenced to make purchases through these channels? Our study on where and how Swiss consumers find inspiration and information about products and brands today, with an added focus on influencer marketing and the luxury industry, says yes. 

Influencer and advocacy marketing can nowadays be identified as Influence Marketing producing the pinnacle of purchase decision drivers, electronic Word of Mouth or eWOM. eWOM is impacting consumers through recommendations that feel as relevant as those of a friend or an expert. It’s therefore no surprise that, according to our data, every third inspiration via a social media channel or influencer leads to a purchase in Switzerland.

We address the ongoing debate about authenticity and marketing power of influencers – do consumers trust them? Can they really sell products? We found that in the lifestyle and luxury sector, 78% of Swiss consumers who noticed paid influencer ads were inspired by them, and 40% stated they’ve made a purchase because of them. In other words, influencer marketing is a powerful form of marketing in Switzerland where authenticity and commercial opportunity co-exist.

In our Consumer Study Report about “The Power of Digital Influence”, you will find profound insights into online channels, platforms, and content creators that inspire Swiss consumers and act as key decision-making levers in the purchasing process.

If you have missed our exclusive summary of the study in our public webinar with marketing.ch, where key results and insights have been presented by our CEO Yoeri Callebaut and Chief Strategy & Digital Influence Officer Eric Amstein, you can find the full recording here.

Free Consumer Study Report – The Power of Digital Influence: What inspires and influences Swiss consumers

Study Report

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Free Ebook – Connecting the Dots: Guide to Omnichannel Digital Storytelling for Brands

Although the term “storytelling” is (over)used non-stop in marketing circles, it sometimes feels like a mythical creature many talk about but few ever really see. One thing we know is that stories work.

In our Ebook about Omnichannel Storytelling, you will find every important aspect to step up your storytelling game to connect even more with your audience.

Downloadable Content

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Build Trust & Humanize Your Brand with Personal Branding

By elevating their personal brand, CEOs and other senior business leaders can become powerful brand advocates and make a valuable impact on the organization they work for. In this article, we’ll cover what businesses need to think about to effectively leverage personal branding at the executive level and further build trust with their target audiences by ‘humanizing‘ the brand.

Engage in Conversations to Drive Results

While social media can enable you to take control of your narrative, the digital landscape is full of noise, with millions of brands — and even more individuals — competing for attention. Some of the keys to successfully connect to your audiences and outpace those who compete for their attention are relevance, timing (right content at the right moment), message clarity, and ease of message absorption. However, none of these keys will open any doors without the most important one needed to captivate people and drive results: trust. Simply having a company profile and posting quotes or other content won’t effectively build trust. Instead, it’s important to differentiate your brand and build relationships with stakeholders in the market. One effective way companies can do so is by leveraging people to humanize their brands. Especially when these people have extensive reach and relevance, their impact can be very significant.

People connect with people, not logos.

Personal Branding. People-connect-with-people

Social media isn’t just about making noise yourself, but also engaging in conversations and dialogues with your audience. You have to be in the weeds to build trust and connect to people. People are craving authentic and real content as well as advice and even guidance in multiple areas, and look for people and brands they believe in to provide this. Cultivate genuine relationships and build trust so that if your audience is ever in need of a solution, you’ll be top of mind. Once you have the trusting ear of your peers, partners, clients, and people in general, it becomes so much easier to get any message across, making your communication much more effective, achieving your goals more easily.

Making A Brand Human

Marvin Sangines, CEO & Co-Founder of notus and personal branding advisor at Kingfluencers, emphasizes starting withclear goals in place.

Personal Branding. Marvin Sangines

It’s easy to get blinded by vanity metrics such as big numbers of views and followers. It’s not about the number of followers you have. What matters is the quality of the connections you make. At the same time, know yourself, your values, and your purpose. Define clear goals and ensure that your communication strategy feeds into those objectives. Once you’ve defined your position in the market and optimized the relevant profiles accordingly, you can start to distribute content across social media and build stronger connections with more engaged followers.

The 4 Content Pillars

Marvin outlined his proprietary “Content Archetype” framework which Kingfluencers applies when working with personal branding clients. He categorizes content as follows:

  1. Tactical: Actionable, implementable advice, relevant to your target audience
  2. Aspirational: Results, case studies showcasing the transformations your customers went through with your company // Stories of growth and hyper-specific outcomes.
  3. Insightful: Analyzing industry trends and extracting insights from your expert perspective
  4. PersonalDiscussing personal anecdotes and stories

When building executive profiles, the human element is very important. It’s up to each person or company to decide how personal they want to make their brand and find the right mix. Additional best practices for CEO profiles include:

  • Engage with other employees
  • Don’t just repost links — give your two cents and contextualize what you’re sharing
  • Communicate company purpose — what’s your purpose?
  • Share behind-the-scenes content
  • Collaborate with other professionals

Before posting content, define brand guidelines and dos and don’ts, for example, you might decide that emojis are a no go. Once guidelines have been defined, it’s important to make sure people move within those guidelines. Marvin recommends, “If you have a slip-up, be fully transparent. Communicate proactively and own your mistakes.”

Growth of Personal Branding Services

Yoeri Callebaut, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Kingfluencers, stated, “Kingfluencers has partnered with specialist Marvin Sangines as part of our efforts to bring personal branding services here to Switzerland. Switzerland is also home to many regional and international organizations and senior business decision makers who have a lot to gain from developing their personal brand following our program. We’ve seen how personal branding can make a significant difference, particularly as part of coordinated branding, positioning, and social selling efforts. As the leading social influence marketing firm, we aim to be the absolute point of reference for personal branding services in the region.”

Impersonating the CEO?

It’s often difficult for CEOs to find time to engage on social media every day, but you need to avoid a sporadic and inconsistent approach. Marvin explains, “People will realize if you make a half-assed effort. You should have quality standards and be strategic about what you post.

Impersonating the CEO

“When working with ghost-writers, it’s important to first consider how to capture the executive’s authentic voice. Our process involves interviewing clients to get to know them and how they speak, as well as their answers on relevant subjects and trends. We use this insight to fuel the content engine, while making sure we capture their tone.

It’s normal for traditional communications, such as press releases and conference presentations, to go through a dozen hands for approval, and it’s still the CEO’s view. This also applies to social media. Think of social media posts as a short form of press releases on behalf of the CEO or senior executives.

So What’s in it for the Brand?

“Investing in one’s personal brand creates all the obvious benefits, from increased visibility to growing one‘s network and boosting perceived expertise and relevance. But the benefits for the company should not be underestimated, when done properly,” says Yoeri. “A first example is clearly the additional attention the company will receive thanks to the initiatives of its senior staff investing in personal branding and proactive public communications. Moreover, as it makes the brand more human and emphasizes the organization’s purpose and values, it is an effective way to get people to connect more to the organization and improve the perception of the brand. Think of the classic example of Apple and Steve Jobs!”

iphone

Targeting Prospective Employees and Building Trust

Personal branding can also help organizations in the battle to recruit top talent. Gen Z, in particular isn’t consuming traditional news, but rather using social media to engage with companies.

Targeting Prospective Employees and Building Trust

“Forward-thinking companies are gradually adopting this human-centric approach to marketing. They leverage employees and executives as important distribution channels to attract top talent. When employees share content on their personal profiles, it reveals company culture, enabling the audience to see behind the scenes of large corporations. This human touch can give prospective employees an idea what it’s like to work for the company and what the company stands for in a real way, which is what younger generations are really interested in,” stated Marvin.

Interested in finding out how personal branding can help elevate your brand?
Get in touch!


Yoeri Callebaut, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kingfluencers

Tomorrow’s Winners are Being Created Now, What Are You Up to?

Lockdown in Switzerland

Effective Monday, January 19 through the end of February, Switzerland has tightened restrictions to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The measures taken include closing shops selling non-essential supplies and extending the closure of restaurants, and cultural and sport sites.

Tomorrow’s Winners. Lockdown in Switzerland

While the government also eased rules for pandemic-hit businesses to apply for state aid, many businesses will still be struggling to stay afloat, retail in particular. Now is the time for B2C brands to rethink go-to-market plans to ensure they can survive in the short term and thrive in the future.

Promote Other Income Sources

Ongoing lockdowns mean many businesses are still struggling for survival and must seek to compensate for the resulting losses in revenue. Fortunately, the pandemic hasn’t entirely stopped business, but rather shifted how it’s done, and marketers need to shift with it.

Promoting alternative sources of income such as e-commerce is a crucial lifeline. Some sectors that particularly stand to gain from better promoting their online business are retail, telco, electronics, e-supermarkets, and digital entertainment.

Tomorrow’s Winners. Promote Other Income Sources

Successful brands are those that are able to connect with consumers and create a relationship. Leveraging social influencer marketing to tell stories and create more emotional connections drives a stronger, more appealing social media presence. According to the Swiss Influencer Marketing Report 2020, about half of the marketing managers surveyed estimate the return on investment of their influencer campaigns to date to be higher than with alternative forms of advertising. Influencer- and user-generated content are among eMarkterer’s transformative developments that ought to be on your radar in 2021.

Brands should invest in promotions now to take advantage of upcoming holidays, including Valentine’s Day. Reach out to our experts and the Kingfluencers team can provide you with a clear strategy to connect with your target audience.

Prepare for What Comes Next

While the timing and phases of the end of lockdowns remain unknown, the fact remains that businesses need to prepare. Brands that take steps now to strengthen their brand perception will be best positioned to capture their share of consumers eager to travel, shop, and enjoy leisure activity.

As the rollout of vaccinations continues, the return of many previously risky activities is expected within a matter of months. The time to prepare is now. Taking steps now to fortify your brand will position you to come out stronger once the lockdown is over. For example, a leading Swiss insurance provider decided to run an end-of-year influencer marketing campaign to generate additional new leads and customers. The company provides health, property, and liability insurance, and serves over 261,000 private customers with over 1 Bn. in premium volume. Kingfluencers managed the entire project, which took 5 weeks from ideation to finish. 21 influencers across multiple social media platforms made posts consisting mostly of videos. The campaign achieved an engagement rate of 3.4%, exceeded the goal for reach by 145%, and generated 3,025 qualified leads.

Build Now for a Stronger Tomorrow

Well-structured marketing plans can help you win over customers online during lockdown and then shift to also win new customers IRL once life goes back to normal. Social influence marketing can help your brand get even closer to consumers and win them over and retain them.

Build Now for a Stronger Tomorrow

With a holistic approach in the industry and the help of in-house AI-based technology, Kingfluencers can run influencer marketing campaigns that not only provide impressive reach but also drive conversions. Contact us to discuss tactics for building brand equity to get ahead of your competitors. Our dedicated and creative team will take care of your marketing journey every step of the way.

Say It with Influencers and Boosting Emotional Appeal

Often, brands don’t adequately convey their true value and unique selling propositions, which leads to lost opportunities in sales and customer loyalty, and unrealized brand equity and value. The “Brand Indicator Switzerland” (BIS) study classified brands into 4 groups, including “Rational Brands:” those with low scores on emotionality but high scores on relevance.

Such brands could gain by boosting their emotional appeal by engaging in more people-driven, creative, storytelling and advertising that unlocks emotion.

Now that physical distance is a given, it’s crucial to get closer to your audiences digitally. Physical distance doesn’t need to become emotional distance and detachment, but brands must act to prevent the loss of brand equity. Unfortunately, as everyone increases their digital outreach efforts, noise increases, and true connection becomes more difficult. Smart choices are vital to stand out from the crowds, and the best path to effective connection is with emotion, empathy, storytelling, and authenticity.

Singular asked marketing leaders for their free-form input on the future of marketing, then consolidated the responses and found empathy as a “supertrend” for 2021. “The goal: better marketing, sure. Consistent marketing, absolutely. But ultimately: strong and lasting customer relationships.”

Social influence marketing is an ideal tool to achieve these goals.

Say It with Influencers and Boosting Emotional Appeal

Influencer marketing can make people feel closer to your brand and develop a strong preference for it.

Influence marketing provides an agile, real-time communication channel with consumers. Social influence marketing is also quick and agile. Such a campaign can be developed and launched in a matter of weeks to drive revenue promptly.

Social influence marketing delivers reach and real impact on consumer decisions fast and efficiently. Give your brand a face people can relate to, elevate your advertising spending by adding credibility and authenticity to your message. Social media channels also enable you to reach audiences that aren’t easily reached via traditional marketing.

Contact Kingfluencers to discuss how you can humanize your brand. Kingfluencers provides worry-free execution along with best-in-class outcomes.

Continue Your Investment in Social Influence Marketing

It certainly feels as though life will never go back to normal. (When do we start shaking hands again?) But much of what we miss, from concerts to sporting events, will indeed return. When that time comes, brands must continue their investments in connecting with consumers. Tomorrow’s winners are being created now, so what are you up to? Let’s talk.

Author: Yoeri Callebaut, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kingfluencers

Recognizing the top brands of the future

Brand Indicator Switzerland — the first brand survey to include influencers

The “Brand Indicator Switzerland” (BIS), which was developed together with the renowned advertiser Frank Bodin, the insight platform deeptrue, and the social influence agency Kingfluencers, contains two innovations: Most brand studies focus on parameters such as trust or image. In comparison, the recently published BIS measures two brand factors that are crucial to the actual success of a brand, namely relevance and emotionality.

While most brand studies depict the present, the “Brand Indicator Switzerland” also reveals an outlook into the future. This is done by comparing the opinion of the entire population with the view of influencers. Because influencers are ahead of their time and constantly impact their followers, the opinion of these creators is a good indicator to predict the future success or failure of brands or even industries.

The digital influencers are reliable trend barometers because, thanks to their forward-looking nature and pronounced brand sensitivity, they use the social media on a daily basis to make themselves increasingly heard among the “normal” population. Influencers are trend-conscious and very close to brands due to their jobs. They often also reflect a somewhat younger and more future-oriented perspective. The 280 interviewed social media experts were interviewed anonymously for the BIS so that they could act really independently for the study.

The future will be more digital

Top brands. The future will be more digital

Swiss people love traditional Swiss brands: Apart from top-ranked WhatsApp, YouTube and Google, the Swiss brands Migros, Coop, Lindt, Toblerone, Zweifel, Ricola, Ovomaltine, Emmi and Rivella are all in the top 16. However, the future is likely to look different; more and more digital brands will push their way into the top positions and replace traditional stars of today. The speed with which new brands such as Netflix or Spotify are conquering the world and thus Switzerland is striking. Frank Bodin comments: “If you analyze the age segments, you can see that Swiss society is currently experiencing a “digital divide” among the 30 year olds; this young population will increasingly take on leadership roles in the coming years and thus fundamentally change the brand landscape.

Recommended actions for modern marketing

The aim of the “Brand Indicator Switzerland” is not so much to provide with a brand ranking but to offer brand managers a tool that helps them make the right decisions: Concrete recommendations for action in marketing and communication can be derived from the results of the comprehensive study. A total of 240 consumer brands from all sectors were integrated into the study and evaluated. The BIS shows which brands are relevant and popular among influencers and which brands will therefore tend to perform better or worse in the future.

Top brands. Actions for modern marketing

Study reveals further important findings

Based on the opinions of both the interviewed consumers and the influencers, the study uncovers a number of other valuable insights. For example, the BIS provides indications that some brands and industries are already undergoing change. The BIS results also show how strongly brands are able to differentiate themselves and position themselves at the top or rather at the bottom of the league.

With the help of the “Brand Indicator Switzerland”, brand managers are now able to react immediately. For example, with better communication, which brings out the emotionality of a brand and thus improves the public image of the brand.

Example telecommunications industry

Telecommunications industry

The BIS not only shows how the brands are developing individually but also points out interesting industry dynamics and measures the degree to which the industry players differentiate themselves from one another. One example is the telecom industry. There, Swisscom and Sunrise are clearly ahead of the pack. The market position of both UPC and Salt is less impressive, despite all efforts. In the eyes of the general population and influencers, the Wingo and Yallo, which appeal to a younger target audience, perform rather poorly. Without fundamental efforts on the part of those responsible for the brands, it is possible that these brands may find it difficult in the future in terms of their competitive position or market share.

The current BIS Power Brands among the population

Top brands

The future BIS Power brands among Influencers

Top brands

The current top 100 BIS Power Brands

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Author: Yoeri CallebautChief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kingfluencers