Reach vs. Relevance: The Science Behind Influencer Campaign ROI

Brands are constantly seeking to understand how creative campaigns truly resonate with consumers and drive tangible outcomes. A groundbreaking report by Element Human and Influencer, "Staying Relevant: Why Relevance is the Key to Consumer Action," empirically proves a pivotal insight: relevance is not just important; it's the most crucial brand trait driving purchase intent. This isn't merely a correlation; analysis shows that increasing relevance has a larger impact on driving purchase intent than any other brand trait.

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Unlocking Deeper Connections: The Science Behind Relevance

Element Human, a behavior AI company, partnered with Influencer to go beyond traditional campaign metrics, aiming to get as close as possible to the human experience of reacting to creator content. Their unique four-part methodology provides a deeper understanding of how brands cut through the noise, rather than just the content doing well. This robust methodology includes:

• Attention Data: Measuring real human experience to understand what audiences are looking at.
• Emotion Data: Utilizing facial coding to capture actual human reactions, providing a more accurate measure than claimed responses.
• Memory Test: Employing an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess if the content experience creates mental associations between the brand and specific traits. This is critical for determining if the brand achieved cut-through, not just the creator's content.
• Brand Uplift: Measuring direct impact on lower-funnel goals like conversion and purchase intent.

A key aspect of this methodology involved consistently testing four crucial brand traits across campaigns: relevant, high quality, authentic, and trustworthy. This allowed for a powerful "relative importance analysis," which empirically demonstrated that creating an association with being relevant to the audience worked harder than any of the other three traits in driving purchase intent. This finding was unexpected, turning into the central focus of the "Staying Relevant" report. Beyond purchase intent, there’s also a strong correlation between relevance and brand consideration.

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Measuring Emotional ROI

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• Creators Drive Emotion: Creator-generated content effectively evokes emotions in viewers.
• Emotion Drives Brand Memory: The emotions triggered by creator content significantly impact brand memory, leading to positive or negative implicit associations with the brand. Positive emotional associations increase, while negative ones decrease brand memory.
• Brand Memory Drives Action: Strong brand memory resulting from emotional engagement directly leads to increased purchase intent and consideration.
• Relevance is Key for Purchase: Consumers, especially younger demographics, find brands collaborating with creators more relevant. Relevance is the most crucial factor in driving purchase intent.
• Attention and Emotion Vary: While creator marketing works, there is variation in performance. Attention and emotional engagement can be measured to optimize content.
• Stopping & Staying Power: Successful creator content needs both "Stopping Power" (attention-grabbing) and "Staying Power" (brand memory creating).
• Sustained Emotion Matters: The longer an audience experiences a high emotional response, the more likely they are to remember and consider the brand.
• Content Effectiveness Scorecard: A scorecard can be used to evaluate creator content's performance across various metrics like attention, awareness, emotion, and purchase intent.
• Benchmark Data: Benchmarks for attention, emotion, and brand uplift are needed to compare the performance of individual creators and content.

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Bringing Relevance to Life: Strategies for Brands

For brands, the challenge lies in translating this empirical finding into actionable strategies. Relevance isn't a one-size-fits-all concept; it shifts depending on the client. Ella Mann, Associate Director of Creative Strategy at Influencer, highlights that relevance on social media is about building genuine connections between brands and audiences by creating content that aligns with their interests or credibly joining their conversations.

A fundamental realization is that you cannot be relevant to everyone. The key is to refine your audience:

• From Broad to Niche: Move beyond broad demographic or interest-based audiences to smaller, more niche communities built around shared passions.
• The Power of Passion: As exemplified by the "sport" analogy, refining an audience from a general interest in "sport" to a "fan of a specific select player" illustrates how interests become passions, and passions coalesce into identifiable communities.
• Direct Message, Deep Connection: It is "better to have high relevance in a small and niche community with a more direct message than to have that kind of broad surface level attention with a wider audience".

Once these niche communities are identified, brands can credibly layer their brand values, products, or purpose onto existing conversations within these communities. This allows for the creation of content that naturally fits and drives relevance. While jumping on trends can be effective, it must be a deliberate and conscious choice where the brand has a credible role to play. Furthermore, continuous research and understanding of these communities is vital, as they are fluid and constantly evolving.

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The Art of Storytelling and Emotional Engagement

Creators are master storytellers, and their skill is evident in the audiences they build. The research underscores that emotion is a core driver of brand metrics in creative marketing. While authenticity is undoubtedly important, and creators are inherently authentic, the study reveals that if an authentic experience isn't delivered to the right audience for the brand, it won't perform optimally.

Beyond simply eliciting positive emotions, the "Emotional Intelligence" report, from which "Staying Relevant" is a subset, found that the longer an audience can be kept at a high level of emotional intensity, the stronger the brand goals and memory will be. This isn't just about making people happy; it's about creating an "emotional cocktail" that can include surprise, grimace, or even fear, as long as it sustains high intensity. Brands that trust creators to take risks and truly "let them cook" often reap the greatest benefits.

This leads to a crucial discussion around creative freedom versus brand control. While it's a constant "dance", the data indicates that giving creators the space to ideate and create content baked into their community's needs leads to better storytelling and superior results. The strategy is to provide creators with the "must-haves" and "guard rails" (the 'what to say'), but grant them the freedom to build a story around it in their own style, aligned with their audience's needs (the 'how it's said'). Creators are the "new media owners" who understand their audience deeply.

A prime example is eBay's "Sneaker Showdown" campaign, which successfully narrowed its broad audience to a niche "sneakerhead" community. By working with creators deeply embedded in that culture, eBay credibly inserted itself, allowing the audience to see the brand's value in their specific passion for limited edition trainers. This hyper-focused, authentic approach delivered relevance.

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Looking Ahead: The Future of Creator Marketing

The findings from this research point towards several evolving trends in the influencer marketing space:

• Continuous Engagement: Brands are likely to shift away from cyclical campaigns towards a continuous schedule and feedback loop with creators, constantly refining their message.
• Beyond Reach: Brand Building Success: Creators will increasingly be recognized not just for their reach or audience building, but for their direct impact on brand building success, with specialized "scorecards" for different product categories.
• Valuing the Creative Asset: There will be a resurgence in recognizing the paramount importance of the creative asset itself. While media plans are often optimized, the quality of the creative contributes significantly (40-47%) to the sales impact of advertising. Great content can break through follower barriers, spread by algorithms, and drive engagement and reach.
• Re-emphasis on Upper-to-Mid Funnel: The industry will likely see an increased appreciation for and focus on upper-to-mid funnel content. This isn't just a hurdle; it's about giving audiences a reason to care about a brand through storytelling and emotional engagement, ultimately making the eventual sale easier. This will encourage a move away from solely performance-driven, short-form content towards valuing longer-form, hyper-creative storytelling.
• Platform Specificity & Creator Expertise: While both Instagram and TikTok campaigns can drive high relevance, strategists often find TikTok easier for uncovering niche communities due to its structure around hashtags and interests. Ultimately, the "best" platform is the one where the chosen creator is most comfortable and skilled, as their expertise in their medium is what drives a "home run".
• Relevance Over Reach: There is clear evidence that brands are starting to prioritize relevance over pure reach, increasingly partnering with smaller, niche creators who have highly engaged audiences. This allows for a more targeted approach with unique messages for specific communities, leading to more positive and powerful results.
• Frequency and Authenticity: The frequency with which a creator shares sponsored content doesn't necessarily diminish effectiveness, provided the brand partnerships and messaging remain authentic and relevant to the creator's niche and their audience's interests. Because creators continually produce fresh, different content, the "frequency cap problem" from traditional advertising is significantly mitigated.

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Relevance is the central pillar for driving consumer action in creator marketing. By understanding and strategically applying the principles of audience refinement, emotionally intense storytelling, and empowering creators with creative freedom, brands can forge deeper, more meaningful connections that translate directly into elevated purchase intent and lasting brand success.

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The Twitch Benchmark Study: Machine Learned Performance

The study analyzed 74 videos across 37 brands with 17,544 participants to understand what makes ads successful on Twitch. It examined memory, emotion, and self-reported responses using methods like facial coding, eye-tracking, and implicit association tests.

• Trustworthiness and Creativity Matter: Trustworthiness drives purchase intent, while creativity drives brand positivity.
• Better Ads = Better Results: Higher video ratings correlate with increased purchase intent and other positive outcomes.
• Relevance Drives Engagement: Ads that are relevant, interesting, and upbeat are more likely to be engaged with.
• Happiness "Rubs Off": Happy ads positively impact brand perception and association.
• Avoid Neutrality: Neutral ads lead to less engagement, clarity, and uplift.
• Embrace Some Confusion: A little bit of confusion can engage people's rational minds.
• Tailor to the Platform: Gamer-custom content and ads that "fit" well on Twitch perform better.
• Longer Ads Engage: 30-second ads tend to be more engaging than 15-second ads.
• Data-Targeted Campaigns: Psychological profiles can be used to create effective, targeted campaigns.

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