Questions to Influencer Marketing Manager: answers Darya Gubina, Team Lead of LEON’s Influencer Department

Influencer traffic has gained a lot of popularity in traffic arbitrage in the last few years and will most likely remain popular for years to come. We interviewed Darya Gubina, the team leader of LEON's influence department, and asked her about the intricacies of working with bloggers.

– Tell us, how do influencer managers work?

There are two options: you can either grow your own influencers or work with the ones that are already well-known. You can talk to an influencer directly, reach out to their manager or delegate the task to a professional agency.

Nowadays, we are receiving a lot of offers, so we are not looking for new influencers ourselves. We use all types of communication: direct contact, as well as working with managers and agencies.

– What’s better: direct contact with bloggers or working through agencies?

This depends on the desired amount of traffic and your experience. If you are not very experienced yet and would like to test a new source of traffic, it’s better to contact them directly and assemble your own pool of trusted bloggers.

If, however, you are already working with large amounts of traffic, it’s best to consider agencies to further increase your reach and traffic. They can enable you to launch more campaigns with less effort, as finding the right influencer and reaching an agreement with them takes a lot of time.

– How do you choose bloggers?

The very first thing we look at is their social media statistics. As a rule, we request data from them or their managers, but we also check the stats through social network analysis services. As for the content itself, there are no restraints—and we’re always happy to try out something new.

– What are the red flags when choosing influencers?

Speaking of Twitch, the evenly distributed timeline of stream views is alarming. Having no activity in saved streams is also a bad sign. In Instagram, we usually check the comments and subscribers for bots. A hidden like counter can be a sign of low activity on the page.

Regardless of the platform, screenshots of stats with cropped account data or dates often mean that the influencer is either sending somebody else’s stats or their reach and activity have drastically decreased, so they are re-using old data.

– How can you check a blogger’s statistics then?

You can always do it by carefully examining the blogger’s content. In Instagram, Youtube and Twitch, primary data is available for all users, and you can easily correlate the number of subscribers to blogger’s reach and comments.

We also conduct checks on bloggers using services like TwitchTracker and SullyGnome for Twitch and Livedune for Instagram. For Youtube, you can use Popsters. There are lots of useful services, simply choose the ones that suit you best.

– How should one talk to influencers and their managers?

You should discuss the technical conditions of your cooperation in as much detail as possible. If you don’t talk through every single step before the start of integration, disputes may arise later. As for content creation, we wholly trust bloggers to do the right thing. If they have questions, we give recommendations on what people would like more.

If you get a blogger manager knocking on your door with an offer, it's worth checking everything several times. Ask for as much information as possible, ask the blogger to do something as a test. Your primary task here is to ensure that the person you’re talking to is an actual manager and not a scammer.

Here’s another advice to all influence managers: don’t be afraid to bargain. As a rule, influencers are good at selling themselves and often ask for very high prices. Use market analysis as your weapon and boldly cut the price of integrations.

– How do you test influencers and evaluate them?

We usually purchase at least 5 test integrations, which he or she will publish in a month’s time—since the blogger will have to first warm up their audience and only then call them to action.

When analyzing traffic, we look at the number of first and repeat deposits and their amount. We analyze the new players’ behavior. For example, if the number of registrations is equal or almost equal to the number of deposits, it’s most likely fraud. Another suspicious situation: players win something but never withdraw the money.

We can also ask to stop advertisements to check if we are receiving any new registrations long time after the integration was posted—if the blogger has a real and active audience, these will certainly exist. If we have serious suspicions in regard to the quality of the traffic, we ask for our Analytics Department’s help.

Sometimes bloggers ask us whether we’re satisfied with the current integration results, and after the conversation the indicators increase dramatically. This also makes us wonder. 

– What formats and platforms are worth trying out?

You should test all platforms and content formats. I always get good results from Twitch streams. My team also actively works with bloggers on Instagram and Youtube. I cannot say much about Kick yet, though.

– How can you find new ideas in Influence Marketing?

At the start of my career, I used to google for articles on marketing, casino and affiliate marketing and simply read them all. I’m not subscribed to any channels with trends or news from the sphere—if something exceptional happens, I will hear about it anyway.

More often, I search for podcasts on the marketing topics that I’m interested in. Once, I listened to a podcast on promoting games, and there was a speaker who had created a platform for tracking marketing campaigns and advertisement for games. This piqued my interest, so I found the platform. At that moment, we didn’t need its services, but I decided to keep my eye on it. Later, the platform’s founder created an agency that we now work with and achieve great results.

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