Gary Vaynerchuk is a social-media marketer, who famously grew his family liquor business from $3 million to $60 million in five years. Mr Vaynerchuk is the chairman of VaynerX – “a modern day communications parent company” – as well the CEO of VaynerMedia. The latter is a digital agency which promotes and develops businesses through video production, influencer marketing and business analysis (to name a few services). We at NXT Generation were fortunate enough to attend an #AskGaryVee show – a business Q&A show. An interesting question was raised during the event: When hiring an influencer to promote your brand, how do you control your reputation? Let us have a look at what Mr Vaynerchuk had to say.
He begins by suggesting that a brand will not mean the same thing to each person – “Coca cola and Heineken and Adidas think that the brand means the same thing to all of you, and that is just laughable. Everybody here, when I say the word Supreme or KFC, will be thinking different things”. It seems, therefore, that a brand needn’t try to promote a single uniform ideology, rather they ought to promote something which is accessible to everyone. When buying sponsorships via influencers, brand managers ought to look for good deals; the influencer will know their audience so it is important to allow them this freedom to act. After all, “as a brand that is what you want: you are giving somebody money so that you can have something happen for your business”.
Micromanagement of influencers, in Mr Vaynerchuk’s opinion, is not healthy as it can detract from the influencers true personality which has made them famous. Thus, it is the responsibility of the brand to give their influencers freedom to promote their goods in their own way. This style of marketing, in turn, will generate genuine interest from a multitude of audiences. Gary Vaynerchuk puts it quite simply – “Once brands pick an influencer, they need to get out of the way to let the influencer do their thing. That’s the reason you picked them in the first place.”