Influencers are everywhere. You’re famous? Please hold our product, take a selfie, and post it to Facebook. You have the coolest Instagram account, with thousands of followers? Please hold our product, take a carefully arranged selfie, and post it. You tweet every thirty seconds? Please tag us. Companies are practically falling over themselves to take product placement to a new level.

The days of carefully placed paid-for products in a film or TV show aren’t gone, but with watching habits having changed forever and audience segmentation at unheard of heights, paying vast sums of money to have your product held in a certain way or placed, just-so, in a shot, is no longer quite the value proposition it once was. Product placement didn’t disappear, it’s simply migrated. Move over Hollywood films and network TV shows, you now get an artfully positioned product in (it seems) almost every social post you see.

But for scholarly publishers, “influencers” tend not to be (for the most part) household names or people with massive social media followings. Doesn’t matter. We can still join in the influencer fun. We’re already seeing a shift towards micro-influencers, and this could well be the moment to make our play. Micro-influencers can be defined however you wish, of course, and much of it is subjective. But smaller numbers of followers doesn’t mean micro-influencers have no power. Good news for university presses! Identifying and cultivating a couple of key micro-influencers in each field in which you publish could lead to significant leads and brand awareness. Or, more excitingly, it could lead to some great, awkward selfies of people holding books in front of their mirror. Honestly, if that happens, any investment in the micro-influencer model will have been well worth it.

But seriously, embracing the potential of scholarly micro-influencers on social platforms seems a really smart thing to do for our books. One could argue that the blurber is the original influencer in our industry, but many more eyeballs will see an influencer on social, than they will on the back of a scholarly book. The potential impact of the micro-influencer for university presses should be a significant ROI, since it’s a relatively inexpensive and resource “free” marketing campaign. Identify your key influencers, provide an incentive, embrace modern-day product placement at its finest, and sit back.

Recommended watch: What is an influencer?

 

About the author of this blog post: Martyn Beeny is Marketing and Sales Director at Cornell University Press. His Instagram account only has forty-six followers but he still dreams of being an influencer.