Girl making a peace sign towards her phone camera on a mount in front of her

Why Influencer Marketing is More Important Than You Think

Would you feel comfortable hiring an influencer for marketing purposes? A lot of startups, but also many traditional companies, swear by it. Others strictly stick to the classic marketing measures. What is it about influencer marketing that drives opinions so far apart? I have taken some of the most popular counter-arguments and contrasted them with my own view.

Argument 1: Authenticity
Influencers only promote products for the money and don’t care about their followers. To a certain extent, I agree. However, every form of paid advertising does the same thing. The difference is that influencers stand behind their advertising message with their own face and name, which should make them more careful in choosing what products they advocate for.

As studies show, the media channel we trust most in is Word-of-Mouth. No medium can compete with a personal recommendation, especially if you are familiar with this person—and yes, this includes influencers, even though most of their followers don’t know them personally. Good influencers are in close and friendly contact with their community, and through that, they achieve the feeling of belonging to a group for people in that community. While you could imply influencers fake closeness to their communities to make money, I think that many underestimate the group dynamic of a community that follows the same interest and, of course, the feeling of being the center of such a community. Because even if no one likes to admit it, no one becomes an influencer without liking being the center of attention.

Argument 2: Giving up control
When I hire an influencer, I have no control over the content spread about my product. First of all, it is absolutely possible to remain in control by creating a detailed brief for the influencer beforehand. However, I would highly recommend giving up some of the control.

When you book an influencer, you are not only booking an advertising channel, but also a whole personality that comes with it. They produce authentic content by often using the same way of speaking, imagery, et cetera. They are probably closer to the target group than you are. Furthermore, they have expertise or engage themselves in a certain topic, through which they achieve an opinion leadership in that area. That expertise can be in factual topics as well as in creative topics like dancing, makeup, and so on. Therefore, it is recommended to take advantage of their experience and involve the influencer in the creative process from day one.

Argument 3: Social media equals bad
As soon as I hire an influencer, I make myself dependent on the social media platform. As mentioned before, booking an influencer is more than just buying an ad space on a social media channel. Influencers are the rock stars of the digital age. Depending on their success and their target audience, they appear in TV, radio, newspapers, you name it. Some might even have a format of their own or have established a brand. Use this for content marketing in any media channel. By offering content instead of pushing ads in the audience’s face you will bypass ad fatigue, which occurs after people see a particular ad too often. Instead, you can place your product directly in the channel they choose to see.

However, what should not be forgotten is that social media is the most sought-after medium among the younger target group. It also facilitates a direct dialogue with them. Dialogue marketing has long been used as a very effective method, as you can get direct feedback from the target group or even use crowdsourcing for creating new content.

In the end, it is important to note that influencer marketing is nothing new in principle. Our buying decisions have always been influenced by friends, celebrities, fictional characters, and so on. Booking influencers on social media, on the other hand, is really new and combines a whole lot of very effective marketing methods among saving you a lot of work steps in the operative execution. However, it is important to remember that every influencer is also a human being who makes mistakes and can get into crises. Therefore, you should not see them only as a marketing tool, but you should always be in close contact with them and solve problems together. This way you not only ensure that your product doesn’t go down the drain together with the influencer, but also preserve your own authenticity.

illustrated cover art for book showing a car, a moon and city buildings. Text reads "Sleeping in My Jeans" and "Teaching Guide"

Reimagining Marketing with Curriculum-Based Teaching Guides

Here at Ooligan Press, innovation has been the name of the marketing game in the past couple years. To market a book, you’ve got to market your brand.

This is where extending outreach to new or secondary audiences reimagines a stagnant brand strategy. We’ve taken the hassle away from literary analysis and created an online, self-guided curriculum for teachers, librarians, and independent learners alike.

Marketing to Educators

We all know Ooligan is staffed by Portland State graduate students. It would seem only natural that Ooligan serve educational or academic audiences outside of the typical target consumer. So, why teaching guides? And what titles will be included in this new outreach?

Extending our outreach to educators is really all about brand strategy. Every book has a specific target audience, but teaching guides act as promotional materials that appeal to a singular audience across multiple genres. This outreach attempts to solidify a stable target audience for our press. And a stable consumer means a potential increase in sales.

With creative writing exercises, reflection questions, and interactive activities, Ooligan’s new teaching guides will appeal to educators as well as the homeschooled learner or the not-so-enthusiastic reader. Not only do these guides reinforce Ooligan’s mission of regionality, community, inclusion, and social-emotional awareness, but they also strengthen pre-existing connections with educators and the Multnomah County Library.

In fact, as Ooligan Press’s 2021-22 Marketing Manager, I was shocked to learn that the press actually had dabbled with teaching guides in the past. With curriculum-based teaching guides of backlists like Ricochet River and Sleeping in My Jeans drowning somewhere in the deep, dark Ooligan archives, I took inspiration from the strategies of yesteryear and am seeking innovative ways to reimagine how these strategies may be more consistently and successfully implemented now and in the future.

In particular, we will be focusing this effort on YA titles. They may be fiction or nonfiction, but must teach valuable social-emotional lessons or spread awareness about key regional, historical, social, or political spheres. Think of it this way: if one of our YA titles can contribute to meaningful discussion in either a high school classroom or library setting, it is probably a worthy candidate for a teaching guide.

So, what does the process actually look like? Well, it’s taken some trial and error. First, the 2017 teaching guides from Ricochet River and Sleeping in My Jeans had to be redesigned. While the curriculum the 2017 Oolies had created is smart and interactive, the design was not much more than a PDF-converted Google Doc with some on-brand fonts. To ensure each guide seamlessly adhered to its respective title’s branding aesthetics, one volunteer crafts a beautifully designed guide. The sparkly new Ricochet River and Sleeping in My Jeans teaching guides are live on the Ooligan website’s Educator Portal, where access is just a simple click and download away for educators and independent learners.

The tricky bit? Creating the actual curriculum for new titles. Each teaching guide must have a particular set of interactive activities, discussions, and additional materials like comparative readings, teaching slideshows, and K-W-L curriculum worksheets.

Whew! Oolies are multi-talented, absolutely. But it’s not like all book publishers are versed in the art of curriculum building, so how the heck do we do it? With the assistance of fellow educators, our curriculum will be reviewed and given the green light. Once this happens and the curriculum has been created, a callout goes live for yet another designer to conceptualize and design the curriculum into a brand new teaching guide.

What’s Next?

Promotion, promotion, promotion.

With all this hard work, it’s crucial that we ensure these standards are incorporated into future production schedules. Project Managers now have access to a Teaching Guide Checklist to assess their title’s appropriateness for a teaching guide. In the Marketing Plan stage, project teams will begin planning for teaching guides in their Marketing and Publicity Highlights, and will begin production after blurb requests—before publication.

Oh, but that’s not all. We’ve got to spread the word. Social media promotion and community connections will be important here. So, get to work on those social media collateral callouts and continue to reach out to educators and libraries for some awesome deals on class sets. This year at Ooligan we’re all about innovation. If all is implemented successfully, teaching guides can set a precedent for a stable target audience within our little independent graduate press.