The Early Days of Influencer Marketing (and What We Can Learn From It)

This is the influencer marketing interview you need to listen to. We know we’re a little biased because it’s our own Cooper Munroe, but seriously. It doesn’t matter if you’re a skeptic or a believer, this interview on the early days of influencer marketing affecting today now will sell you (or your clients) on why influencer marketing is beneficial, or more importantly, why it works.

In these days of fake followers, pay-to-play and content overload, it’s easy to become disheartened when reading articles about campaigns going awry. That’s why we’re excited that Cooper was able to sit down with Aaron Watson of Piper Creative to have a conversation about the beautiful aspects of influencer marketing. In only 37 minutes, they cover everything from the very early days of influencer marketing to the conception of The Motherhood to the status of the industry today.

Aaron graciously introduced Cooper and the conversation by saying, “The marketing landscape is changing rapidly, and [Cooper] is one of the few people around who is poised to take advantage of the very exciting future that we have ahead of us.”

Here is an excerpt from interview. At this point, Cooper is talking about the blogging community back before social media was even a phrase:

“[Blogging] was looked at like this weird, anomaly, strange thing. Everyone thought they were going to go away; they thought it was a flash in the pan kind of trend thing. And it was mostly about politics and technology. It just felt like there’s something here. There really is something so intriguing and exciting about what people were doing because people were publishing their own lives. Telling their own stories in a way that could reach huge amounts of people. And in a way that was in real time and had never been done before. The potential was enormous.

So, it started out and there weren’t very many people, very many women, especially, women with children, doing it at the time. But those who were, were incredibly gifted storytellers. Really creative. Really wanted to share their lives, share what they knew, share their expertise, share their narrative with whoever wanted to listen and connect. And it was from a real genuine place of needing connection and needing community that this felt like it was being built. It was profoundly intimate. So, people were sharing the challenges or the wins or the sadness of their lives to strangers who became friends. And it was just such a beautiful thing to behold.”

While we have come so far from those early days of influencer marketing, one thing has stayed the same; what made content good then still holds true now. Just because influencers today have strong SEO, high definition pictures and five+ social platforms doesn’t mean they are any different from the bloggers who were just figuring it out over a decade ago. What makes influencers valuable then and now is their ability to relate and provide value to their following of real, everyday people. Over the years, we’ve see good, quality bloggers remain good, quality bloggers when they stuck true to themselves and their audiences while using their voices to support important causes and trustworthy brands.

“It went from this strange little thing people experimented with to gaining steam because it was clear it was really effective, to ‘ok, we are a massive, global brand- we need reach.’ And here are these people blogging with the weight of the world on their shoulders. ‘We gotta increase our reach, we gotta increase our reach, and how are we gonna do that?’ So, it started to lose a little bit of what was so special about it, and that was the authenticity and the creativity and the content from the heart. And really caring about why their audience was seeking them out. When people see it now, I want them to think back to what makes this work so well.”

The idea of authenticity and adding value to people through influencers marketing isn’t new. But in today’s digital age, it’s a good and necessary reminder.

“Readers or viewers or listeners will show up for content that adds value to their lives. That’s it. That can’t be lost. It was true back then and it’s true now.” – Cooper Munroe

Listen to the full interview on the early days of influencer marketing here or watch it below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nsm1B5Ut0E