Exploring the role of magazine brands in ‘The New Influencer Ecosystem’ and the expertise that magazine brands and their journalists achieve for brands in the evolving media landscape.

In Brief

Influencer marketing is increasingly being used in the media mix and this trend only seems set to grow.

The influencer ecosystem is evolving, with brands exploring new strategies and commercial opportunities. Magnetic set out to explore the role of magazine media in this new influencer eco-system and the impact they have in terms of reach and engagement compared to other channels. Our hypothesis was that the passion and expertise of our journalists and editors in their areas of specialism would still play an important role, and we wanted to quantify this. So Magnetic decided to explore influencer marketing across three different passion areas: Fashion, Beauty & Motoring.

We focused on key events for the sectors to ensure we could analyse the most relevant conversations when influencers are more likely to be active. For fashion and beauty we looked at London Fashion Week and for motoring we looked at The London Motor Show and The Geneva International Motor Show.

We used a social media analysis tool and concentrated on two key metrics: reach in terms of audience and engagement in terms of replies, likes and retweets.

Key Findings

Fashion and Beauty

• For fashion, interestingly whilst it is true that bloggers originated more posts than magazine brands over the fashion week period, in terms of reach, magazine posts connected with as many people.

• For beauty, although a lot smaller than fashion, not only did magazines produce more content, it also reached more than bloggers. The extended reach that magazine brands manage to achieve is explained by the level of interaction with their posts.

• For fashion, magazine content was more likely to be shared than that of bloggers, achieving on average eight interactions per post compared with two for bloggers. For beauty, a similar pattern emerges with an average of four interactions per post for magazine brands and two for bloggers.  

Motoring

• In the motoring analysis we also found that motoring content from magazine brands had better reach because of increased engagement with the London motor show achieving 6 times the audience compared to all other channels (bloggers, newspapers & journalists combined) and Geneva motor show reaching double the audience compared to other channels.

• In motoring even more of the content is created by consumers rather than editors, journalists and bloggers. And they choose to post this content in magazine brand environments.

Implications for Advertisers

• Influencers are the default channel when it comes to influencer marketing but it’s clear that the credibility and authority of magazine editors still holds sway with consumers, magazine brands should be included in the influencer marketing mix

• Magazine brands work with influencer too, so rather than an alternative could be a complementary strand to your influencer marketing programme