Recommendations always hit better when they come from someone you trust, rather than a stranger.
Which is why creator marketing platform Hummingbirds puts community at the center of its strategy.
“You need local people to influence local people,” says Emily Steele, the company’s CEO and co-founder, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. That sentiment is basically the mantra of Hummingbirds, which focuses on small-scale, local creators.
The idea for the platform was born from Steele’s realization that the people who influenced her the most are her neighbors, her volleyball teammates and even people she runs into at a local coffeeshop or grocery store.
“I had this thesis,” she says, that anyone with even a small social presence “could influence their peers and ultimately drive business” for brands.
In other words, the most credible influencers are the ones who don’t position themselves as influencers so much as ordinary people putting forth a genuine recommendation.
But finding high-quality local creators is just the beginning. The next challenge is proving that these creators are providing incremental value for the brands they recommend.
For online purchases, attribution is pretty straightforward: Viewers click to a product page directly from a creator’s video or they enter the creator’s promo code at checkout.
When it comes to in-store purchases, though, the path from discovery to purchase is a lot less clear-cut, particularly for creator campaigns.
So, earlier this summer, Hummingbirds launched a new feature to provide creator attribution at the receipt level. Creators share rebate offers for the products they market and earn affiliate commission on each purchase.
And consumers scan their receipts to upload them to the Hummingbirds platform and immediately earn cash back. It’s a pretty frictionless process to engage with – as long as you’re not the kind of person who immediately loses your receipt after shopping.
Having such an attribution system for in-store purchases is crucial, says Steele, because 83% of all retail dollars are still spent in person.
But since in-store attribution doesn’t usually link back to creators, they often aren’t incentivized to push their followers into stores.
This discrepancy between where dollars are spent and where creators are focusing their efforts was, according to Steele, “what we wanted to solve.”
Also in this episode: How Hummingbirds got its name, the issue of “influencer fatigue” and whether AI-generated influencers have a place in marketing.
