We mentioned it in one of our latest blog posts, women are dominating the influencer marketing industry – both as influencers and as social media users. Thus, influencer marketing isn’t an option for a male target group, is it? The truth is that men can also be reached effectively through influencer marketing.
In this blog post, we explain which social media platforms men use and give detailed insights on how you can develop a successful influencer strategy with men as your target group.
Which channels do men use and how?
The most popular social media channels among men are YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram – with Youtube at the top with 78%. The fact that social media is perceived as a woman domain can be explained, among other things, through different user behaviours. From a statistical perspective, women are active users while men consume social media more passively. For this reason, men are often overlooked as a target group when it comes to influencer marketing initiatives. You can use this as an advantage since male social media users are open to influencer advertising just as much as females. Fun fact! On average, men spend 131 euros on a purchase which was inspired by an influencer whereas women put only 71 euros.
How can you reach a male target audience?
As you just learned men are willing to spend their money on influencer recommendations. To get them to do that is another pair of shoes. It’s as with all marketing efforts about the mix between the right message, the right timing and the right platform. Therefore, a sophisticated strategy is key. Make sure to think about the following aspects before starting your influencer marketing activation.
Because of this passivity on social media, it can be a challenge to motivate men to engage on social media posts (e.g. through a comment, a click on a link or a purchase). To succeed with this, it’s important to have a creative approach.
For example, together with our client Philips we initiated a competition promoted by influencers to engage men between the ages of 18 to 35. The influencer activation resulted in a unique reach of 672k people and over 2000 comments. Philips could not only place their new razor OneBlade on the markets successfully but also show it’s possible to effectively reach men with influencer marketing.
Our best advice here is to think outside the box. For example, male influencers are not always the right people to go to when you want to start a dialogue with a male target audience. Female influencers like @elzthewitch, @eljonesuk and @manonlloyed5 have primarily male followers (which points out the importance of looking at data when choosing influencers for your activation). The above-mentioned influencers indicate some general favourite topics of men: gaming, sports, and fitness. Other subjects men show great interest in on social media are tech, computers, photography as well as politics, media, and comedy. With increasing age, travelling is also a big matter.
If you want to reach out to a group of men interested in one of the listed topics above, influencer marketing can be a great channel. But to be successful with your influencer activation, the chosen influencers have to match your brand. Our tip is to collaborate with niche influencers. Niche influencers are people who specialise on a certain segment (like gaming) on their profile. With them, you can reach narrow target audiences in a relevant way – and communicate with them on their preferred channels.
A great example of this is DC Shoes’ campaign with Ken Block. The rally driver is admittedly no micro influencer, but on one hand, this campaign is eight years old and therefore the benefits of micro influencers weren’t known yet. On the other hand, they targeted a very narrow group: car guys. The activation was composed of a video of Block racing through urban San Francisco and with almost no logos or advertising means. The content on its own was so exciting, emotive and engaging that the goal – drawing attention from this male target group – was achieved without big words. In the first 24h after the upload, the video already had 500.000 shares. The fact that this influencer marketing campaign was created in 2012 shows men didn’t only discover influencers for themselves yesterday.
The influencer marketing industry is changing constantly and new trends are popping up in every corner. Therefore it is not always easy to develop a sufficient strategy on how to reach your target audiences. Our best advice to succeed in targeting the men is to use niche influencers, be creative with your message as well as innovative in your idea. This will increase your chances to lure men out of their passive user behaviour.
As mentioned above with our examples of female influencers with primarily male followers, it’s critical to take detailed data into account when choosing influencers to collaborate with. Why? To succeed with your influencer activation, you need to ensure that the influencers you choose to partner with actually reach your target audience. A common mistake here is to go by instinct and choose profiles that you personally like, or that you hear many people at work talking about.