Digital Marketing & Technology
Readings
1
,Week 2
Article 1: Driving brand engagement through online social influencers: an
empirical investigation of sponsored blogging campaigns (Hughes et al., 2019)
score = 3.0
A large and important category of influencer
marketing is sponsored blogging, in which
companies solicit bloggers to post about
specific products and brands. The field needs
to develop a better understanding of what
drives the success of influencer marketing as
a whole and sponsored blogging in
particular. Sponsored blogging is a hybrid
approach combining aspects of paid and
earned media. Our theoretical basis for
predictions derives from the literature on the
elaboration likelihood model (ELM).
Findings show that in a blog context, blogger
expertise, campaign intent, hedonic value of
post, and campaign giveaways are the key
drivers of engagement.
This research suggests that the type of social
media platform moderates the impact of
social influencer and post characteristics.
The key dependent variable is social media engagement. It is defined as ‘’a customer’s
cognitive, emotional, and behavioural activities.’’ Our focus is on indirect customer
engagement, which includes incentivized referrals, social media conversations about
products/brands, and customer feedback to companies.
Consumer engagement literature highlights several potential factors that may influence
consumer engagement, including emotionality, direct firm actions, and product involvement.
We add new factors, such as overall campaign intent, influencer characteristics, and level of
involvement elicited by the social media platform. The customer engagement activity we
focus on is social media interactions with sponsored influencer content, and we
operationalize this as likes and comments on sponsored posts.
Model A.
Platform differences – a key difference is the rationale or motivation for consumers to
engage with platforms (evidence that platform distraction and content search differ between
blogs and Facebook). Given the low-involvement nature of Facebook, consistent with the
ELM, there should be a greater emphasis on peripheral cues. In high-involvement platforms
(blogs) argument quality should exert a greater impact on persuasion.
Campaign intent on the blogging platform – broadly there are two goals (1) increase
awareness and (2) encourage trial. Trial campaigns have a more overt persuasion intent and
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,also a higher hurdle to generate customer engagement. Campaign intent is a potential
moderator that can influence engagement differently depending on the stage of the customer
decision journey.
Main effect of blogger expertise –source expertise refers to the level of credibility a source
possesses. Higher levels of persuasion are a result of high source expertise leading to a deeper
processing of the advertising message. In influencer marketing, expertise increases
behavioural intention toward products.
H1: Blogger expertise has a positive impact on blog engagement. The higher the blogger’s
expertise, the higher is the number of blog post comments.
Interaction effect of campaign intent on blogger expertise – depending on the context,
type of claim, and stage in the DMJ, source expertise may have a nonsignificant (or negative)
impact on engagement. Early in the CDJ we expect expertise to be beneficial.
H2: There is an interaction effect between campaign intent and blogger expertise.
Specifically, (a) when blogger expertise is high, awareness campaigns are more effective in
generate engagement; (b) when blogger expertise is low, trial campaigns are more effective
at generating brand engagement.
Main effect of hedonic value of post – refers to the enjoyment, emotions, and entertainment
a consumer experiences from reading the post. Hedonic content captures attention and
influences attitude toward an ad.
H3: Post content, in terms of hedonic value, is positively related to engagement in blog
post comments.
Campaign incentives – marketing actions designed to elicit specific responses and
engagement from consumers. Campaign incentives are a direct firm action to increase
customer engagement.
H4: Campaign incentives are positively related to engagement, such that inclusion of a
campaign incentive leads to more blog post comments.
Campaign intent on the Facebook platform – In trial campaigns, we expect Facebook
participants’ willingness to engage in campaigns with overtly commercial intent to be low. An
overtly commercial intent, as in the case of trial, can interfere with the intended usage of the
platform and therefore be met with resentment by users.
H5: Campaign intent has a positive impact on engagement on the Facebook platform.
Specifically, awareness (vs. trial) campaigns generate more Facebook engagement.
Model B
Hedonic value on the FB platform – evidence shows that engagement on Facebook is
positively related to hedonic content. On a low-involvement platform, we expect hedonic
value to be more salient to the reader.
H6: The hedonic value of blog posts has a positive impact on Facebook engagement.
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, Interaction effect of campaign intent and hedonic value on Facebook – hedonic content
leads to a greater likelihood of message forwarding. In the FB setting, opportunity and
motivation to process become key components in information processing. A consumers’
motivation to process an ad will be higher when there are more hedonic cues.
H7: High (vs low) hedonic value has a more positive impact on trial campaigns than
awareness campaigns.
Study 1
Dependent variables:
o Nr of blog post comments (primary measure of engagement)
o Nr of Facebook post likes (also measure of engagement)
Independent variables:
o Campaign intent
o Campaign incentives
o Blogger average number of followers
o Blogger psychographic profile factors
o Blogger expertise
Post variables
o Weekend post –
control variable
o Number of
Facebook posts
o Hedonic and
informational
value associated
with the blog
post.
We find that campaign
intent exerts a
differential main effect
on each platform, with
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