Measuring the Impact
of Influencers on your brand
Are there different flavours of influencer marketing?
Yes, there are different flavours’.
There is the celebrity or category influencer model, where
brands engage with people who are influential in their vertical or industry but
may not yet be customer advocates (think: Shure Microphones using J-Lo or
Lansinoh baby bottles using influential mom bloggers.)
There is the everyday, brand advocate model. This involves
identifying people who are actual customers/users of your brand, product, or
service, who are also advocates looking for an opportunity to build a closer
relationship with the brand they love.
Large consumer brands have millions of such advocates, many
who have enormous influence. Connecting with these people has proven to have
more impact, including long-tail impact, than celebrity influencer campaigns,
although both flavours often run side-by-side and can complement one another.
Finally, as mentioned above, there are opt-in influencers,
who can be “rented” – in exchange for sweepstakes entries, coupons, or other
sponsored programs – to post about the brand on social.
This should not be considered a “flavour” of influencer
marketing, since even a quick look at the “#sponsored” hashtag on Twitter will
reveal that these people do not spur engagement, they do not have real
followers, they tweet about competing brands, and they are not remotely
authentic.
The profiles that engage with these opt-in, incentivized
programs are built solely for the purpose of entering sweepstakes or getting
free products. These “influencers” will hurt your brand, so when I think
“influencer marketing,” I do not include this group. (See this article on the
stark reality of this kind of these incentivized influencers.)
What’s the most challenging aspect of influencer marketing?
Identifying influencers? Actually engaging them? Tracking the impact?
Brands face issues around all three, really, but each
activity has its own obstacles.
On the measurement
front, there is a huge shift going on.
Metrics used to fall into the “reach” or “impressions”
bucket, because that’s what people were used to and comfortable with, and
that’s what they were being offered by vendors. The reality today is that
there’s an enormous opportunity for brands to measure much, much more when it
comes to word-of-mouth and influencer strategies; they just need the tools to
do it.
That being said, “reach,” as a KPI, is on the outs. It’s
still worth looking at as a general metric, but it shouldn’t serve as an
indicator of performance or be considered a success metric.
Here’s what I’m talking about. As a web marketer, I might
measure website visits, but a spike in visits doesn’t automatically signal
success for me. Quality visits, however, do. If visits don’t provide a desired
result (conversions, purchases, downloads, etc.), then a spike does me no good.
People should think about reach in the same way. If a spike
in reach does take place, it’s the responsibility of the brand, the agency, AND
the vendor to validate that this reach translated into actual, quality results.
Did it result in reviews? Did it result in sales?
In other words, you always must ask, “What did I want from
influencers in the first place and did increased ‘reach’ get me there?”
Measuring success is a mix of the right tools coupled with
the right strategies, and sometimes takes a little bit of thinking and
planning.
The fact of the matter is, success in influencer marketing
can be measured, and there really isn’t an excuse anymore for measuring
quantity over quality.
So, what is
influencer marketing, actually?
This should really be two questions. The first is, “What are
people actually doing when they say they’re doing influencer marketing?”
The second is, “What do you think ‘influencer marketing’
SHOULD BE?”
Influencer marketing should be as follows: Brands partnering
with people who have influence over their own networks, both on- and offline,
who will spread authentic word-of-mouth for those brands, and who create real
impact and business value for the brand when they do so.
The influencers brands partner with should either be
influential within the industry or space that the brand is directly a part of,
or they should be customers/potential customers of the brand already. In other
words, if I see an influencer promoting something, I ask myself, “Do I have
reason to believe that this person would authentically use this product or
service even if they weren’t in a partnership with the brand?”
Influencer marketing all too often boils down to: Brands and
agencies getting people – celebrities, social celebs, bloggers, etc. – who seem
to have a large follower count to share tweets or content in exchange for a
fee, free stuff, or entry into a sweepstakes, regardless of whether or not that
person has any expertise or is even likely to be a user of the product or
service.
What is it NOT?
Influencer marketing is NOT the use of influencers who are
not already fans of your brand or have no influence in your category or
vertical.
It is NOT engaging with influencers who share or distribute
content from your competitors (which is extremely common).
It is NOT working with influencers or other people who do
not have expertise in your industry, service, or vertical.
It is NOT asking any consumer who is willing to tweet a
hashtag to become an influencer without first vetting them.
Brands need to find people who, when they talk about a brand,
service, or product, are viewed as authentic and true customers/advocates of
the brand. (See this Gawker article for a nice summary of what’s happening
right now and how this is all changing.)
Identifying Influencers
On the identification front, many brands don’t have the
resources to manually sift through their communities to find good people, and
when they do have the resources, often all they have to go on is a single
“comment” or some other isolated action.
It’s extremely important to understand who potential
influencers are as people. When they talk, do they influence other people? Have
they interacted with your brand before? I
f so, how many times and in what way?
How passionate are they? What drives that passion? And so on.
Engaging Influencers
There is the challenge of simply being a good marketer and
knowing your audience well enough to create content and marketing that
resonates with them and generates engagement.
Still, from a strategy perspective, there are many things
that brands miss out on when it comes to engagement. Engagement must spur
advocacy. That is, when an influencer interacts with your brand, it’s important
to make these interactions visible to that person’s network.
For example, when you give people the opportunity to connect,
interact, or engage, you should also give them an opportunity to share and
bring their friends into the conversation. Always provide a catalyst for this
kind of advocacy or word-of-mouth marketing. And make it easy to do; don’t
force influencers to find their own way of getting the word out.
Brands often miss this last point and influencer
conversations happen on the brand’s site, or within the brand’s community, and
stay there, never finding their way into the larger network of that
influencer’s connections.
The brands that are best at engaging people are the ones who
aren’t afraid to be personable and build relationships with people. Brands need
to be able to step out of that “corporate” persona, especially on social, and
let people feel like they’re interacting with some ONE, not some THING
Finally, brands need to think of word-of-mouth as a channel,
something that’s always on and that builds exponentially over time. They need
to treat word-of-mouth and influencers the same as they would any other channel
in their mix (e.g., PR, display, eCommerce, etc.) and not just think in terms
of campaigns.
To find out more about iReach Insights, check out our website: http://ireachhq.com/
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