THE POWER OF INFLUENCE
INTRODUCTION Word-of-mouth marketing has always been a powerful driver of consumer behavior. Every experienced marketer knows that customers are more likely to base purchasing decisions on information from fellow customers than brand advertisements. In the age of social media, brands can capitalize on this by focusing their efforts on social influencers rather than on the market as a whole. With influencer identification tools, brands can locate influencers across the social web and then develop strategies to incentivize those users to share key information that will sway potential buyers. This approach, known as Influencer Marketing, relies on organic social sharing and referrals, rather than en masse messaging, to drive brand awareness and purchases. WHAT IS INFLUENCER MARKETING? Influencers are social users with significant networks (followers, readers, etc.) who can speak about a broad range of products and services with the ability to sway opinions in their favor. Influencer marketing means focusing your efforts on key social users to: Grow your audience Drive positive buzz Boost revenue Hit KPIs Influencer Marketing lets your brand leverage the ability of influencers to foster organic conversations with social users, tackling three key goals: 1 2 3 Generate brand buzz, awareness and sales Grow your audience organically Avoid annoying or alienating your customers
DEFINE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS There are several factors that go into defining a particular user as an influencer. It s best to begin by thinking about what gives an individual the power to influence other users in their social audience. The three attributes that are most important for marketers to consider are relevance, reach and resonance: RELEVANCE: How relevant is the content influencers are sharing to your business? REACH: What is the total number of users in a given influencer s audience? RESONANCE: What is the stickiness of an influencer s owned channels, i.e. how many daily and monthly active users do they have on each channel? In determining an influencer s resonance, it may be necessary to analyze how their channels (websites, blogs, social accounts, etc.) rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This will indicate whether that influencer s properties have been deemed influential by Google and are therefore receiving lots of traffic. Social influence and SEO are closely linked -- if a user wants to rank highly in the SERPs, they will also need to have high social media influence. Microsoft s UK CPE team partnered with Synthesio to develop a powerful tool called Pulse which incorporates offline feedback given by customers in surveys and phone calls, with social media conversations, to give a rich and holistic view of the customer journey. By defining their influencers, Microsoft was able to develop an understanding of the differences between conversations among influencers and the general public on industry topics like cloud computing. IDENTIFY INFLUENCERS There are a variety of influence-scoring metrics, such as SynthesioRank, that can provide information about key industry influencers. Some of these tools can also provide detail on the levels of influence generated by websites or media type, e.g. how many of your Twitter followers are clicking your links and retweeting your content, the level of engagement within your Facebook page, etc. BLOGGER FACEBOOK USER TWITTER USER JOURNALIST FORUM MEMBER
The ability to accurately identify the influence of a brand mention, website or individual can provide a variety of benefits, including: Filtering through thousands of mentions to find that needle in the haystack. Identifying key communities of advocates (or detractors) in order to more accurately target your advertising and communications. Streamlining customer service efforts by prioritizing your resources and responses to ultimately improve brand reputation, customer satisfaction and sales. Once you've identified keywords, topics, communities and media sources of interest or import to the brand, a listening tool will help you find social users who are particularly vocal and/or have significant social followings. Depending on the tool's level of sophistication, you'll be able to collect these users in a CRM-type database as well as visit their social sites (Twitter profile, blog site, etc.) to find out more about them and begin developing an outreach plan. With Synthesio, Peugeot was able to identify their main ambassadors on social media as well as the most influential sources in the auto industry. With this intelligence gleaned from social listening, the brand has brought together a community of bloggers and brand ambassadors for influencer campaigns online and offline. With Synthesio s help, Peugeot created a listening dashboard just before a TV show about diesel engines and the Automotive Industry. This helped Peugeot s team follow the on-topic conversations across Social Media channels and engage with the community in real-time. Participants appreciated the responsiveness of Peugeot and their willingness to engage in a dialogue around the subject. WIN YOUR INFLUENCERS OVER Many influencers are happy to have their voices heard, gain exposure and build their community and following so give them a forum. Influencers need to protect their own reputation by being a credible, objective source for their community, so they need to report all negative experiences along with the good ones. Even a negative experience with an influencer gives you an opportunity to win the Influencer over. Make sure you have a crisis management plan and workflow in place to route the information to the right people at the right time with a prescriptive way to respond. By doing this you can turn potential detractors into your most vocal advocates.
CREATING INFLUENCER MARKETING KPIs Each department within the organization should have its own influencer management strategy and tactical approach based on use cases and KPIs special to that department. Social management tools can help organizations automate content delivery to different departments to help teams manage workflows and execute on department-specific engagement strategies. INFLUENCER MARKETING KPI: How much does your audience grow per influencer over measured periods of time? Influencer marketing can help you achieve real business objectives. YOUR BRAND REVENUE PRODUCTS & SERVICES MARKETING INFLUENCER MANAGEMENT BRAND BUZZ & PURCHASES SHARES & REFERRALS INFLUENCER AUDIENCE
KEY METRICS There are key metrics that play an integral role in helping you measure the health and effectiveness of your Influencer Marketing program. AMPLIFICATION RATE helps you measure the effectiveness of your influencers in growing your audience (and implicitly gauge the brand's effectiveness in cultivating its influencers). SRS helps you measure the aggregate sentiment around your brand among your target audience. CONVERSION RATE helps you measure how many goals you're achieving per target audience. Having a holistic view of your Influencer Marketing program's effectiveness requires tracking all three of these metrics. If you find that your Influencer Marketing program is not working (i.e. not achieving the results you expected), it s always a good idea to go back to the drawing board and segment (or re-segment) your audience. Plot out your fans, leads, customers and detractors as part of your overall target audience, and then build an Influencer Action Sheet containing specific outreach tactics for each Influencer. From there you can set numerical goals for growing your "good circles" (fans, leads, customers) and shrinking your "bad circles" (detractors, critics, etc.) using your influencers. Be as number-driven as possible in every aspect of your Influencer Marketing program. ABOUT SYNTHESIO Synthesio, named the leader in The Forrester Wave : Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q1 2014 report, is a Global Social Intelligence Platform. Used by some of the world s top brands, and the agencies that support them, Synthesio is the framework for building social intelligence that provides real business results. Whether an organization s social team is built within Marketing or crosses multiple departments, business units or geographies, Synthesio helps teams listen, analyze, and engage with consumer conversations across social and mainstream media within one platform. Founded in 2006, Synthesio has offices in New York, Paris, London, and Singapore. www.synthesio.com.