To figure this out, Augure surveyed 600 marketing and communications professionals from more than 30 countries and 30 different industries with the aim of understanding how they are approaching influencer marketing. Here are five key takeaways from Augure’s State of Influencer Engagement report for 2015.

Influencer Engagement Is On the Rise

Of those surveyed, 84 percent said they expect to launch influencer engagement initiatives in 2015, confirming that this discipline is gaining weight in brands’ strategic marketing and communications plans. And it works: 81 percent of those surveyed considered influencer engagement effective or very effective for attaining their objectives (this figure climbs to 91 percent for the US). It’s not a tactic that’s exclusive to large companies, either: 85 percent of marketing and PR professionals from small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) stated they obtained positive results from their initiatives with influencers.

This global trend is also backed by budgets allocated to influencer engagement. Of those surveyed, 33 percent expected to increase their budget in 2015, while just six percent had taken the decision to reduce it. The American continent appears to be at the forefront of this trend with a whopping 61 percent of US companies surveyed saying they expected to increase their influencer marketing budget.

It’s Not Just About Brand Awareness

What objectives do brands have for influencer engagement? Building brand notoriety is unsurprisingly the main objective for communications and marketing professionals when launching their programs.

But the study also shows that influencer engagement isn’t just a top of the funnel strategy. A majority (75 percent) of those surveyed consider it is effective or very effective in garnering leads. Similarly, 76 percent claimed to have obtained positive results in increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value. Understanding how to identify the most influential people from their existing consumer base has become the new Holy Grail for brands to develop successful customer advocacy initiatives.

Content: The Key to Unlocking Influencer Relationships

One of the strongest trends seen in the study is the increasingly strategic role played by content in influencer engagement. As previously reported, influencers can play multiple roles in brands’ content strategy. Content promotion appears as brands’ favored activity when working with influencers, with 67 percent of them preferring it.

But communications and marketing professionals see influencer engagement as much more than just a strategy for boosting the reach of their content. A majority (59 percent) also consider involving influencers in the content creation stage (joint whitepapers, guest blogging, webinars or even events) enables them to improve the quality of their content and better meet the needs of their audience.

Encouraging collaboration in content creation and promotion is also the most effective way for brands to meet the expectations of their influencers and build a win-win relationship with them. The results of the study show that one of the main motivations for influencers to collaborate with brands is to have greater access to resources, information, and experts that enable them to make their content more attractive and, thus, bolster their influence within their own community.

The Marketer’s Dilemma: To Pay or Not to Pay Influencers?

The question of whether to pay influencers or not has seen much heated debate between those who favor an organic approach and the believers in sponsored content. According to the results of the study, financial compensation isn’t what influencers hope to get out of their relationship with brands. In fact, 69 percent of those surveyed never paid their influencers, or did so very rarely.

But, if we look more closely, there is a great deal more contrast. In the US for example, payment is a much more common practice: 54 percent of Americans surveyed said they systematically or frequently paid their influencers. This data can be explained by the increasing levels of professionalism of influencers in the US market where some even have agents to manage their interests as if they were celebrities.

Is PR Dead?

How are businesses organized to approach this discipline? Of those surveyed, 28 percent stated that PR managers led influencer engagement at their companies. This makes sense since these professionals have already shown the know-how and expertise in dealing with other opinion leaders, such as journalists.

But the main conclusion that can be drawn from the study is that management of influencer marketing campaigns is diverse and falls across many professional profiles. CEOs play a key role in some cases (such as in SMEs) while community managers and marketers lead influencer efforts in other organizations.

As observed by Raymond Morin in a recent article: “Relationships with influencers should not be entrusted to a single person or a single department within a business. Each speaker in the chain, starting with the leaders and senior executives, must be involved at one time or another in the relationship.”

The biggest takeaway from the study is that influencer marketing is alive and well in 2015. It’s by no means a perfect science, but best practices are emerging every day and businesses are continually allocating more budget to it.

The post 5 Things You Need to Know About Influencer Engagement in 2015 appeared first on Relevance.

Okay, now you can open your eyes and stop dreaming because this never happens in the real world. Influencer engagement is far from being an automatic transaction, nor is it managed with a simple phone call. It is based upon a well-designed strategy. It takes a long-term dose of patience to allow for the time required to capture opinion leaders’ attention, to get on their radar and to (slowly but surely) build a relationship to start developing content together.

How long does this process take? Typically, somewhere between six months and a full year. Have you allotted that much time to reach your goals?

The Influencer Journey

To a certain degree, influence marketing is like taking a trip, or what I call the influencer journey. You’ve probably already heard this term and will recall a similar term called the buyer’s journey, which may be described as the evolution that a consumer undergoes before carrying out an actual purchase. It can be broken down into 5 basic steps:

The influencer journey is the evolution that an influencer undergoes from a total lack of awareness of a specific brand to the opposite end of the spectrum where they have become that brand’s ambassador. Visually it may be depicted in the following manner:

Awareness

This early in the process, targeted influencers most likely know nothing at all about the brand and its internal workings. This is the moment in which the brand has to gain visibility from bloggers, social media users, journalists or online experts – whoever they happen to be targeting.

“Social networks are the best approach for reaching them,” said Danielle Look, Content Coordinator for Relevance, in a webinar about “Content Marketing & Influencers”.

Getting key targeted influencers to begin sharing your content, commenting on blog posts and mentioning you in their posts will only be achieved with a series of thoughtful actions that should never be overlooked in the very early stages of your influencer engagement strategy. Here’s a brief checklist:

• Monitor each and every one of their activities. This can be done by using monitoring tools that comb through the media, social media and blogs they engage with. News aggregators also work well to monitor their latest blog and Twitter postings. Regardless of which system you end up choosing, the vital point here is that you don’t want to miss a single opportunity to respond to their activity and get on their radar.
• Share their social media content. “Like” them on Facebook, retweet them, save them as one of your Twitter “favorites.” Let them know that you are very interested in everything they are saying and doing, and do it by combining their corporate profiles along with their personal accounts. Why? Because influencers – and, for that matter, anyone who has established a web presence – are pleased to know that behind any brand there are real human beings, real professionals. The moment that “devirtualization” with an influencer takes place is when you are able to assign a name, a job, a face to them and then gain their trust.
• Attend their events, workshops, and offline appearances. Continue to grow your interest in targeted influencers’ content by personally attending events, classes or workshops where they are speaking. Moreover, you will become much more visible to them as soon as they realize you are tweeting what they are saying at these events. Attempt to devirtualize yourself after attending an event by explaining “I would love to chat about something you said in your talk,” which will give you a great opportunity to explain to them what your company is doing.

By closely following these points over a period of time, you will successfully gain visibility with these influencers and move onto the next step, credibility.

Credibility

Once you have moved into their field of vision, the time has come to take another step forward and help them perceive you as being an active player, a content generator and fully committed to this specific sector.

• Comment on their blog posts and/or the articles they publish in the media. This is another way to show your own recognition of what they are doing. But don’t over-do it by piling on excessive praise or simply flattering them. Instead, actively participate in the discussion provoked by their articles and share other similar content with them.
• E-mail or send your own content to them. Do this without being asked to do so or requesting anything in exchange beyond their honest, sincere opinion and response. By forwarding high-quality content, you carve out your own spot within their weekly reading.
• Offer them the chance to test your product. At this point in time, they know you quite well, understand what you do, have attended your events, and read your content. Why not offer them the chance to test your products or services and then give you some real, honest feedback? They will appreciate your thoughtful gesture and find value in testing (and perhaps blogging or posting about) a product within their sector. Additionally, you will receive an expert opinion that will help you improve your own offering.

Connection

You have now gained more visibility with your influencers. Whenever they see your logo they immediately associate it with your services or product. They have met a person or two from your team. The time has come to take the next step and to propose some sort of joint collaboration.

• Interviews: Your targeted influencers are well-regarded professionals within your sector, as you yourself are. They work and write about subjects of great interest for your clients and potential customers. So, why not conduct a brief interview and post it on your blog? This not only offers value to your audience, it gives you a wonderful opportunity to recognize your influencers’ work far beyond simply sharing it or retweeting it. Additionally, they’re likely to help distribute the interview across their own networks, which will further drive traffic to your website.
• Recognition content: There are infinitely many different ways to create content that explicitly recognizes and celebrates the work of the targeted influencer(s). For example, earlier this year Augure launched a “communication calendar” for our European market that involved posting a caricature of an influencer every month along with one of his/her quotes predicting what will happen in the world of communications in the coming year.

• Webinars or whitepapers: Why not literally work with them? At Augure, we call this collaborative content. Ask them to generate content expanding on the subject of their latest book, the subject they are going to talk about at an upcoming event or the course they are going to be teaching later on this month. They’ll jump at the opportunity, viewing it as promotion and publicity for their future activities.

• Research: Research and sector analysis tend to be excellent content to boost PR actions. Lean on your targeted influencers to offer feedback and data to fuel your industry research.

Loyalty

This is the phase in which your influencers fall head over heels in love with you thanks to your content, your accessibility and your recognition of their work. This is the point when your influencers, without you exerting any pressure whatsoever, are writing about your products, services or your content, attending the events that you are organizing and freely distributing your content. They are the ones who are proposing ways for the two of you to collaborate on joint projects. At this stage, we no longer refer to them as “influencers,” but rather as “brand ambassadors.”

At this point in the journey, they are part of your company. They play an active role in advisory sessions or panel discussions before a product launch, participate in the communications campaign planning stage and even provide support in event organization and other partnership agreements. Thus, naturally and without even realizing it – solely based on the fact that they are collaborating with a transparent, useful brand – these ambassadors will become a major asset at all levels.

That is the influencer journey in a nutshell. Don’t forget that this may be a two-way street. Keeping your influencers at the right connection level and maintaining their status as a brand ambassador will depend greatly on how well you handle the constant activity flow, on how well you follow your pre-defined strategy, on the transparency of communications with them and the overall quality of your products or services.

Are you ready to start the trip?

The post The Influencer Journey: From Amplification to Recommendation appeared first on Relevance.

However, those who try to persuade you that it’s possible to transform influencers into an army of brand supporters and content promoters overnight are not selling you anything more than a pipe dream. Successful brands are fully aware that earning an influencer’s trust takes time, and only can be done by cultivating a long-term relationship that creates value for both parties.

The good news is that, as with any other area within marketing, there are metrics that can offer guidance and help you hone your strategy.

Influence Scoring: how to find the right influencer

Social scoring metrics help identify those people who have the ability to persuade their networks via a deep reach within communities focused on the topics that matter most to you (and your audience). In other words, those with strong social influence.

In his 2012 report “The Rise of Digital Influence and How to Measure It,” Brian Solis defined social influence as a combination of three main pillars: reach, relevance, and resonance on a given topic. Almost all existing influencer identification platforms have been built on the foundation of this original definition and use algorithms to help brands spot the most relevant influencers for their context.

The first step in this process is to have a clear vision regarding your own objectives and the target audience you wish to reach before building your circle of influencers. Therefore, what really matters when using an influencer identification platform is the responsiveness of the final score to the background information of your brand or your upcoming campaign.

Here are a few key context elements that your influencer ranking system should be taking into account, and why:

• Topic: Michelle Phan is one of the world’s top influencers within the fashion and beauty industry, but would you target her if you wished to promote a white paper on marketing automation?
• Location: More important than the location of your influencer is where his or her audience is located (and the language they speak).
• Channel: If your next campaign is on Instagram, do you really need to find the top influencers on Twitter?
• Time: Is the influencer currently active and playing a key role in the on-going discussion on the topic?

Influence scoring is a great precursory metric that can be very helpful in finding the right influencer in the right place and for the right subject. But bear in mind it should only be the first step of your influencer marketing journey.

Proximity scoring: the path to influencer engagement profitability

What sales people hate most is to invest their precious time in poor leads. This is the prime reason why marketers invented lead scoring, whose aim is to evaluate the sales readiness of a prospect and decide whether they should be fast-tracked to sales or slowly nurtured by marketing. If implemented well, lead scoring has been proven to both help companies increase their ROI and reduce sales cycles.

Are influencers different than prospects? Well, of course, they are … and of course they aren’t, either. Just as consumers don’t suddenly become your customers, influencers won’t become your best brand promoters in a single day. You have to catch their eye and be perceived as a credible source before possibly collaborating with them on projects and converting them into new brand ambassadors.

Being able to map out where each targeted influencer is on this path and understand where they are in the engagement process is your key to better relationships and better ROI. And proximity scoring is the way to measure this.

How does it work? In the same way that lead scoring analyzes buying signals, influencer proximity scoring allows you to spot the interest that the influencer is showing regarding your content and actions.

Are they following your brand’s Twitter account? Subscribed to your newsletter? Do they engage with your content? Are they attending events that you are organizing, or requesting to test your new products? All of these signals may be tracked, weighted and fractured into a proximity score.

Proximity scoring is your best ally to stop investing time and money on influencers that looked to be relevant for your brand at first sight yet, at the end of the day, failed to show interest in your content. Furthermore, being able to know at any given moment where the influencer stands in their relationship with your brand will enable you to define and roll out the best engagement strategy.

For example, sending a standard press release to an influencer with whom you’ve been working quite closely is surely the best way to confuse them. It’s likely they’re expecting you to call and pass along an Earth-shaking scoop or let them be the first person outside of your company’s C-Suite to have full access to your strategic plan. On the other hand, inviting an influencer who has just started following you on Twitter to co-create your next white paper will sound a little  premature.

Measure the outcome

As is true in any other marketing discipline, an influencer program’s final outcome has to be linked to the campaign’s predefined goals. For example, if your primary aim was to enhance brand awareness, useful metrics would include volume of earned media, level of noise within your social community or referral traffic to your website.

But as Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella state in their “Influence Marketing” book, “True influence marketing is about measurable customer acquisition and lead conversion.” Being able to measure your influencer engagement program’s impact on sales, customer lifetime value or churn reduction is the holy grail of influencer marketing.

Putting it all together: The Influencer Engagement Funnel

We now have one set of metrics for each stage of the influencer marketing process:

• Social influence scoring for influencer identification
• Proximity scoring to measure engagement and build better relationships
• Awareness and business KPIs to assess your influence engagement programs’ overall performance.

That’s great, but here comes the most beautiful part: it all flows together in the influencer engagement funnel:

Checking the funnel’s evolution over time is a very powerful way to measure your influencer marketing efforts. Here are a few ways you can use it:

Analyze the efficiency of your influencer engagement process

Once you have identified an influencer (first layer), the main challenge is to catch their attention and create a primary level of interaction. Once that has been established, they can then pass onto the second layer (engaged). The conversion rate and period of time between those two layers – and even more importantly, their evolution over a period of time – will reflect your capacity to raise your content awareness and attractiveness.

In much the same way, the conversion rate between engaged influencers and active influencers (second and third layers) will reflect your capability to both nurture meaningful relationships with your targets and convince them to collaborate with you.

Predict your results

Checking the health of your influencer engagement funnel will help you to improve the predictability of results.

If, for instance, your roster of engaged influencers has dropped from one time period to the next, it’s quite simple to guess that you will very soon be seeing a decrease in the number of publications and business opportunities coming from your influencer marketing effort. Without these metrics and model in place, a comprehensive analysis would most likely be required to reach such a conclusion.

Back to the basics

Will all these metrics give you the magic formula for influencer engagement success? Not by themselves.

Influencer marketing is about creating meaningful relationships with influencers, and this is a matter in which common sense and intuition can never be replaced. But, as in many other disciplines, measurement is here to fine-tune strategies and tactics, evaluate performance and sharply increase ROI.

The post The Key Metrics of Influencer Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

Modern marketers and communicators have grasped the idea that generating great content that’s shareable is absolutely necessary, yet far from being sufficient enough to ensure the overall success of their campaigns. If content is still king – and there is little doubt that it still is – then influencers should be considered the superheroes who are capable of raising a brand’s content strategy to the next level. Influencers have the power to boost credibility and extend your content’s reach into new communities, as well as be critical partners in generating content.

What exactly are the various roles that an Influencer may have within the scope of your company’s content strategy? Most likely there will be a wide array of options depending on the level of creativity that your own brand’s content creation team has. At Augure, we have defined five separate roles (bear in mind that any influencer may play several roles) that influencers may fulfill within our own content strategy.

Inspiration

Beyond their visibility and the relative size of their community, the prime attribute for an influencer is to be a true expert in a concrete subject. An influencer is capable of grasping all of the factors surrounding and affecting your target audiences and knows how to add a thoughtful response to their concerns through his or her own content.

As a brand, it is fundamental to know how to both identify and listen to those influencers who have achieved credibility within a community. The content that they post (or share) is an ideal observatory for detecting market trends, understanding consumers’ real interests, and thus inspiring a brand’s content strategy.

Collaborator

The next step is to co-create content. A co-branded eBook, webinar collaboration, a series of video-interviews, or setting up a joint event can be key in laying the foundation for a stable relationship with opinion leaders online. Including influencers in these kinds of activities has the potential to convert them into your best brand in proponents.

44 percent of marketing and communication professionals are already working directly with influencers to co-create content. Furthermore, 64 percent of these marketers stated that including influencers in content creation is a major stepping stone when the time comes to broaden the exposure for their content.

You may be thinking, “How am I supposed to get a well-known influencer within my sector to be willing to collaborate in creating my content?”

The fact is that unless you ask him or her directly you’ll never know what their response may be. Based on our own experience at Augure, we have been pleasantly surprised by the way that many influencers have been more than willing to participate in our content creation, although in some cases it may hardly be more than a simple quote. The key is to propose ways to collaborate that provides them a means to broaden the exposure of their own knowledge and expertise without necessarily forcing them to promote or endorse your products.

Leading Star

Let’s not fool ourselves; all of us have an ego when the time comes to interact and enhance our public image online. This has been proven time and time again by sociologists in numerous research projects. Go-Gulf, a leading research firm, found that 68 percent of all people share online content with the main goal being to let others know what they are doing and what themes they are really interested in.

Influencers – like all of us – are also seeking the benefits of this type of recognition, not simply for being an influencer, but rather to strengthen their role as being a recognized thought leader, to promote their own specific expertise and to build their own personal brand.

It may even be worthwhile to generate original content inspired by an influencer’s own content and experience. Let’s look at an example where this approach was used utilizing SalesLoft, an American lead generation tool.

Mark Suster is a partner at Upfront Ventures, a venture capital firm, and is also a high-spirited entrepreneur, well-known expert in sales & marketing and an active blogger. Mark Suster meets all of the requirements for being an excellent influencer in his sector. In fact, when we ran a keyword search based on the keywords “entrepreneur”, “startup” and “sales”, Mark’s profile popped up in every case.

In June 2013, Mark posted an article on his blog about the ideal profile for a “born salesperson” – one who is able to increase sales for any company. SalesLoft decided to use that post to generate recognition content: infographics that visually represented the profile that Suster had described in his blog.

Amplifier

The role of Amplifier – broadening the scope of content’s exposure – is surely the first one that pops into anyone’s mind when we start talking about getting influencers involved in content strategy.

Many brands have made major mistakes in seeking the attention of those influencers who have the largest number of followers, fans or readers. This is a grave error for two basic reasons:

1. Even though he or she may be wildly popular, an influencer will only get a valid echo in those themes in which they have achieved credibility and trust.
2. It is worthless for a brand to push their content towards an audience that is not aligned with their target audience. Not only does it not benefit them, it may even trigger unneeded costs as they generate non-productive, low-quality sales leads.

Knowing how to accurately identify the true key influencers for a brand plays a vital role in measuring the effectiveness of your content strategy. The influence should be defined as being contextually applicable to one single theme and you must be careful to not confuse the terms “influence” and “popularity”.

Critic

Marketing and communication departments tend to generate a vast amount of content on a weekly basis, so why not ask for your closest influencers’ opinions and get their feedback on the content being created? You need not send them each and every blog post that you publish, but you should get them involved in special content production, eBooks, infographics related to their specific sector and any other situation in which they are qualified to provide feedback that will enhance your own content.

In turn, they will appreciate this gesture and recognize that you really do value their opinion and expertise, increasing the likelihood that they will actively help the content gain greater exposure through their networks.

Leveraging influencers in these five critical roles can do wonders for your content’s visibility. Find inspiration for content topics from the trends they are participating in. Get them involved early on in the development of content, but be sure to keep it easy for them to participate. Help them enhance their own image and status by holding their input with high regard. And, finally, let them know how much you value their opinion by strategically asking for their constructive criticism on your most important content pieces.

Influencer marketing takes time and requires a clear plan for execution. When done purposefully with defined goals for success, influencers can be pivotal in helping your content receive the attention it deserves.

The post 5 Roles Influencers Can Play In A Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Relevance.