Influencer Impact #5: The Pursuit of Influencer Marketing

Welcome to the fifth edition of Influencer Impact! ??

Did ya like the play on The Pursuit of Happiness in the title? Yeah, me too.

Before we jump in, guess what?!

You can now join the shiny new Influencer Impact community! ??

Come join in on the fun, will ya?

On the influencer marketing front…

During MarketingProfs B2B Forum last week, one of my favorite people, Ashley Zeckman, gave a fantastic talk on influencer marketing.

Among her many great points, she shared the 3 questions that you need to ask yourself before starting your influencer marketing program:

1. Are you pursuinwg influencer marketing for the right reasons?
2. Do you know what success looks like?
3. Do you have the tech, tools, and processes to scale?

Let’s break each one of these down:

Pursuing Influencer Marketing

You should pursue influencer marketing because you want to build relationships with influencers within your industry, not just pimp your company or product.

You want to work with these influencers to develop co-created content that is beneficial to both you and those that work with you during the campaign.

And you also have to ensure that you identify the right influencers. Remember, the sheer number of followers means nothing.

What Does Success Look Like

You should never start any program, much less an influencer campaign, without defining what success looks like.

This definition of success needs to be an agreement with the business and from there the KPIs will dictate themselves.

Is it a brand awareness campaign? Great. You can start with metrics such as reach, impressions, engagements, and traffic back to your .com.

Is it a demand campaign? Awesome. You’ll need additional tracking to that landing page, such as an SFDC campaign (if you use Salesforce) so that you can track through the funnel.

Scalable Tech, Tools, and Processes

As your program matures, you’ll likely want to consider adopting an influencer marketing tool (my fav: Onalytica).

As we’ve talked about before, you can start with something as simple as a Google Sheet.

This can be as simple or complicated as your current program dictates but, to get started, you can use this free template that I created just for YOU.

On the dark social front…

I had the pleasure to chat with Christina Garnett from HubSpot on a recent RevGenius LinkedIn Live. We discussed building an active and engaged community.

One of the areas that we talked about was that we trust our peers' reviews. All of us would agree, right?

How does this apply to dark social?

A study by GWI and Reddit found that 66% of respondents said they appreciate belonging to online B2B communities because it allows them to connect with others who have relevant interests.

It’s within these communities that people seek reviews of your product(s) before they’ll engage with your brand.

Therefore, if you’re spending time within these communities, you could be losing out on precious opportunities to engage these prospects and customers.

?? ?? Where you can find me online…

LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram | Website

?? Where I’ll be speaking…

• RevGenius LinkedIn Live - Developing Your First Influencer Marketing Campaign with Jason Falls, Monday 10/24 at 2p ET | 11a PT

?? Thank you!

Thank you for subscribing. I appreciate you and your time.

I’ll see you at the same time, in the same place next week!

- Justin