Part 2 of our Influencer Marketing & Relations in 2018 series. How to solve marketer’s biggest influencer marketing & relations challenges: Identification, recruitment and Influencer-Brand Dissonance.
It is among Marketers’ biggest Influencer Marketing & Relations (IMR) challenges: discovering, identifying and vetting the right Influencers for their brand, business objectives, and strategy. The future of Influencer recruitment requires going above and beyond a smart database of Influencers, so that the process is an ongoing data and channel-agnostic methodology. Influencer identification, especially in the context of a brand’s ethos and customer experience (CX) touchpoints, should not be validated by reach and engagement rate alone, and requires more context, that a brand’s CX touchpoints can provide.
Influence is dynamic. It is rooted in historical behavior and predictive performance, which requires technology integrated into select brand touchpoints to best understand and quantify. An Influencer might be a mega-influencer or might be a micro-influencer depending on the category, brand or network, and their influence might be relevant for the next few hours or perhaps for years to come.
Influencer recruitment should be an always-on, CX-integrated strategy that is continuously engaging new influencers – most of whom already have brand passion. Mavrck’s channel-agnostic Influence Plugin embeds seamlessly into a brand’s existing digital touchpoints to discover, identify, and validate consumers with influence – for example, in-the-moment recruitment of Influencers post-purchase within a brand’s e-commerce site.
Additionally, IMR practitioners can also discover the right Influencers for their brand using Mavrck’s network of over 10 Million Influencers or source directly from an owned customer database.
Marketers also struggle to connect their brand’s voice and campaign ideas to an Influencer’s authentic voice and style – we call this Influencer Brand Dissonance, or IBD. IBD is largely a byproduct of IMR being treated as a reactive tactic and not a proactive strategy. Influencers are still too often brought in once a campaign is fully baked, which does not allow for the campaign to be designed with influence and trust in mind. Influencer Marketing platforms contribute to this problem, as they frequently limit the engagement with Influencers to activation and late-stage campaign management.
But Influencers, by definition, have such rich knowledge that not including them at the point of initial campaign research, ideation, strategy & planning is a significant missed opportunity. As modern business leaders struggle to remain influential and trustworthy themselves, not inviting the Influencers that are influencing their target audiences into the boardroom is lost business insight.
Mavrck enables consumer alignment and segmentation around influence, topics & keywords (NLP), demographics, life events, and location, which can validate their potential to influence add value to their experience, their peers’ experience, as well as the brand. Influencers’ ability to create, amplify, and submit insights, ideas, and content applies to all aspects and disciplines of campaign design. Engaging Influencers in more ways and at select CX touchpoints, beyond content creation and dissemination at the point of campaign activation, can also add value to additional parts of the Marketing & Communications organization.
In addition to driving collaboration among different practitioners within an organization, Mavrck’s integration within a brand’s existing marketing stack (eg. Oracle, Magento, Bazaarvoice) enables even more advanced scale and efficiency so that IMR practitioners can bring an Influencer Marketing & Relations technology to their CMO for enterprise integration. Mavrck allows, for the first time, an all in one, enterprise IMR platform to help solve select needs across different disciplines within a Marketing organization, and as a result, create enterprise efficiencies across an organization’s silos.
For more on this topic, as well as our roadmap to creating an integrated Influencer Marketing Mix and strategy, download our 2018 Influencer Marketing & Relations Trends Report.
