ZS Associates

Say “influencer marketing” and you’ll likely conjure up images of chic, glamorous celebrities. If you aren’t in fashion, travel ora handful of other industries known for their influencers, then it’s easy to think, “does not apply—next.” A closer look, however, reveals that today’s influencer marketing is akin to yesterday’s word-of-mouth marketing, albeit amplified. Word-of-mouth marketing spreads one-to-one, is organic and fades over time. Meanwhile, today’s counterpart—driven by social media and its associated network effect—spreads one-to-many, is curated and amplifies over time.

Consumers rely on influencers because of their authenticity and trustworthiness, as well as to cut through the noise and clutter in today’s marketplace. Influencer marketing is fast becoming a valuable source of advertising, outperforming paid advertising fivefold.

So, how do brands develop their influencer strategy? A key first step is to identify the business goal they are trying to achieve. Is a company looking to drive brand advocacy, increase market share, gain entry to a new market or a specific demographic, for example? Defining your objectives upfront and, more importantly, the audience you want to reach, helps you understand who your influencers might be and how you might leverage them.

How do brands identify their influencers? Identifying the right influencers and, more importantly, their network of influence, is key to success. Often brands aiming to increase sales or presence with a younger audience tap into social networks to source influencers. Brand advocacy can be achieved through digital influencers but can also come from more traditional influencers like business and community leaders. It can even be found closer to home when companies turn to their existing customers and employees.

“Shaping the content, frequency, where and among whom these conversations are taking place can affect brand sentiment and ultimately consumer behavior”

While these principles apply to both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies, for business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) companies there is added complexity as the message does not go directly from the brand to the consumer via a linear line of communication. In other words, with B2B2C, it is important to influence the influencers and tap into the power of their connections. Influencers for B2B2C could include well-respected leaders with broad networks, industry experts and decision-makers whose power to—and spheres of—influence are evaluated across numerous dimensions beyond their presence and engagement on social platforms.

How do brands leverage their influencers? Once you recognize that people who are talking about your brand or space are influencing it, you can unlock value by facilitating the conversation.  Shaping the content, frequency, where and among whom these conversations are taking place can affect brand sentiment and ultimately consumer behavior. Building a robust omnichannel influencer strategy can be powerful. While influencers are usually a key part of marketing and digital campaigns, brands that go a step further to integrate influencers into their sales, research and development, and corporate communications efforts can gain greater leverage and drive increased effectiveness. Additionally, even though brands think of influencer marketing as an upper funnel, brand-building tactic, it can be just as effective at driving lower funnel impact, as well as for post-sale marketing efforts to drive customer satisfaction and retention.

How do brands measure the effectiveness of their influencer strategy? While most brands focus on engagement metrics, measuring the impact on sales can be challenging. To go beyond engagement metrics and measure the return on investment of influencer marketing, campaigns need to be designed and activated with business goals, data, and measurement in mind so that brands can appropriately track outcome-based metrics.

At ZS, we help brands across the spectrum define their influencer strategy, use advanced AI techniques to identify key influencers and their network of influence, activate their strategy and more importantly measure the impact of their strategy. Need help to unleash the power of your influencers? Contact Kajal Narasimha (kajal.narasimha@zs.com), visit www.zs.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.