While word of mouth marketing remains the greatest method of driving sales and spreading the word about your product or service, a disturbing trend has been sweeping through social marketing and stands to undermine the very purpose of influencer marketing.
What are we talking about?
Influencer marketing is concept of targeting individuals with a broad social reach and soliciting them to share information about your product and service, perhaps with an endorsement, to spread the word to their large network of contacts about you. The theory is excellent, you’re tapping into a preexisting market, utilizing a spokesperson who is trusted by the audience and broadening the reach of your marketing efforts. McKinsey recently reported that marketing-inspired word-of-mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, so influencer marketing should definitely be on the radar of small and medium-sized businesses.
A 2014 study from Augure provided some pretty compelling statistics on why influencers should be a part of every company’s marketing, finding that:
· 79% of respondents said influencers were able to change opinions and create reactions
· 73% of respondents said influencers had built large online networks focused on specific topics
· 62% of respondents said influencers’ share of voice on subjects was significant.
The study also found that 43% of companies claim to have had profitable responses from influencer campaigns, while 36% say these campaigns were either “effective” or “very effective.”
Sometimes these endorsements and information sharing initiatives are paid, or simply offered in exchange for services or products. For instance, a body shop can spend $500 on an ad that generates no click-throughs, or $500 working on someone’s car in exchange for a Google, Yelp or Facebook review and social media post. Which do you think will generate greater buzz?
What’s the problem?
The problem is twofold – first, the influencers can buy followers to inflate their numbers, making them more attractive targets for influencer marketing campaigns. This leads to bogus numbers and cheats the company out of impressions they might have made on real life people, while benefiting the influencer, who has received a product, service or payment. Influencers must be chosen carefully for this reason, and the onus is on the company to ensure that the people chosen will operate ethically, provide honest feedback and generate real awareness. Services like Traackr can help narrow the field, but it’s generally a better idea to start with your own customers and build from there.
Second, companies are defining success using the wrong metrics. For many years, “impressions,” or the number of eyes who see your product or service’s advertisement, has been the golden metric, driving untold advertising dollars and budgets toward a number that only has a loose connection with money in the door. If you’re spending a lot of money and receiving a lot of impressions, but your bottom line isn’t improving, it’s time to do something different, and marketing with influencers is no different. There is a place for awareness building in every campaign, but general awareness is tough to quantify and, therefore, tough to continue supporting.
How do we solve it?
Start with your existing customers. Unless you’re a brand new business, chances are you know of a few people who love your service or products and continue to come back time after time. These are your core brand advocates – people who will sing your praises to all who will listen. The thing is, it may not have occurred to them to do any singing, and a little prompting from you might help motivate them to post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or a review site like Yelp, Google or Urbanspoon. Often, these people don’t even expect anything in exchange for this because they love your product or service so much, they just want to help you continue doing what you do.
Track your new visitors. Getting to know how people got to know about you is the most critical step in determining the effectiveness of any program. If you’re not asking new customers at your register how they heard about you and keeping track in a spreadsheet (or even just tickmarks on a piece of paper!), you’ll never know what’s working and what isn’t. By starting a program like this, you can learn who is talking about you and spreading the word, then focus your efforts on those people to keep them talking.
Provide the carrot and drop the stick. Incentivizing users to post reviews or status updates about you is tinged with ethical grey matter. Influencers should definitely disclose if they’ve been paid, whether with money, products or services, to share their experience with your company. Under no circumstances should you ever request a positive review from anyone, just ask them to share their experience, and if you've done a good job making sure it was a positive experience, you have nothing to worry about. This helps the influencer preserve integrity and credibility, since it won't look like they were "bought." Reviews, even with some constructive feedback, will likely turn some heads, so it’s worth pursuing if you’re confident the influencer will go about it in an ethical way.
Wrap it up now
Influencers can be a great way to get your product or service in front of new people by utilizing your existing fans or influential (thus the term) industry spokespeople. But it’s critical, especially for companies with small marketing budgets, that they go about identifying and activating these individuals intelligently. Skyword recently sat down with some influencers and spoke to them about their experiences, which I think is a great, unique look at life on the other side of the coin. Read their story, focus on your current customers and talk to a professional about how you can best benefit from a growing, powerful form of marketing.