Chapter 2

Collaborating to Win

IN THIS CHAPTER

Examining the changing role of influencers

Measuring the value of influencers

Looking at influencer types

In today’s marketplace, many types of people make up the constellation of customer influencers. Sometimes a family friend can supersede any referral made by your hand-picked celebrity. It’s important to know your audience and understand what really matters to them. The key to using influence is putting the customer at the center of your content-marketing efforts.

In this chapter, you look at how digital marketers can harness the role of influencers to satisfy a customer’s greatest needs and make their brand indispensable. You examine both the accepted industry expert and the influencer whose word of mouth (WOM) recommendations drive conversions.

Discovering the Evolving Role of Influencers

First, what is social influence? Pam Hughes (nee Dyer), Marketing Chief at Agile Alliance and one of Forbes Top 25 influencers the defines social influence as the following:

Social influence occurs when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are affected by others. Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion — the ability to cause a change in mindset or actions so someone thinks or behaves in a certain way. In the world of social media marketing, influence is currency.

This quote clearly spells out the three principles that must be present to influence others. To have influence, something or someone must do the following:

• Impact the person’s feelings. Although most people believe otherwise, logic is not the way to influence someone. You must touch people to get their attention and allow them to focus on primitive emotions. Most information goes right by you unless it taps into your lizard brain (the part of the brain that controls such things as addiction, happiness, and the fear response.)
• Cause a change in mindset. Influence must cause movement that impacts your mindset. You may start as neutral or even negative. Persuasion causes you to move in the direction of the influencer.
• Rest on a trust relationship. Influencers have “emotional capital” with their audience. They are trusted, which keeps the lizard brain from invoking the “fight or flight” response and instead focuses on positive emotions.

Persuasion is not trickery or deceit. The best types of persuasion help educate buyers to understand that your solution is the best. After you’ve done that, price is not an impediment to selling. You’ve allowed the buyer to persuade herself.

Understanding the six principles of persuasion

In his seminal book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini identifies six principles at the heart of persuasion. (You might want to check out his blog, shown in Figure 2-1, at http://www.influenceatwork.com/. Also see the upcoming sidebar “Social proof and reciprocity: Better together?”)

FIGURE 2-1: Influence at Work.

Cialdini’s principles are closely followed by marketers, and they can help you identify why your customers respond to some tactics more than others. Here’s a quick overview of these six principles:

• Reciprocity: This principle is about keeping a relationship in balance. You want to reciprocate to someone who gives you something. There is no stated contract, but people instinctively want to make sure that they don’t take more than they give.
• Social proof: This is another principle that remains unspoken but is understood by most. People like to eliminate the amount of risk they take in everyday life. One way to do this is to make sure that others have made the same decision you are about to make and have been pleased with the consequences. No one wants to be the first person to try something. Content marketers know that they need to show customers that others have used and raved about their products.
• Liking: It’s well known that people want to do business with people they like. Dealing with likable people and brands is easy and certainly preferable to dealing with someone who is difficult. It is that simple. If your customers like you or your brand, they’re predisposed to do business with you.
• Authority: People believe in experts. If you have a title after your name or are an acknowledged authority in some field, people believe what you say. If an authority recommends you, you’re more likely to be chosen.
• Scarcity: This principle has been abused by marketers since the beginning of advertising. People hate the idea that they can’t have something because its quantity is limited. When something is scarce, people want it all the more. Content marketers have recently extended this principle and called it fear of missing out (FOMO), which includes the value of physical goods as well as the fear of losing out on an experience that can’t be repeated. The idea of FOMO is discussed further in Book 2, Chapter 2. The buyer journey is detailed in Book 2, Chapter 3.
• Commitment and consistency: People’s image of themselves dictates their behavior. For example, if they consider themselves to be generous, they would not like to find themselves acting in a miserly way. They want their behavior to be consistent with who they are. If they make a commitment, they want to believe that they will keep it.

SOCIAL PROOF AND RECIPROCITY: BETTER TOGETHER?

Robert Cialdini’s well-known “Towel Reuse Study” has garnered much attention. He looked at the impact of changes he made to small signs left for patrons in their hotel rooms. In randomly assigned rooms, he left a sign that asked patrons to reuse towels because it was good for the environment. In the other rooms, he asked them to reuse towels and noted that other guests had recycled their towels at least once during their stay. Here you see social proof in action. Twenty-six percent more of the guests who received the second sign recycled their towels. The simple fact that other guests had recycled made it more likely that these guests would do so, too.

Another study cited by the American Psychological Association (http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/02/persuasion.aspx) returned to the topic of towel recycling. This time, the topic related to the reciprocity principle. The sign referencing the environment was used, and another, randomly distributed sign said, “We already donated to an environmental cause in the name of our guests. Would you join us in this effort to cover our costs?” This sign testing the reciprocity principle achieved a 21 percent greater response than the first.

Understanding why influencers matter more now

A trusted friend or family member has always been a social influencer. But online, influencers matter even more than they used to because of the glut of information coming at your customer from all sides. No one can read and understand everything on the web that he wants to know. People need help in the form of customer reviews, recommendations, and communities united around common topics.

According to Forbes, shoppers have completed 70–90 percent of their research before they ever speak to a salesperson.

It’s both a blessing and a curse that users can investigate products or services they want to buy before ever talking to a salesperson. Rather than turning to a salesperson, they find trusted sources who can explain the benefits of a product without displaying a vested interest in making a sale. That’s where influencers come in.

Influence marketing provides several benefits, including:

• Lending credibility: Customers give a sales page on a company’s website very little credence. It’s great to find out about specific product features, but most customers are too cynical to believe the hype. When an influencer recommends the product, it’s given much more weight. You can capture brand awareness through recommendations in a way that you can’t with your own ads.

  In a study by Dimensional Research, respondents found that 90 percent said that positive reviews impacted their buying decisions. Eighty-six percent said their buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews (https://marketingland.com/survey-customers-more-frustrated-by-how-long-it-takes-to-resolve-a-customer-service-issue-than-the-resolution-38756).

• Cost-effective targeting: It’s easier to tap into a community of people interested in your topic than it is to create one from scratch. Influencers have already done the hard work.
• Positioning and copy: Many content marketers overlook the opportunity to learn from their audience’s influencers. How do they talk about the product? Are they tapping into specific emotions or using special language? They show you what content resonates with your audience. Paying attention to their appeal and what their audience wants to hear is an important takeaway for you.
• Finding out what channels are their favorites: Influencer audiences point the way to the channels your potential customers spend time on, thereby saving you a huge amount of time and pointing the way to the best advertising venues.
• Developing brand awareness: Having an influencer discuss your products can develop enhanced brand awareness. Not only is the influencer discussing your product, she is implicitly endorsing your brand.
• Helping build your online community: Building an audience from scratch is difficult and time consuming. Anything that you can do to encourage self-selected members of the influencer’s group to join you as well is a great boost.
• Fronting a specific campaign: You know that some campaigns are more important than others. If you are a start-up and customers are seeing your product for the first time, collaborating with an industry insider can make all the difference.

Understanding how to measure expert influencers

How can influence be measured? A lot of controversy exists among content marketers about how to measure influencer clout. Marketers dislike the way some clout-ranking companies give a high rating to an influencer based solely on the number of Twitter followers he has or the amount of attention he garners on Facebook. The key to measuring influence is by looking at a range of factors.

An ebook called Identifying and Measuring Influencers in Social Marketing published by Klout (closed its doors) identified three attributes of influences:

• Reach: Does the influencer have your target audience as a subset of hers? Does she have the social followers and real-world influence to impact your potential customers? Is her audience large and responsive?
• Relevance: Do the influencer’s content topics align with yours? Does his content have the quality your audience expects?
• Resonance: Do the influencer’s authority and authenticity attract the audience you’re trying to reach? This is important to determine. You want to be sure that you don’t have more of a niche audience that doesn’t resonate with your influencer.

Recognizing Influencer Types

You may be surprised by the wide range of influencer types. When you say influencer, what usually comes to mind is a celebrity or family member. But influencers come in five types:

• Friends, family, and work colleagues: This category of influencer you’re most familiar with. These influencers make up the person’s social graph on social media platforms. They are known as positional influencers because they constitute the person’s inner circle.

• Subject experts: This group has demonstrated expertise in a particular topic or area of interest. They are thought leaders and others who work to gain recognition by virtue of their knowledge. When they recommend something, their audience listens. These people generally have titles such as trendsetter, thought leader, authority, or even analyst.

  A subset of this group is the gadfly. The gadfly is known for saying controversial things and disrupting the status quo.

• Professionals in high positions: You recognize these influencers because they have jobs that confer expertise on them. They are the captains of industry, the politicians, and the local business leaders. Their credibility is measured by the size of the position they hold and the people over which they have power. Titles for these people include decision maker or industry leader.

• Celebrities: This group is easy to identify. Its members have high profiles and are written about in magazines and newspapers. Celebrity influence is very high and usually unpredictable. Fashion designers and others often give celebrities their merchandise free in the hopes that the celebrity will be photographed wearing it. That kind of publicity can’t be bought. The downside to using celebrity influencers is that you may be subject to criticism if their behavior doesn’t comport with your brand.

  A subset of this group is the professional brand. These people are stars in their specific industry. For example, they could be a YouTube star or Internet marketing star.

  What kind of influence do you think you could wield if you’re Taylor Swift. She told Apple in 2015 that she wasn’t going to allow her album 1989 to stream on Apple’s service because of its decision not to pay artists during Apple’s three-month trial period. Apple quickly relented and agreed to accommodate the artists in some way. Swift accomplished this concession by placing an open letter to Apple on her Tumblog (http://taylorswift.tumblr.com), demonstrating that influencers can impact even the world’s most valuable brand.

  Are you targeting millennials? If so, be careful who you choose as your celebrity. MediaPost, an online publishing resource for advertising professionals, reports that “Authenticity is most important among the very desirable youth market (ages 12–29)” (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/251664/rethinking-celebrity-endorsements-authenticity-an.html?edition=83523). Even the most popular celebrity must have a true connection to your brand to satisfy this group. For more about marketing to Millennials, see Book 4.

• Your raving fans: This group is the one you love to nourish. This group’s members are the people who chat up your brand and do the work of a citizen sales force. Their buzz is organic and never dies down. These people influence by being your best brand ambassadors. You can find out more about how to use your fans in the “Enhancing Word of Mouth (WOM) with Advertising” section, later in this chapter.

Finding the Right Influencers

If you’ve read the previous sections of this chapter, by now you’re probably convinced that influencers matter. But how do you find the influencers who are right for your audience? Assuming that you’re starting from scratch, the following sections look at how to find the right influencers and approach them.

Discovering the influencers you need to target

Say that you’ve considered the influencer types described in the preceding section, “Recognizing Influencer Types,” and have decided to focus on self-selected experts for now. These top thought leaders and bloggers are whom your target audience reads and follows. (At some point, you will also want to consider the other types, of course, such as raving fans.)

Following are several immediate actions you can take to find influencers using three free online tools — BuzzSumo, Followerwonk, and Alltop:

BuzzSumo

To find influencers through the BuzzSumo tool, follow these steps:

1. Go to https://app.buzzsumo.com/influencers to use the influencer search.

   Look at the left side and select the filters you want to use, such as bloggers and influencers, as shown in Figure 2-2.

2. Type the topic of your niche.

   After typing your topic, you receive a list of results, as shown in Figure 2-3 that shows the results for pet food. (For a longer list, you need to sign up for the Pro version and pay a fee.)

   From this list, you can start to research influencers.

3. Select the ones you want to research further and put them on a list in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Doc.

FIGURE 2-2: Filters on BuzzSumo for influencer types.

FIGURE 2-3: Results of pet food search on BuzzSumo.

Followerwonk

Follow these steps to work with the tool on Followerwonk:

1. Go to http://followerwonk.com.

   On the page that opens, you see a tab called Search Bios on the upper left hand side.

2. Click the Search Bios tab and type in the topic of your choice, for example pet food.

   Followerwonk returns a list of all your Twitter followers who cite pet food in their profiles, as shown in Figure 2-4. Add the names you want to look at further to the list you created.

FIGURE 2-4: The FollowerWonk homepage.

Alltop

Alltop provides a collection of the best blogs on various topics. To find those blogs, follow these steps:

1. Go to http://alltop.com/.

   You get the alltop homepage, as shown in Figure 2-5.

2. On the list of blogs, look for duplicates and see which ones show up most often.

   Don’t forget to consider bloggers that aren’t at the top of the list. They may be more open to collaborating because they’re not bombarded daily with offers.

FIGURE 2-5: Topics to search at the top of the Alltop home page.

You can always do a simple search on Google for your topic, such as pet food influencers, and see which blogs are returned. You can also search related terms, such as “pet resources,” to see what you find.

Don’t forget that you can also search Google using your terms as hashtags and keywords.

Developing a system

After you pick the influencer(s) you want to work with, you should establish a working system to define your roles. This step is important because you want to make sure that everything goes smoothly. You may feel a bit intimidated working with your influencer for the first time, but you want to ensure success. The last thing you want to do is alienate someone who is important to your audience.

For this reason your system should have a documented plan.

Working with your influencer includes documenting the following:

• The overall goal of the campaign or collaboration: Each of you will have different goals for participating. You should make sure that it’s clear what each of your goals are.
• Deliverables: Document what the campaign deliverables will be. Are you going to put on a webinar for the influencer’s audience? Who will take care of the promotion and the technical aspects?
• Roles: Some influencers may want to front the campaign, whereas others may want you to take the lead. If the influencer has to spend time preparing a presentation, you want her to know that up front.
• Decisions about editorial content: Will you have to get approval for all the content in your campaign? Does the influencer want to run through everything beforehand or is he leaving the details to you?
• Success measures: How will you know whether the collaboration was a success? Decide beforehand what measures will be used.

Make this process as informal or formal as you think it warrants. The key is that you do it. It’s not uncommon for people to be disappointed by those with whom they’ve collaborated because they didn’t have clear parameters before they began.

You also need to establish some predefined metrics that will let you know whether your association with an influencer is valuable. You may not have revenue returns immediately (unless you’re specifically selling a product or service). However, you do want to make sure that you have tangible results. Although the ROI is difficult to measure, here are some to consider:

• Increase in followers tied to that influencer
• Increase in requests for sales demos or leads or materials
• Increase in your mailing list tied to a specific landing page that you established for the campaign
• Increase in sales of the product or service if applicable
• Increased traffic of new visitors to your website right after the campaign

Uncovering New Influencers

Influencer marketing continues to change with the influx of new channels and technology. A relatively new phenomenon is the social media platform celebrity. That’s an influencer who becomes popular on a specific platform based on the content that influencer creates just for that platform. Musicians, beauty bloggers, and others have posted tutorials that have catapulted them to fame. Social media creates its own media stars. Two innovative ways that influencers are being discovered are

• On social platforms that have their own celebrities: Because social media platforms have no barrier to entry, anyone with a good story to tell and a pleasing personality has a shot at becoming famous. This fame can then be parlayed into a line of physical goods, such as makeup, or a gig with a brand that wants to appropriate your celebrity for its media campaign.

• By creating algorithms on social platforms to find more catalysts: Another way in which social platforms are using influencers is to uncover and target them for their own publicity purposes. Uncovering new influencers and using their clout is serious business.

  A case in point is Facebook’s being granted of an ad patent that would reportedly identify new influencers. The way it works is that Facebook can identify the people who share content and then get the most reshares. Every advertiser would be interested in knowing who they are and paying to advertise directly to them.

If you know the influencer’s website but not his specific email address, you may want to check out Email Hunter at (https://emailhunter.co/). This tool isn’t a license to spam someone, however. Be respectful.

Influencing with Customer Advocacy

As most content marketers agree, getting WOM from happy customers is the best advertising of all. If you can encourage your own fans to be your de facto sales force, you can expect great results. By organizing your most ardent fans, you can multiply your brand’s profile. One type of advocacy is typically known as brand ambassadorship, which is a program that has a company’s most loyal customers provide testimonials and other positive information to prospects. The program can be as large or small as makes sense for your audience. When people join your ambassador program, you can offer them free stuff, discounts, or special group meetings.

One key benefit of an ambassador program is that you will be privy to feedback that you probably wouldn’t get from other sources. Remember, these are your fans, so their criticisms are heartfelt. They want to make the program better. Consider them to be your most intense focus group.

One example of brand ambassadorship is the Champions Program created by Brainshark, a sales enablement company that helps customers create high-end video sales presentations. Its case study was reported by Truman Tang on the Influitive blog (http://influitive.com/blog/brainshark-social-media-case-study/).

Tang reported that Brainshark knew it had an avid group of fans who loved its products. The key was to figure out how to get those fans to increase their advocacy on social media. To this end, the company created an online community staffed by Brainshark’s star employees and called that community Brainshark Champions. The community invited customers who had given testimonials and case studies on the company’s website. Customers were categorized into four groups: (1) active users; (2) social content sharers; (3) customers nominated for their loyalty by employees; and (4) community leaders and influencers. To demonstrate its commitment, the company provided the community with exclusive training and networking about Brainshark products. Obviously, this offering served as a real incentive to raving fans.

The program was very successful and won Brainshark the Forrester Groundswell Award for 2014. One success measure showed a 106 percent boost in Twitter activity. Clearly, a program like this would be worth considering for your fan base.

Another example of a very active brand ambassador community is the one run by Evernote (https://evernote.com/community), the online content catcher. With more than one hundred million users, Evernote must be doing something right. It started its ambassador program in 2011 with an eye toward highlighting different use cases. Evernote picked users who were both passionate about Evernote and expert in their own field, and the company wanted to offer something valuable to these users. For example, a user who wantsto solve a particular problem with Evernote might find an ambassador who can offer tips and hints. Figure 2-6 shows a listing for Paperless Living Ambassador Jamie Todd Rubin.

FIGURE 2-6: Example of Evernote listing for an ambassador.

You can also see a link to Rubin’s website (http://Jamietoddrubin.com), shown in Figure 2-7, on which he mentions his ambassadorship in his blog heading along with his own considerable skills. Clearly, this is a win-win for both the ambassador and the company.

FIGURE 2-7: Jamie Todd Rubin’s website.

Enhancing Word of Mouth (WOM) with Advertising

As powerful as a collaboration with an industry influencer can be, word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations are equally important. When you adopt WOM as a content marketing strategy, you can get results that are even more effective. The best way to deploy WOM as a strategy is to understand its power as an advertising tactic that is called Word of Mouth Advertising (WOMA).

WOMA refers to actively using tactics to encourage WOM. Rather than use hope as a strategy to accelerate WOM, you proactively seed your campaigns with WOMA.

A study at the University of Auckland Business School found that three major benefits accrue to companies when WOM is used. They are (1) greater enthusiasm for a company and its products; (2) increased brand awareness; and (3) greater customer loyalty.

Connecting with your audience

An article in Forbes reports that 64 percent of marketing executives believe that word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. Only six percent say that they have mastered it. That’s an astounding number! So why is using word of mouth marketing (WOMM) so difficult? Suzanne Fanning, former President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), thinks she knows why. She believes that marketers have a hard time with WOMM because they use it to “collect rather than connect.” By this she means that marketers are focused on counting followers, tweets, and likes rather than actually connecting with the very audience who loves their products (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2014/07/17/why-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-the-most-important-social-media/). (In 2018, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) acquired WOMMA.)

You can easily see how this lack of connection results in a failed strategy. Most marketers show off their social media numbers as though they directly translate into revenue. What’s missing is the knowledge of the level of advocacy behind those numbers. Many of your followers can have only a very casual interest in your brand and not be very effective ambassadors.

Identifying factors for WOM

It’s important to understand what factors must be present to trigger WOM. The conditions have to be right so that people feel comfortable sharing content with their trusted network. According to a study by consulting service McKinsey & Company (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/a_new_way_to_measure_word-of-mouth_marketing), three factors are critical to triggering WOM, as explained in Table 2-1.

TABLE 2-1 Three Critical Factors that Trigger WOM

Factor	Must Be Present to Trigger
What’s said	Important product or service features
Identity of the messenger	Trusted advisor
Environment	Trusted channel where the message seen

Paid Influencer Programs

If you want to go further and develop an ongoing influencer program for your company, you may want to consider paid influencer programs. A report called “2017 Influencer Marketing Benchmarks,” by RhythmOne (http://www.rhythmone.com/advertisers/influencer-marketing), found that “advertisers who implemented an Influencer Marketing campaign in 2017 received $12.21 in earned media value for every $1.00 of paid media.”

Here are a few influencer programs you may want to investigate:

• GroupHigh (http://www.grouphigh.com): Shown in Figure 2-8, GroupHigh is a PR and marketing software provider that helps companies find influential bloggers.
• RhythmOne (http://www.rhythmone.com): RhythmOne is a company that provides influencer marketing and unites advertising across all devices. (See Figure 2-9.)
• Tapinfluence (http://www.tapinfluence.com/): Shown in Figure 2-10, Tapinfluence has a Software as Service (SAS) platform that helps brands find influencers and create co-branded content.

FIGURE 2-8 GroupHigh.

FIGURE 2-9 RhythmOne.

FIGURE 2-10 Tapinfluence.