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How To Work Effectively With Influencers
Influencer marketing is about change from marketing “at” consumers to marketing “with” people. It’s about initiating a relationship based on both give and take, two-way conversations, and showing appreciation. Once you have identified appropriate influencers, it is necessary to establish a productive, two-way relationship. Key hallmarks of such a relationship include giving thanks and creating true engagement.
Let’s differentiate an influencer program from a loyalty program as a key assumption. Loyalty programs serve an important role and can be a subset of a well-designed influencer program, but are by definition less comprehensive in their approach. Put simply, loyalty programs provide incentives (points, punch cards, miles, status) for frequent product/service use/affiliation, but typically lack comprehensive connection and feedback efforts. A loyalty program can be a good filter for influencer identification, but doesn’t account for the connectedness of the user or their level of activity in influence behaviors. In order to maximize the influence effect, it’s necessary for a brand to commit to a set of bi-directional relationships with influencers.
Given this prerequisite assumption, let’s look a bit further at thanking influencers and engaging and enabling them.
Thanking Your Influencers:
Identification and segmentation of your influencers is just the first step in a three-step process recommended for influencer marketing. Step two is an opportunity for you and your brand to reach out and thank the influentials. As a starting point, “thanking” is about acknowledgement of their passion, contribution, and/or usage of your products/services and is designed to establish communication with the influencer and begin to develop a bi-directional connection between the influencer and the brand.
The following are recommended guidelines and suggestions based on a combination of industry practices:
• Influencers aren’t doing what they do to help your brand; they are doing it to help other users. Thank them for helping other users instead of just for helping your brand.
• Respect privacy prerogatives. Whatever thanks you are providing, they should have the right to opt out. If they opt in, this is a good time to gather contact and sharing rights (share my recognition info with no one, share my contact info with the brand only, ok to share public, etc.).
• Be cautious about rewards and gifts. While modest gifts are great to share, a t-shirt will not build brand affinity and is no substitute for an ongoing, committed connection with the user (more on this in the engage section). More generous gifts may be construed in the wrong way, create a cost burden you can’t sustain, a tax liability for the influencer, and/or public backlash for perception of rewarding positive reviews. In extreme cases, substantial rewards could create an implied co-employment risk with the influencers. Awards and gifts should only be for what influencers have done in the past, with no forward-looking expectations on the part of the brand. It’s better to keep awards simple and relevant to your community objectives.
• Surprises work. Don’t underestimate the power of doing something dramatic and/or unexpected. Creating legendary stories can be very powerful ways to both generate conversation and affinity.
• Similar to surprises, moments of truth about product failures are important. If there is a recall, or you cancel flights - it's how your customer service responses in these moments that create "sticky memories" for you brand. Listening to your influencers and responding aggressively is key. The call to action here: ensure you’ve tuned your listening system to be especially alert to this audience.
• Your best influencers may not always be positive about your product, company and/or services. In fact, your biggest fans may at times be your harshest critics. The fact they are sometimes negative will make them far more credible to their networks.
Engaging Your Influencers:
Now you’ve found them, and you’ve thanked them. It’s time to engage them. Just knowing who your influencers are is a step ahead of most organizations today, but to maximize the value of their role in the network, you need to commit to an engagement model with them. This is the third, and perhaps the most critical, aspect of differentiating influencer programs from other loyalty efforts. Engagement can take a number of different forms depending on your industry, audience, and business objectives. What follows are some suggestions on how to get started with engagement.
• Consider engagement as a balance sheet. The relative benefits to you, the brand, and the influencers needs to be in balance with one another. If the balance is too much in your favor, your influencers will feel used and you’ll ultimately alienate passionate users. If the balance is too much in the favor of your influencers, you’ll lose interest over time, and your program will be a campaign instead of a multi-year, long-term commitment.
• Influencer programs are, by definition, long-term, multi-year commitments designed to build a relationship; they are not marketing campaigns. Campaigns can augment influencer efforts to help find, activate, or engage influencers in particular activities (like a product launch), but influencer programs need to level out the roller coaster of connections provided by campaigns.
• Private access is an excellent way to engage your influencers. If they are passionate about your product or service, you can be reasonably sure they would be passionate about opportunities to connect behind-the-scenes in your company with the people who make the product or service. Private access can also be seen as a form of social currency within the influencer community; it gives them a sense of pride and connection to your brand or company.
• Likewise, influencers generally love to connect to one another. You can provide opportunities for private interaction amongst your influencers.
• Consider both online and offline connection opportunities. Online scales and connects more broadly, but offline creates more powerful and trusting relationships. Similarly, consider different connection modes: Meetings, conferences, online chats, webcast, concalls, etc. No one solution fits all or scales equally.
• Influencers are a great source of product feedback. Ideally, design your influencer marketing program such that you can close the loop back with your influencers on what you’re doing with their feedback and suggestions. Falling short of closing the loop substantially diminishes the value of listening in the first place.
• Transparency. With the possible exception of analysts and partners, this is the audience you should be most transparent with. They can be your early warning system for both good ideas and bad ideas.
• Depending on your program and goals, consider a non-disclosure agreement as part of your process. Bringing influencers closer to your inner circle on longer-range product plans is key to building loyalty and affinity. It’s reasonable, depending on your business, to consider a non-disclosure for some of those private discussions.
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