43% of marketers are currently experimenting with influencer marketing.
With this amount of experimentation come trends, best practices, and emerging thought leaders. During conference season, these thought leaders gather to exchange ideas in hopes to inspire the practice of influencer marketing.
Drawing over 19,000 marketing and sales professionals to Boston each year, Inbound inspires growth and transformation in the industry. This year's Inbound 2017 speakers span from Mario Batali to Michelle Obama. And this year, the roster includes a leader near and dear to Traackr, our co-founder and CEO, Pierre-Loic Assayag.
While we know that 3% of the people online generate 90% of the conversation, what those conversations cover can be very telling. To gain insight into the Inbound community, I looked to the agency, agency professional, marketing, ecommerce, and executive audience speakers at #INBOUND17 in Traackr to analyze leading the charge in influencer marketing.
The 17 Influencers Who Understand Influencer Marketing
By using the Traackr platform, I can rank this list of Inbound speakers by the three R's of influence: Reach, Resonance, and Relevance. (You can see a deep dive into the three R’s here.)
In this case, I used influencer marketing related terms to set the relevance keywords. Based on Traackr's data, which takes into account how many times these keywords were mentioned, here are the top 17 speakers who lead influencer marketing conversations...
- Peggy Fitzpatrick
- Brian Solis
- Tyler Anderson
- Chris Smith
- Mari Smith
- Deb Calvert
- Rand Fishkin
- Sharon Toerek
- Erik Huberman
- Salma Jafri
- Pierre-Loic Assayag
- Bob Ruffolo
- Viveka Von Rosen
- Wajahat Ali
- Kelly Hoey
- Dan Tyre
- Sherron Washington
Key Takeaways from #INBOUND17 Speaker’s Conversations
Most Engaging Marketing Thought Leaders
Traackr’s heatmap indicates which influencers mention the conversation topics most relevant to influencer marketing. The heatmap allows me to rank the influencers on total average engagement per post. Below you can see the top five most engaging influencers, including which influencer generates the most engagement on specific topics. For example, we can see that on average Rand Fishkin is the most engaging influencer on content marketing and Mari Smith is the most engaging influencer on influencer marketing.
Most Engaging Influencers on Influencer Marketing
In order of most total engagements with posts mentioning influencer keywords, Chris Smith leads the influencer marketing pack followed by Mari Smith, Peggy Fitzpatrick, Rand Fishkin, and Brian Solis. Glancing at the information below, you can quickly see the total audience size of each influencer, the total number of influencer marketing mentions over the past 90 days, total number engagements with those posts, average engagement per post as well as total video views. These numbers can help inform marketers which influencers they might want to work with, understand who is meaningfully engaging their audience, and quickly vet influencer content.
Most Engaging Post on Influencer Marketing
If we look at all posts that mention influencer marketing, the post with the most overall engagement comes from Chris Smith. Chris has mentioned influencer marketing 12 times over the last 90 days garnering 1,232 total engagements on those posts. The engaging post links to an episode of his podcast, Calls with Chris, where he interviews Jay Baer on The Importance of Influencer Marketing.
How Influencers Help Brands Thrive in the Trust Economy
Consumer trust is extremely valuable yet, it is also the most difficult for brands to gain. Consumers have a voice in the market and some voices are more significant in how they influence others. As part of the overall marketing process, entering into a relationship with these influencers can impact a brand's reputation and revenue.
If you are attending #INBOUND17 you’re invited to join to Pierre-Loic Assyag’s session to learn how to gain consumer trust by establishing a long-term influencer relations strategy. Traackr’s CEO will be speaking on Wednesday, September 27th at 11:45am. If you are attending, tweet us and let us know. We hope to see you in Boston!