When faced with launching a new product or solution, best-in-class marketers turn to influencers. We recently caught up with Philippe Duhot, Brand Content & Digital Manager at Orange France, who shared some strategic insights on the recent launch of the brand’s connected home solution, Homelive.
In charge of the influencer strategy, we also took this opportunity to ask him some questions about the organisation of his team, the integration of influence to the brand’s activities, the KPIs they’ve put in place, and the orchestration of the varied influencer activities.
Q1 – How is the team dedicated to influencer programs organized within Orange France?
My team falls under Digital Communications and constantly collaborates with other key entities, namely:
- Public Relations, which activate types of influencers associated with journalists;
- Client Relations 2.0, which are also in contact with influencers;
- And Performance Web, which focuses on measurement, analytics, and monitoring.
Two people within my team are dedicated to influencer relations:
- One with marketing tech expertise who is in charge of all the tech aspects and also manages the Twitter feed, as it is recognized today as a core centre of influence.
- One who has more of a communications profile and manages relationships with marketing, communications, and social media influencers; and brings a real expertise in terms of event production, program management etc.
Q2 – How is the influencer dimension integrated to the client relationship in an organization as big as Orange?
We are working very closely with the Client Relations department. When we identify influencers who are also clients, we inform the Client Relations team so they can treat them accordingly. It’s not about being treated better than any other clients but more to know whom we are dealing with so that the relationship can be personalized and strong.
We are also increasingly developing programs that get influential clients involved in tests and exclusive previews of new services. In this instance, we aim to treat them with greater care because we know about their substantial broadcast capacity to relay and share information to their network and indeed to slowly get them to become loyal brand advocates.
Q3 – How do you measure the results of this influencer team? Which main KPIs do you track?
We track KPIs at two levels:
- KPIs initiative by initiative and activation by activation. We try to set the same KPIs by activity to be able to compare them: what are the results of an initiative compared to the results of a similar type of initiative? Here, it is about KPIs, such as the number of activated influencers, the response rate of these influencers, the number of publications generated by the activities, and the activity level of the activated influencers. We also have qualitative KPIs such as the quality of the produced content. For example, a tweet or an Instagram picture won’t have the same impact as a long form content piece notably in terms of search ranking. A blog post will boost SEO performance and help to generate visibility above and beyond the influencer or blogger credibility.
- Overall KPIs are longer term KPIs and that we measure quarter per quarter. They help to measure influential bloggers’ share of voice by topic compared to our overall earned media visibility. These KPIs are quite general but they enable us to see whether the work we’re doing with an influencer category on a special topic is showing results, both in terms of volume and tone. Then we can determine if it had an impact on the overall tone of the conversation around Orange on a selected topic, be it on fiber, 4G etc.
Q4 – How do you organize your influencer activity planning around the year?
To organize our activities, we develop plans and schedules by identified category of influencers, of which there are four:
- Statutory influencers, celebrity type and who are influential both online and offline;
- Partner influencers, core to our business and around technology, who we have been developing relationships with for a long time and with whom we have close and strong relations. There’s about 40 in total;
- Influencers specifically relevant to a topic that we activate less often, like the Connected Home ones for Homelive.
- Finally, the influential clients on social that we are trying to approach and activate.
Then, we cross these categories with the different highlights, messages, activities, topics that we need to integrate, and also the type of activities, whether it is an event, a one-to-one interview, an exclusive visit for a small group, and indeed all the PR dimensions.
We are trying to orchestrate all of this into our schedule and it totals about 50 or 60 activation initiatives per year.
Interested in learning more about Orange France’s influencer program? Download our latest case study to discover Orange France’s influencer program – strategy, activation, and results – for the launch of its Connected Home solution, Homelive.