I joined the EMEA Traackr team in June last year to support the marketing (or “maarkting,” as our team calls it) efforts in Europe, with an initial focus on UK, France and the Nordics.
A few years ago I managed an innovator community set up by the spirit brand Courvoisier that gathered up to 1,000 individuals. As a marketer, I faced the same challenges as our customers at Traackr. For example, our main issues in the Courvoisier project were:
- Innovator identification and recruitment
- Documenting all community activities with members
- Measuring the impact of the activities and the engagement within the community
- Scaling the program globally
It is the challenges listed above that modern marketers are facing on a daily basis. This is why I turned to influencer marketing to face and conquer these challenges within my role at Traackr.
What is Influencer Marketing?
In this highly social web, information travels like waves. These waves are created by people who generate content and build followings. A subset of these people create stronger waves than others. These wavemakers drive their audiences to believe, buy and care. So, what makes someone a wavemaker? Influence.
Influence simply means you are recognized as a thought leader or expert on a topic. People want to listen to you and relay your opinions and ideas when it comes to that topic. Influence is inherently authentic, contextual and, in many cases, geographical. For the marketer, influencers are doubly important: 1. They serve as a proxy to the larger, unruly web, and help focus limited time and resources on the most powerful channels and conversations. 2, They are the most effective partners for sharing your messages and driving business your way.
Influencer marketing is the process of identifying, researching, engaging and supporting those influencers – the people who create the conversations impacting your brand, products or services. At the core of Integrated Marketing Communications, influencer marketing aligns PR, marketing, sales and product around a common strategy. Here is a walk through of how I use Traackr for my influencer marketing efforts.
My Traackr Maarkting Example
My influencer lists were segmented by influencer marketing campaigns for EMEA locations: “French Influencers,” “French Clients & Partners” and “French Prospects”; the latter two are shared with my sales and account management colleagues so they can collaborate, track clients’ online activities and activate social selling. Tags were used to identify events, industries and expertise of each influencer.
Influencer Search & Discovery
To identify more influencers that may be important to the success of my campaigns, I identified keywords that are relevant to the conversations in which my target audience are active participants. I used keywords around the conversation of marketing and influencer marketing in my case: Influencer Marketing, Influence, Digital PR, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Social Selling, Employee Advocacy etc.
The influencer search results are ranked in terms of three metrics:
- REACH – This is a measure of total audience size. Things like blog visitors, Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers, etc. go into scoring.
- RESONANCE – This is a measure of how much activity someone creates when they publish and the level of interaction with this person’s content. Things like Twitter retweets, linkbacks, comments etc. are factors of someone’s Resonance.
- RELEVANCE – This is a measure of how relevant someone is to a topic and how much they talk about it. Relevance is a factor of how often someone uses the keywords that drove the search; the timing of the keyword usage (more recent posts are weighted more heavily); the diversity of the keywords used by an influencer; and the placement of keywords (title vs. body).
With the ranked list I am able to review the influencers online footprint (including blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram etc.) and published content, so each influencer can quickly be dismissed or added into an ongoing influencer marketing campaign.
I also may choose to filter my search by location, language, gender, and a specific social platform to ensure the right influencer mix for my campaign.
Listening and Content Curation
Logging into Traackr is the first thing I do every morning. I check the trending content amongst my influencers within a campaign – what pieces are the most engaging, and determine which conversations I should prioritize to bring value to the community and build relationships with my influencers. This feature is really key, as it helps curate our content stream, and assist with the long term content strategy.
Influencer Management Tool
On each influencer’s profile tab, I am able to view the influencers interactions within the community, the influencers content stream across all social platforms, and their online footprint. This allows me to determine the best channel of communication to build an ongoing relationship with the influencer.
It is important that I collaborate with my marketing team members, as multiple influencer relationships are being nurtured across the organization. I am able to quickly identify other campaigns they are involved in and view all logged conversations across the team. In this way, the platform acts as a marketing CRM, allowing me to strategize with the team on which influencers would be most impactful for each of the active campaigns.
Extended Network
The Influencer Network Map highlights who are currently the most engaging influencers within my community – so, the very key influencers I should engage with to reach others. However, the tool also continually recommends new and upcoming influencers that should be considered for the project – keeping activities and influencers fresh and relevant.
In addition, the Network Map identifies the people that an influencer influences, and who he/she is mostly influenced by. Trying to engage with a very key influencer who has a huge amount of followers can be a bit of mission, as that individual may be highly solicited. Looking at his/her “influenced by” map can reveal some less influent people that may be easier to engage with, and indirectly help reach.
Analytics
The Analytics tab illustrates the impact generated by the activities and interactions that have occurred with the campaign’s influencers. For example, I monitor Traackr mentions over time to ensure my campaigns are successfully building new relationships and earning more mentions. I can dig into the engagement around each mention, see my most activated influencers, and an approximate number of impressions.
While the marketing field is still a while away from the all-in-one marketing technology solution, Traackr has been a necessary platform in our marketing technology mix within the Maarkting team. Traackr allows marketing teams to scale their influencer marketing by creating one succinct place for you to discover, manage, listen, engage and measure results of your influencer program.