by Rita Baker | Apr 20, 2015 | Marketing
In my last post, I talked about what is influencer marketing and how it works. So now we will look at how to find influencers, the type of relationship to forge with them, the dos and don’ts and the risks of influencer marketing.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to find your influencers is to do a hash tag search with your brand or key words that are highly pertinent to your customer segments. Find the people who use those tags the most often, then find the ones that have the largest following. Look through the most active of their followers and find potential influencers by running the same search again. You can also use various applications (such as Hashtagify) to see what words are most associated with your brand. Find high traffic blogs that pertain to subjects close to your product. Another easy way is to do a quick survey of your customers asking them who they know that would make a good spokesperson for your brand.
Once you identify such potential influencers you need to connect with them. You can start by doing it publicly, by responding to their social media content that pertains to your product, or by approaching them privately.
The best influencer relationships are not commercial but emotional
You need to get to know the influencer and build a relationship with him/her. Once the relationship is on its way you can use a more traditional approach of signing an agreement that specifies what you want them to say, how often, on which social media platform and what they can expect in return. The better results however are not obtained by being directive. Giving your influencer the freedom to express themselves naturally and learn together what works best is a riskier but higher yield approach. Getting to know your influencer first will help reduce this risk. The desired outcome is one where your potential customers will truly believe that your influencer is convinced by what he or she posts and not motivated by a payout. You can also enlist the help of your influencer to start discussions on your products on social media. You can take part in these discussions if appropriate. This tactic will help convey the image of a brand that is in touch with what its customers concerns and needs are.
Dos and don’ts of influencer marketing
- Do measure the results your influencer brings.
- Do take the time to understand your influencers’ community and their values.
- Do make sure your influencer’s overall personal brand fits with your product’s positioning.
- Do use influencer marketing to increase reach, credibility and engagement for your brand.
- Do make certain that your relationship with your influencer is transparent to his/her followers. Not doing so can be detrimental to your influencer’s personal brand and yours by ricochet.
- Do listen to what he/she says as well as the feedback his/her comments generate.
- Do try and help your influencers achieve their own goals.
- Don’t confuse popularity and influence
- Don’t use an influencer to try and fix a negative brand image.
- Don’t contradict your influencers on social media. Manage any disputes behind the scene (and do it quickly).
- Don’t engage influencers that are known rivals simultaneously.
- Don’t prevent your influencer from associating with other (even competing) brands. If done in moderation, it will give him/her more credibility. In real life, very few of us only use one brand of any one product forever. It can also help to differentiate your product from your competitors. Your influencer may explain he/she uses your product for A and B reasons and your competitors’ for X and Y reasons.
Risks and responsibilities associated with influencer marketing
Influencer marketing can be a powerful and lucrative tool in your arsenal. It does have a higher risk factor than advertising and requires constant supervision.
It is important to understand that influencer marketing is a form of co-branding. If the brand of your influencer goes south, so will yours for a while.
Your influencers are most likely not marketers or professional communicators. They will inadvertently goof up once in a while. It comes with the package. Hence you need to monitor closely all that they will say about your brand and manage any issues that may arise quickly. You also need to monitor how your influencers’ brands evolve to ensure a continuous fit with yours.
Influencer marketing is taking away some of the advertising revenues social media platforms live on. If the cut goes too deep, Twitter, Facebook and company may very well find creative ways to put a damper on this practice.
Influencer marketing is a flexible multi-purpose tool
You don’t need to be a large known brand to use influencer marketing. If you are just starting up, you can associate your brand with local celebrities that will most likely be more than happy with a product payout.
Influencer marketing is not only useful to build your brand, it can also be used to open new distribution channels, identify new customer segments and for crowd funding campaigns.
What other uses can you think of for influencer marketing?
by Rita Baker | Apr 14, 2015 | Marketing
Influencer marketing is a practice where you focus your marketing efforts on key individuals that can influence your buyers into purchasing your products or services. Influencer marketing can be used both in B2B and B2C environments. Influencer marketing can focus on marketing to, through and/or with influencers. Influencer marketing does not replace traditional marketing, it complements it.
Origins of influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has its roots in relationship and peer to peer marketing theory. It is also strongly influenced by psychological theories such as choice making and confirmation bias. The mechanics of it are partly explained in Malcolm Gladwells’s Tipping Point.
Influencer marketing is not new. Actually, is it possibly, in the form of word of mouth marketing, the oldest marketing tactic there is. Advertising while using a celebrity to promote products or services is also a form of influencer marketing.
Both of these tactics have serious shortcomings. Word of mouth, despite being one of the most powerful types of influencer marketing lacks in scalability. As for advertising with celebrities, it lacks the two-way communication potential which increases the effectiveness of this type of marketing.
Enters the social media platforms, they enable direct, two-way communication on a very large scale. Thus making influencer marketing a potentially powerful tool to increase your conversion rates and sell your products or services to large numbers of customers.
What makes an influencer?
According to Kyle Wong, CEO of Pixlee and influencer marketing authority, you can measure influence with this equation:
Influence = Audience Reach (# of followers) x Brand Affinity (expertise and credibility) x Strength of Relationship with Followers
The formula itself is sound but the variables should not be separated from their ‘’ecosystem’’ to be of any use.
The number of followers of an influencer is important but not as much as the quality of their followers in regards to your product or service. Only the followers that will relate to your brand should be counted. An example would be if you are trying to sell luxury sporting goods and your influencer is an extreme sport athlete. Said athlete is not only known for her sport but also for her dabbles in indie music and implication in inner-city shelters for battered women. She may very well have over 200 000 followers, excellent expertise, credibility and have a very strong relationship with her followers but she may not prove to be much of an influencer on your potential customers. First, only a fraction of the followers are in it for the extreme sport aspect and may have value to the luxury sporting goods company. Second, her relationship may be stronger with the people who follow her for her activities other than extreme sport. Not to mention that her entire image is less about luxury than about non consumerism and social conscience. Hence her influence regarding your brand may be lost on the majority of her followers.
In general, influencers are popular, activists, looked up to, who embody the prevalent values of your targeted customer segments, are knowledgeable about products/services similar to yours and are inspiring.
Inner workings of influencer marketing
Influencer marketing works best when:
A) Your buyers feel they don’t have all the necessary information in order to make a purchase decision, and
B) Stakes are high
In the first case it can either be that the product/service is so complex or has so many facets to know about that the purchaser can’t or doesn’t feel like going through all the information before making a decision. This is often the case in the B2B environment. Purchasers cannot get hold of sufficient information to make a decision and will rely on a (or many) trusted third party to make their decision. In the B2C environment, it can be when there are so many competing products that the buyer doesn’t have the time or inclination to compare them all.
Influencer marketing is also very effective when the product or service purchase is highly significant to the purchaser. This is often the case in B2B environment or when the purchase price represents a high percentage of the buyer’s income. In such cases, part of the burden of making an important decision will be differed to the referencer.
In a future post we will look at influencer marketing tactics, its dos and don’ts and potential limitations.
by Rita Baker | Apr 1, 2015 | Marketing
We now live in a world that is in part, at least, virtual. Crossovers from the virtual to the real world are done constantly. Many of the people we meet in our daily lives we have ‘’met’’ before thru their LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, webzine articles, tweets or other web presence. Some people we meet in social settings we will google, when we have a chance, to learn more about.
In fact, if you are an entrepreneur and you are absent from the web, most potential business partners (suppliers, customers, investors, employees, etc.) will see this as being suspicious or at the very least be surprised not to find you there.
The image we project on the web is now a part of how people see us. If you are an entrepreneur it can either hinder or help your business endeavors. The good news is, the outcome is pretty much up to you.
Building your personal brand
Marketing yourself on the web is very similar to building and managing a brand. You need to put some thought into the brand Me inc. brand. Ensure it reflects the product (you) well, fits with what your customers are expecting and the image you want to project. The idea is not to create a fictitious character but to work with what you have and shine the light on your best assets.
Produce, or even better, give others the opportunity to produce content voluntarily about you that sticks with your brand objectives. Don’t be shy to promote your activities and accomplishments.
Monitoring the content about yourself on the web, to ensure it does reflect the image you wish to project, is also part of taking care of your image.
The tools
The basics of business web presence at this time are a bio on your corporate website or at the very least a full and accessible LinkedIn profile. There a dozens of other tools also available. The most effective ones are usually the content that you appear in that has been posted voluntarily by others. Just like any brand, a basic presence won’t get you far. You need to invest time and effort to stand out from the rest of the pack. The table below gives you an idea of the tools available and for what purpose you can use them.
|
Visibility/ Reassurance |
Getting to know you |
Thought leadership |
| Bio on corporate site |
x |
|
|
| LinkedIn Profile |
x
|
|
|
| Blog posts |
x
|
|
x |
| Tweets |
x
|
x
|
x |
| Re-tweets of your tweets |
x |
|
x |
| Videos |
x |
x |
x |
| Slideshare content |
x |
x |
x |
| Books |
x |
x |
x |
| Articles on you |
x |
x |
x |
| Tagged pictures of you |
x |
x |
|
Visibility transfer
As an entrepreneur investing in your own personal brand will automatically benefit your company(ies) as long as you make sure most of your content ties back to your corporate site. Rich web content on you will ensure good SEO positioning as many people who meet you in networking situations, may remember your name but not that of your company, will find you more easily to do business with you or refer you.
Transparency
It’s becoming more and more of a buzz word in marketing circle. Consumers are increasingly preoccupied with who they buy from not just what company they buy from. Case and point would be the actions of one of Uber’s co-founders behavior that got a lot of press on the web a few months ago. It seriously affected Uber’s overall image and sales were affected.
We have all been fed so much advertising content that we are getting pretty good at discerning the icing from the cake. Given we generally don’t trust the icing, we want a look at how the cake is made. Getting to know the owners of a company, we are thinking of dealing with, is the best way to do this. Making your Me inc. web content easily available through your corporate web site is simply making it easy for your potential business partners to see if they like the cake.
Portability
The strongest argument for investing in the Me inc. brand is portability. Despite all our best efforts sometimes our businesses don’t make it. For entrepreneurs, this is usually a temporary setback until the next business venture. When the time comes to raise capital, find partners and get your new business on the map, the collateral you bring with a strong Me inc. brand will prove invaluable.
There are other benefits to having a strong personal brand. Hopefully these few arguments have convinced you to work on yours.
I challenge you to google your name. What do you see? Are you in the top pages? Is the top content a good reflection of the image you want to project? Is the content linking back to your corporate site?
If so, bravo! If not, you may want to invest some time and resources in what may be your most profitable marketing investment to date.
p.s. I just took the challenge myself. Wow, I have to get to work on my own Me inc.
by Rita Baker | Jan 26, 2015 | Marketing
La page d’atterrissage (landing page) s’utilise lors de campagnes web. Il peut s’agir d’une page de votre site web mais souvent les circonstances demandent une page dédiée.
Dans ce billet je m’attarderai sur les pages d’atterrissage qui ne font pas partie intégrante de votre site web. Généralement, une entreprise utilise ce type de page lors d’événements dits uniques tels des concours ou des ventes qui ne touchent qu’une portion de l’offre de l’entreprise.
Puisqu’il est relativement facile et peu coûteux de faire des tests comparatifs (A/B Testing) sur les pages d’atterrissage on retrouve de plus en plus de données sur les éléments qui en augmente l’efficacité.
Voici trois bases qui vous aideront à améliorer le rendement de vos pages d’atterrissage.
Une proposition de valeur claire
Les chances sont que votre visiteur n’accordera pas plus de 7 secondes à la lecture du contenu de votre page d’atterrissage. Vous n’aurez que très peu de temps pour faire passer votre message.
Il est donc essentiel que votre texte soit concis, se lise facilement (tant au niveau des mots que de la police de caractère) et soit placé dans l’écran d’accueil. L’écran d’accueil étant l’espace sur l’appareil utilisé par le visiteur qui apparait dès l’ouverture de la page sans navigation aucune.
Des images qui parlent
Une page web dénudée d’images est non seulement moins agréable à regarder mais diminue aussi le temps passé sur une page par les visiteurs. L’utilisation d’images sur une page d’atterrissage sert non seulement à l’agrémenter mais aussi à accélérer la compréhension du message. Puisque vous n’avez que très peu de temps pour convaincre vos visiteurs, les images de votre page d’atterrissage doivent supporter votre argumentation et avoir comme objectif principal de faire passer votre message. Il faut donc choisir une image qui, même sans contexte, communique votre message.
Si vous utilisez une vidéo, assurez-vous que l’écran d’arrêt montre une image qui supporte votre message puisqu’une partie de vos visiteurs ne regarderont jamais la vidéo.
Il est préférable de ne pas faire jouer la vidéo automatiquement sur votre page d’atterrissage. Une proportion importante des usagers de téléphones mobiles qui ne sont pas en connexion wifi ferment ces pages sans les regarder.
Un message simple et concentré
Encore ici on comprend que le peu de temps dont on dispose pour faire passer notre message fait en sorte qu’il doit être très simple. Si votre message est plus complexe, tentez soit de le simplifiez ou d’utilisez un outil promotionnel qui sera plus approprié. Un message simple se résume souvent en un verbe d’action tel : regarder, acheter, voter, téléphoner, télécharger, visiter.
Les pages d’atterrissage qui ont le plus haut taux de succès concentrent l’attention des visiteurs sur le message. Il faut donc éviter toute distraction tel les menus de navigation, d’autres publicités (oui, j’ai vu des page d’atterrissage avec des espaces publicitaires) ou des éléments de style qui détractent l’attention du texte et des images.
Ces trois éléments font partie des bases à respecter lorsque vous créez une page d’atterrissage. Il est important de se souvenir par contre que la création de page d’atterrissage est une science encore inexacte. Les tests A/B démontrent fréquemment que des éléments aussi anodins que la couleur d’un icône ou l’emplacement d’une image sur la page peuvent augmenter l’efficacité d’une page d’atterrissage de façon dramatique.
Le succès d’une page d’atterrissage est fonction non seulement de son contenu mais également de votre clientèle cible. C’est pourquoi il n’y a pas un modèle unique de page d’atterrissage performante. Je vous encourage donc à créez vos pages d’atterrissage en respectant les bases énoncées dans ce billet mais aussi en testant différents modèles afin de voir lequel vous permet de mieux atteindre vos objectifs.
by Rita Baker | Jan 20, 2015 | Marketing
In many companies the marketing and sales departments are at odds. They often fight for resources and power.
Most often they are two separate entities reporting to the CEO. Sometimes marketing reports to sales and on some occasions, mostly in smaller companies, it’s the other way around.
Which is right? If you are starting your company should you set up a sales department or a marketing department first?
The answer lies in the product or service you are selling as well as in the market you wish to address.
When sales should trump marketing
If your product or service is highly complex and its benefits cannot be explained quickly then you need to have someone who can find the right way to do this and adapt the explanation to the customer in front of him or her. This is the case most often for industrial products. The product itself can be simple but it may come in a multitude of variations according to specific needs. An example would be windows. Everyone knows what a window is but when you start looking into it you will find they come in various amounts of layers, in hundreds of types of glass, with various types of gas in between layers, with multiple types of mountings, etc.
Another situation where sales should trump marketing is in the case where your target market has complex needs. Most complex needs, but definitely not all, can be traced back to emotional rather than logical responses. An example would be if your product or service is fulfilling a status need. If your customers need to feel important, they will require one on one contact and made to feel special.
In both these cases a marketing approach, as good as it may be, will not suffice to convince the buyer. He or she needs to ask multiple questions and make sure that his or her needs are satisfied with the right product and treatment.
This doesn’t mean of course that marketing is not necessary. Every company needs to understand their product, pricing, promotion, distribution, market knowledge and customer needs. It simply means that marketing should be under the responsibility of the sales department.
It is important not to confuse sales representatives with clerks or agents. The representatives’ job is to find customers, convince them and close the sale. Clerks and agents such as the ones in stores or technical agents that help understand complex technological customer needs are there to facilitate a sale not make it.
When marketing should trump sales
I imaging you get the gist of my argumentation by now. If complex products and needs make sales trump marketing then simpler products and needs make marketing trump sales.
If your company sells a widget or only a few variations of this widget, even if it’s in a B2B context, you don’t really need a sales team. You can make use of a call center with agents, if revenues justify the costs, but you don’t need representatives on the road. Sales agents become a marketing tool just as a web campaign or direct mail campaign would. Usually a marketer will find the customers and write the script that will be used by the sales agents to convince and close the sale. Call centers operate under the responsibility of the marketing department.
Sales representatives are significantly more costly, on a percentage of sales revenue basis, than marketers. Hence they should only be used when marketing alone is insufficient to convince your customers to purchase your product or service.
This is one of the most important staffing choices you will be making in your company in terms of sales revenue. Make sure it’s the right one.
by Rita Baker | Jan 13, 2015 | Marketing
It’s the beginning of the year. You are most likely hard at work planning your marketing for the next few months. Trying to see where you will be allocating your budgets. You are now convinced, probably because you read it over a hundred times in the last few years, that digital marketing needs to be an important part of your plan.
While planning, you should be aware of the following three hurdles that, if not cleared properly, will undoubtedly impede the returns you are hoping to get from your investments in digital marketing.
Lack of knowledge
Let’s face it. Digital marketing is evolving so fast in the last few years that it’s almost impossible to keep up with all the new techniques, tools and applications out there. Raise your hand if you feel you know all that you need to know about web analytics, programmatic, social media platforms, mobile advertising, email promotion and all the rest of the digital marketing world? My hand is not up and I spend a large chunk of my time reading on these topics and helping my customers plan for and implement them. At this time and point, keeping up with what’s new seems like a race to a finish line that keeps being pushed further every time you look up.
Marketing is no longer a one person job, even in the smallest of companies. Every resource in the company needs to keep up with market information and contribute to the planning. That still doesn’t mean that you will have the digital marketing expertise internally to execute your plan. It will however allow you to have a better idea of the tactics that you can include in your plan.
It also means that it would be wise to accept that your plan will be a very short term one. Chances are a new application or tool will come out in the next month or so that will give you better returns than what is currently available and you will need to adjust your plan. It could also be that Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or another social platform retires or changes a feature that you were banking on.
Lack of strategy
Lack of strategy for your digital marketing or any other business management aspect is the best recipe to shoot yourself in the foot eventually. You can have the most beautiful website or presence on the web but if it’s not tied into a good strategy it’s akin to buying the most beautiful and powerful car on the lot and having no driver. It won’t get you very far.
Sparse resources combined to the massive amount of knowledge to acquire in digital marketing make it more efficient to narrow down which of the tools you want to focus on to start with.
Your strategy will enable you to identify goals and market segments you will need to prioritise. This information will point the way to the right digital marketing tools to achieve your goals. As an example if you are a small B to B software firm and your marketing strategy identifies opening a new niche market in a restrained geographic area, investing in an Adword campaign although useful, may not be where you will get your best returns. Investing in an email marketing application may however be where you need to focus. Your resources time will therefore be better spent finding and learning an email application rather than learning how to run an Adword campaign in the first part of the year.
Dark traffic and dark social
This hurdle is at a higher level. This one will impact even the most advanced companies using digital marketing tools.
Dark traffic and dark social, a subset of dark traffic, refer to all the traffic that enters your website or mobile application that analytic applications cannot identify. It usually is lumped up in the Direct channel category in Google Analytics. It can come from anonymous browsing (not all but some), email links or simply from mobile applications (mostly Facebook and Reddit) or websites that don’t collect or transmit information on their users or visitors source.
How big of an issue is it you ask? Well according to Radium One (Dec. 2014) study, it represents 59% of all digitally shared content in North America and an average of 69% worldwide. That is a pretty big chunk. (1)
In practice what it means is in order to get decent returns from many of the marketing digital tools that are based on segmenting analytics data (retargeting for one) you will need a significant amount of visible traffic to compensate for the dark one.
As with any good runner these hurdles should not discourage you from running the race. Hopefully knowing about them and planning accordingly will help you turn in a better time.
(1) Facebook’s mobile app is responsible for the largest part of this dark social traffic. Once analytics applications find a way to count this traffic the importance of dark social will go down dramatically. Increase in popularity of fully anonymous browsers such as Thor may however re-ignite the trend upwards.
