A brand may claim any number of things. Consumers believe what their friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues have to say about a brand more than all such claims. They would also trust any endorsements by their favorite actors and sportspersons. This is the power of word-of-mouth and how much it is trusted. This concept is the premise on which influencer marketing plans are based. Influencer marketing is on the rise and startups, consumer brands and even B2B businesses are realizing the effectiveness of word-of-mouth. According to Social Media Today, influencer marketing content has eleven times the ROI of traditional marketing.
How does Influencer Marketing work?
The popularity of influencer marketing is primarily derived from the algorithm trusted by social sites that prefer humans over business pages. It’s also due to the innate tendency of human beings who like to socialize with fellow beings, trust them and follow their recommendations. Customers relate more to your product when their favorite celebrity endorses it or an industry expert vouches for it. There are tools aplenty in the market which claim to be good for influencer marketing on social networking sites but it is always wise to hold back and look at the simpler things instead, for a while, before making a hefty investment. Log in and simply browse through, try to find influencers and the people who have influence over you. This is a good place to start. For the next step, investing in tools like social listening platforms can be a smart move. It is a platform that serves the purpose of hunting influencers for you and meets a plethora of other marketing needs.
How to use Social Listening for Influencer Marketing?
Social listening only aids your native search process by organizing the data better. Simply put, you are browsing through relevant social media comments after applying the required filters. So, how do you get started?
Identification
Any social listening tool allows you to set up a search for specific mentions or hashtags. If this hashtag or keyword is related to your area of interest/business/industry, you would find important people from within that community speaking about it. Mapping their influence score and audience reach with the social listening tool tells you about this influencer. Now, based on their influence scores, a social listening tool tracks all the important people talking about the keyword and presents you with the data. Influencer identification becomes easy when using a social listening tool.
Learning more about the Influencers and choosing the Right Fit.
Once you have identified prospective influencers to work with, a social listening tool presents you with a complete analysis of each influencer’s score, community reach, no. of posts, and engagement rate.
Swedish watchmaker, Daniel Wellington, built its social outreach strategy mostly around influencer marketing, since inception. The company approaches micro-influencers to spread brand awareness. The founder believed that several micro-influencers would create more buzz than one mega influencer. Different companies adopt different strategies and social listening tools which are built to serve any purpose. Auris, for example, lets you look for mega or micro-influencers on the same platform. Filters within Auris allows the admin to search for influencers by their influencer scores.
It is always advisable to closely follow an influencer before you choose to go ahead with them. Social listening tools can help you monitor your prospective influencers, they can help you find the right fit, but it is upon you to prove a great collaborator and get the influencer to champion your cause.