As we have entered into the digital age, influencer marketing is proving to be more efficient. This is mainly because when buying a brand, people tend to trust the recommendation of a third party. When that third party is a well-known celebrity, suddenly his words turn into an obligation for buyers, making them rush to the suggested brand’s stores. But what role does social media listening play in this game, and how can it affect influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing
Research conducted by Sony states “People are more than five times as likely to buy based on a recommendation from a social influencer when compared to traditional forms of marketing.“
Hence, influencer marketing intends to sponsor famous social media stars to use branded products and represent the sponsoring company by becoming their ambassador, basically like paying a celebrity to support your brand on their respective social media platform.
Social listening and its value
Social listening works by applying particular tools (paid and free) to check keywords across social media and the web in general to collect important mentions or exchanges of an audience.
Now, coming to its benefits and values, let me tell you that while it is a great way to catch up on conversations and mentions relating to your brand, it offers way more than mere keyboard searches with professional social media tools. There are features like Boolean search to help you gather as much social intelligence as you like, mind-blowing features to create complex searches with multiple keywords, and lots more!
Ways you can use social listening in influencer marketing.
Social listening to find the right influencer
While influencer marketing sounds like some golden egg-laying hen, it’s actually far more complex and challenging than that. The number one issue here is to find the right influencer, who won’t only be a person with a decent following but will also relate with your brand and at the same time keep your audience engaged. They also need to be popular among your demographic audience, or they won’t make any difference.
And no matter what industry you’re in, there is sure to be much competition among the influencers themselves for business. Everyone is working hard to get noticed. And if employing the right influencer can make or break the influencer marketing campaign. Picking wrong and misbehaved ones can lead to problems worse than failure that could leave your brand’s image at stake.
There are even fraud and audience factors to consider. Some influencers attempt to increase their apparent value on the market using deceptive ways, and joining your brand’s name with them could result in real PR horrors.
So as mentioned above, choosing the right influencer is challenging and very difficult. Thanks to social listening, though, you can easily accomplish this tricky task. By utilizing this technology, you can easily lead searches and background checks to find influential people with brand affinity and PR knowledge. Also, it will only take you minutes to do it all. A real problem solver, isn’t it?
Strategy to remember!
After conducting your research, go on and make a list of relevant influencers and begin short-listing them based on the following criteria.
- Is this influencer interested in working with your brand? Will your brand stay relevant with its audience?
- Do they hold a good and useful following? Some micro-influencers with a small audience can prove to be more effective. They are like retail stores of recommendations-that is they are like experts who are approached when their audience needs professional advice on a particular product.
- What is their impact on people? Can they persuade their viewers to take a particular decision?
Once short-listed, you will find yourself getting nearer and nearer to selecting a benefitting ambassador.
Working with Influencers
After short-listing, ranking, and choosing from your candidates, now comes the next step, contacting them and beginning your work-related relationship. As your influencers begin their silent work and bring more and more sales to your market, you must play your part and be thankful. This will strengthen your relationship and motivate your ambassadors to stay loyal to your brand.
So acknowledge them and let them know of your admiration towards their hard work and that you are rooting for them in this. This will persuade them to do more for you.
So when that happens, please encourage them to talk more about your brand. Remember to not be too pushy in this and always approach this in a friendly manner.
Friendly ways to get influencers to talk more about your brand:
- When releasing a new product, contact them and ask them for their opinions. This will eventually lead them to post their thoughts on their social media account.
- Show them favors in the form of discounts and gifts. This will give them an incentive and provide them with the feeling of being repaid for their efforts.
- Appreciate all sorts of content and don’t stay limited to blog posts. If your influencer has a good following, anything from a Youtube video to a Facebook post can be beneficial.
- Meet them in person and discuss their significance to your brand to implant a sense of loyalty in them. They will then pour their hearts into your content and promote your brand even more.
Repaying them
This final step includes presenting the brand ambassadors with the incentive they deserve. Unless you are paying them financially, they naturally aren’t doing all they can and putting aside their business aspect; they as a human would like receiving some token of appreciation now and then. It will boost their efficiency, making them more useful to your cause.
When it comes to giving, there are various ways of repaying influencers, but they mostly depend on their productivity, the task assigned to them, and their preference.
Primarily, there are three ways to compensate your influencers:
- Financially: You can repay them financially, but it depends on you and your user’s discretion. This approach is the most common one when compensating freelancers.
- Doing giveaways or providing discounts: When removing money from the table, the next most common and hearty compensation is to give valuable deals and giveaways. An influencer who appreciates this will most likely talk about you because of it.
- Morally: If your influencer is genuinely not interested in money and gifts, the next appropriate and morally encompassing way to repay them is by sharing their content on your network and helping them out with their content production.
In conclusion:
To conclude the above-given statements, using social media listening to search who is influencing your target audience is an investment as significant as nothing else in this digital age. The profit that comes from partnering with these brand advocates is absolutely unmatched by the usual marketing methods.
So even though finding these gems and building long-term relationships with them is tough, their importance is like sowing seeds that will not only bloom flowers in time but bear deliciously sweet fruits to devour.
