Not all customers are born equal. Don’t get us wrong, every single customer is important and deserves a great experience but some will have the power to make or break you business and therefore they deserve more of your limited time and resources.
If you want customers knocking at your door then the most powerful and cost effective means of doing so is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is the concept of directly sourcing and targeting the most influential people or companies within your market, these could be normal social media users with large and highly engaged followers or it could be a popular blogger or journalist.
The concept isn’t new; in fact it is probably the oldest form of marketing there is, good old “word of mouth”. The only thing that’s changed is that is has been digitalised. So, whereas once upon a time “word of mouth” marketing was restricted to the off-line world, now it’s being accelerated and inflated by the rise of social media.
All of us know have the ability to connect with hundreds if not thousands of people online that we would likely never have known if it wasn’t for social channels. These social channels have also given us a voice that can reach millions. When you combine these factors together you realise that there are influencers all around us, for businesses tapping into this network will be the next charge.
So, how do businesses take advantage of individual examples of social influence? Well, they source them out, they develop relationships with them over time and they then hope to turn these people or companies into their brand ambassadors. The goal is that once a business has created a pocket of brand ambassadors that they will then start to benefit from having their products and services shared, endorsed and promoted organically by these ambassadors. This is a fantastic result for any business. It becomes even more significant if these ambassadors have a large and engaged band of followers who trust what they say.
However, businesses might rightly ask apart from some PR and improved brand awareness “what else is in it for me?”. For businesses that get this right they have the ability to foster and develop genuine improvements in their customer: engagement, management and value metrics. After all, they have created a loyal following of customers and turned some of them into their very own marketers. This means more referrals, more leads, lower cost of acquisition, less churn and better brand positioning. If you are still in any doubt of the effectiveness of online referrals a recent study concluded consumers were 300% more likely to make purchasing decisions based on a recommendation (personal or not) than they are with a brand advert.
Sociolus can help you to identify who the influencers are for your market. Our technology allows businesses to track who is engaging with their brand or their market and then rank them by influence. We also provide you with a campaign tool to make the next step and actually start to develop the relationships with these people.
For more information or to discuss our analytics proposition please contact team@sociolus.com or take advantage of our free trial at www.sociolus.com