How Sophisticated Influencer Engagement Can Transform Marketing

Build a two-way conversation with advocates and experts impacting your industry

Consumers today are unhappy with brand communications, much more so than most brands realize. That’s because those individuals aren’t looking for the intrusive sales pitches that companies all too often provide. If they’re looking for anything from a brand—beyond straightforward answers to product questions when they arise—consumers seek relevant marketing content.

So, how can a brand maintain relevance? Listen to the market, yes, but also keep track of opinion leaders and influencers within that market.

This isn’t simply a way to get those influencers to talk about you. It’s also an effective tactic for staying aware of the newest and best things that are capturing the interest of your prospective customers. Once you know who the top influencers in your market are, you can plug your brand into that broad conversation—not clumsily, but skillfully.

Beyond paid endorsements

Before we start, let’s get one top misconception out of the way: Influencer marketing is not just about paying people to talk about you. Paid influencer advocacy is certainly a viable tactic in some industries, but it’s just a small part of a much bigger market opportunity. True influencer campaigns identify, listen to and nurture the advocates and experts who are most important to your market.

As a marketer at a Fortune 100 company once told me, “the problem with paying people to talk about you is that when you stop paying them, they stop talking about you.”

Brands that are effective with influencer marketing build their programs around two-way conversations with their communities. “True digital transformation requires new ways of thinking and doing marketing, rather than simply enhancing and supporting the traditional methods,” says enterprise marketer Leah Kinthaert, editor of Knect 365’s communities and content. “Social media—more specifically two-way conversations on social media—is a crucial part of it.”

Microsoft, for example, builds campaigns, content and connections with subject matter experts and community leaders online around a wide range of cutting-edge initiatives. The program uses insights from Sprinklr’s influencer marketing platform (Little Bird) to identify and connect with these influencers. According to Microsoft’s marketing communication manager for the CEO office, Aileen McGraw, influencer listening and two-way conversations on social media “help [her] teams speak like living, breathing members of [their] customer’s communities.”

A window to the market

Influencer marketing also needs to go beyond brands reaching out and feeding information to their communities. By listening to the social conversations their influencers are having, brands can learn more about the trends in their markets, shifting behaviors, or even what their competitors are doing. As analyst and business strategist Dion Hinchcliffe once said, “The networked organization of the future recognizes that the lion’s share of value exists outside its walls. It seeks to capture that value and bring it inside.”

The most strategic-minded marketers today are starting their influencer engagement by listening. A bigger opportunity for influencer engagement, though, comes after that: partnering with key influencers to collaboratively explore where your industry is heading and what the prospects are in the future. This is the kind of strategic advantage brands can use to help steer them toward competitive success. Now that’s relevant content.

Will all this result in influencers saying your brand’s name on their social feeds? Probably. But isn’t it time we started looking for much more?

 

Marshall Kirkpatrick is director of influencer marketing and research at Sprinklr. He was CEO of influencer identification and marketing platform Little Bird, which was acquired by Sprinklr in 2016.