How toUse Social Data to Jump Start

Your Influencer Program

2How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

IntroductionAh, influencer marketing—the buzz words on every marketer’s lips. You’ve read blog posts about putting together an influencer program. You’ve seen people tweeting about influencer marketing, and have started following those people, and have even retweeted some of their influencer-related content. But you’re still not sure how to get started, how to measure success, or which resources you’ll need for this endeavor. Is making an investment in influencer marketing worth it? What does an influencer program look like for your brand specifically? Here’s the bad news: we can’t answer these questions for you. Here’s the good news: your social data can. In this guide, we’ll explain how you can use social data to easily identify your influencers, plan your influencer campaign, make edits to that campaign as you go along, and measure your campaign’s efficacy so you can do better on the next go-round. Let’s get started.

3How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Step 1: Identify Your Influencers When I tell my group of friends that they should download an album, watch a new TV show, or read a new comic book, they generally listen.

But if I were to tell them which sports car to buy, they might laugh in my face. I hardly ever drive, I don’t care about cars, and I think spending an obscene amount of money on a car is dumb. So when they want to buy a car, whom do they turn to for advice?

We all have a circle of influence, but we may only be influential about certain topics. The same is true when it comes to social media, and identifying the people who hold esteem in specific areas can be a challenging task.

Influence boils down to three key factors:

1. Reach: How much reach does the influencer have? What kind of awareness or conversion percentage lift will this influencer be able to offer your brand?

2. Resonance: How engaged is the influencer’s audience? What do the interactions with their posts look like? Are they laudatory, amplifying, action-oriented, or a mix of all three?

LAUDATORY AMPLIFICATION

ACTION-ORIENTED

4How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

3. Relevance: Is this influencer relevant your audience? Does this influencer’s hashtags, common topics, and persona match up to your audience’s? If so, where does that overlap occur? For instance, just because you’re selling upscale women’s apparel doesn’t mean that you can’t leverage a fitness influencer, or a musician, or a travel blogger—as long as the social data tells you that these influencers’ audiences could become your followers and customers.

You can use social data to identify your influencers quickly, easily, and on an ongoing basis.

First, find the influential folks who are already engaging with your content and talking about your brand.

Look at your most engaged and most followed users:

For instance, Simply Measured’s Twitter Account Report surfaces the users who’ve engaged with your brand the most regularly, and users who’ve engaged with your brand that have the most followers.

If you want to focus your search around your brand or product hashtags, you can do that, as well.

5How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Look at your most active posters:

In this Instagram Hashtag report, you can quickly see the users who are posting the most often with your hashtag, the most-followed users, and those who are generating the most engagement with their posts that use your hashtag. This is a great opportunity to identify folks that are already your brand influencers.

You should also be “getting outside the building.” Validate assumptions by listening to actual humans. This is good advice for anyone looking to identify influencers on social media.

Don’t just look for the folks who are tagging your brand in every post and already engaging with all of your content (although, as I mentioned above, you may find some valid opportunities there as well). Look for folks who are driving value in conversations that are relevant to your brand, but not ones that necessarily involve your brand.

Dig into topics and categories:

6How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

While engagement on your social posts is a good sign of brand health, what you really want to know is how your content is increasing awareness and leading your audience one step closer to becoming your customer.

With Simply Measured’s Social Listening, discover the most influential and engaged people discussing any topic of your choosing.

Filter down to the most relevant people:

Drill down to the specific themes and demographic profiles that will be the most relevant to your audience. This will help you get the clearest picture of the influencers you want to work with.

Finally, look at the influencers your competitors are using, which you can easily do with the Simply Measured Social Analytics dashboard. One of the biggest benefits of social media is that there is a ton of public data. Who’s driving value for other brands that market to customers like yours? Which users are generating engagement that you can pivot to your own brand? Who is respected in this conversation, and how can you leverage influencers similar to the ones your competitors are?

7How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Step 2: Plan Your Influencer Campaign There are three ways you can use social data to plan your influencer campaign. We use the STAR framework:

Set a Goal Use social data to set goals for your influencer campaign (or the campaign for which influencer marketing is a small part). One of the most difficult elements of developing a social media marketing plan is defining success and the metrics which will represent that success. There is an assortment of numbers to choose from, ranging from the much-maligned “vanity” metrics to advanced data, like Lifetime Value of a customer: Customer Acquisition Cost (LTV:CAC).

With many options and little precedent, a lot of marketers and social media managers are left asking, “Where do I start?”

First, and most importantly, you need to establish the ultimate bottom line goal. This goal can come in the form of something like increasing sales or generating leads or lowering customer acquisition costs or simply building brand reputation.

8How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

No matter what you choose, the goal must then be tied to a numerical value and a deadline, and it must support your larger marketing strategy.

The next phase in the process is to build out the objectives that will result in your ultimate goal, when tied together. One example can be in the form of sales, where these objectives may be aligned with the typical sales funnel of driving awareness, consideration, purchases, and retention from social audiences (aka social selling).

For instance, a goal can be decreasing the cost of acquisition through social media by 5% within one year. Then, your objectives will branch out from what’s necessary to achieve this goal over the time allotted.

Or your goal can be increasing brand awareness and equity in your space. To achieve this conceptual goal, you can set your measured goal as:

To establish a majority social media market share in our industry, drive over 400,000 visitors annually to our social properties, and net over 5,000 new subscribers annually by 2018.From here, your metrics will be applied to track success on a micro-level.

9How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

A simpler version of this type of goal-setting and attribution is known as OKR (objectives and key results).

One key to remember is that these metrics aren’t set in stone. Rather, they are guides that allow us to understand if our influencer campaign/program is moving in the right direction and can be amended as needed.

For instance, a year from now we may see that we’re outperforming these numbers or that the competitive landscape has changed more than we were projecting, and that we need to make adjustments. These goals also help inform us if there are opportunities or appropriate channels that we can isolate to have an impact on our strategy.

If you’re competing for market share (calculated based on a combination of social share of voice and share of engagement), your success is measured with a combination of competitive metrics and internal performance metrics.

Time Your Campaign Use social data to time your influencer campaign perfectly. This means: • Time of Year: Look at past performance to understand which times of year your brand achieves its best results, whether that’s mentions, engagement, or conversions. Double down on influencer campaigns at your absolute peaks and lowest valley times. This is a great way to capitalize on positive performance and improve low performance, and makes planning your content calendar less of a guessing game and more of a science.

• Time of Week and Day: Which times of the day and week is your audience most active and likely to take your desired action? You can look at your social analytics to find out, then promote influencer-related content at these times. You should also run an analysis on your influencer’s social accounts, since their audience might be active at a different time. Ask your influencer to post at the peak activity time for their audience.

• Time of Larger Campaigns: Remember that your influencer program does not exist for its own sake. Your influencer program is meant to drive the business goals we talked about in the S part of this STAR framework. Don’t start an influencer program aimlessly, in a silo— connect it to upcoming product rollouts, larger marketing campaigns and

10How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

messaging, and corporate initiatives. Use competitive social analytics for ideas about how other companies have done this sucessfully. Allocate the Necessary Resources Social media has become a pay-to-play space. To reap the greatest rewards from social media, you have to put some money behind your efforts. These resources can be put into three categories: • Promoting influencer content on your owned channels using ads: Identify the influencer- related posts which are doing well organically, then boost them with ad spend.

• Paying an agency to find and manage the relationship between you and your influencers: This is a good choice if you have extra financial resources, but not enough time.

• Paying influencers directly: A good choice if you want to work with influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers, vs. microinfluencers who have fewer followers but incredibly engaged communities. An analysis you will want to run before making a decision here is to find out which influencers you are considering have a better engagement rate. You may be surprised at what you find. Run an Audit of Your Content Run an audit of your content for the year so far. Which pieces of content have performed exceptionally for your brand? How can you build content for your influencer which extends the runway and reach for your most popular products, themes, and campaigns?

From Simply Measured Conversion Tracking

11How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Step 3: Make Edits to Your Influencer Campaign Make the necessary edits to your influencer campaign as you go along. The only way to know which edits to make is by using social data. We use the RACE framework here:

Regular Evaluation You should reevaluate your objectives on a regular basis: weekly, monthly, and year-to-year. That way, you can reevaluate and refine your goals and plans based on performance.

The objectives you choose are structured to add up to your overall goal, but they also provide information to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your channels, engagement, and message amplification.

Some examples of social media objectives:

• Increase social engagement by 50%

• Increase in social referral growth by 58%

• Establish a quality traffic conversion rate of 25%

• Establish an email signup conversion rate of 1%

100% success rate isn’t likely, but you want to be sure that you are as informed as possible and can quickly isolate specific causes for trends that need to be either leveraged or modified.

12How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

You can then focus on the strategy and tactics needed to reach your goals and understand what success looks like on a micro-level to ensure you are continually moving in the right direction.

You should examine how each channel is contributing to your chosen metrics, so you can understand how to allocate resources, where you’re gaining advantages over our competitors (or losing them), and how to make better strategic decisions when it comes to your influencer program.

According to Plan How are you tracking according to plan? Keep an active progress tracker so that you can understand how far towards your goal you are at any given time.

Constant Communication Your cadence of communication with your influencer(s) should match your goal check-ins. You should be communicating the progress being made with your influencers, and ask for changes or additions accordingly.

13How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Eye on Trends Use listening to understand what the major, relevant trends for your brand are, and how you can leverage these trends within your influencer campaign. Can you send your influencer to an event, and ask them to run a takeover on one of your social channels? Can you ask your influencer to write and heavily promote a blog post about your product or conference, in tandem with another popular industry event or time period?

14How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Step 4: Measure the Efficacy of Your Influencer Campaign We use the GLIDE framework to understand whether an influencer campaign has been successful—and what to do next.

Goal Evaluation Remember those goals you came up with in your planning phase? Now it’s time to see whether you met them overall.

From Simply Measured Social Analytics

15How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Let ‘Em Know Create an end-of-campaign report for yourself, key stakeholders in your organization, and your influencer(s).

Ideas and Learnings What have you learned? What does the data tell you? What ideas do you have for next time based on what worked well this time, and what didn’t work so well? Decision Time Should you use this influencer again? Should you use a different influencer or set of influencers? Should you use the same influencer, but tweak your strategy and tactics? Why or why not? Expand...or Nah? Should you expand your influencer program? What does this look like in practice? Which influencers should you work with next? Can you get your influencers to collaborate with one another?

16How to Use Social Data to Jump Start Your Influencer Program

Conclusion Now you know the steps you need to take to jump start your influencer program. An influencer program will differ for every brand, and for every industry. For instance, a makeup brand will probably excel by partnering with lifestyle influencers on Instagram, while a B2B tech brand might fare better with a LinkedIn focus. Where is your audience? Exactly what and who are they talking about now? These are specific questions you’ll only be able to answer with strong, holistic, reliable social data. We can help with that! Scroll down to request a demo today.

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Our passion? Exposing social media’s total impact, from conversations to conversions.

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