Influencer MarketingThe Data-Driven Approach to Influencer Success

THE MARKETING INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM

Influencer MarketingThe Data-Driven Approach to Influencer Success

01 Foreword

02 Understanding your audience

06 Identifying the right influencers

09 Measuring the success of an influencer

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

3FOREWORD

Partnering with the right influencers makes all the difference when it comes to end results.

Peer to peer influence is more powerful today than top-down communications.

More and more consumers are relying on their peer sources for buying decisions. Not only are consumers trusting their peers for purchase recommendations, but they are also blocking ads, making paid efforts less effective.

Building off of this desire for peer to peer communications, marketers are embracing influencer strategy more than ever before. While influencer marketing is not new, it continues to evolve as strategies and technologies advance.

Influencer marketing, when done right, presets a unique opportunity for brands to connect with consumers in a meaningful way.

However, in today’s oversaturated media environment paired with the growing fear of bots, brand safety, and fake audiences, connecting with consumers and identifying the right influencers is still a flawed system. For brands, it is imperative that they partner with influencers who attract high-value, real audiences.

In this eBook, powered by Affinio, we will take you on a journey from the very basics of understanding your audience, to selecting the right influencers, to measuring your success.

The Interest Graph shows several interest-based communities, including and

4PART ONE: Understanding your audience

Before marketers can successfully strategize and implement an influencer marketing

initiative, they must have an intimate understanding of their target audience.

Unfortunately, the common practice of building audience segments based on demographic characteristics is outdated and limiting. For example, let’s say you’re a marketer for an athletic wear brand. Sure, men and women aged 25-55 might need athletic wear; but what products they need and the reasons that they want them are based on their interests, not their gender and age.

Instead of relying on demographic segmentation, Affinio segments audiences into interest-based clusters by looking at who or what people choose to follow. We shed light on the passions and interests of any audience, and ultimately what they care about most.

To demonstrate, we’ve analyzed the Twitter audience of an unnamed athletic wear brand using Affinio. Affinio looked at the network connections between over 100,000 individuals following the brand.

Let’s take a look at these two communities in more detail.

Cyclists

Health & Fit

Fashionable & Fit

CrossFitters

Yogis

Foodies

OutdoorsyPilates

Fashionable & Fit

CrossFitters

5PART ONE: CrossFit Segment

6PART ONE: Fashionable & Fit Segment

7PART ONE

As seen from the Affinio analysis, while the Crossfitters and Fashionable Yogis communities share a love for the brand, they have different needs, wants, and expectations of the brand. Furthermore, the influencers they select to reach these audiences will be drastically different.

By being able to identify and understand the interest-based communities within any audiences, brands can adjust their communications strategies for each segment, ensuring they align with the interests and passions of their ideal audience.

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8

At Affinio, we look at influencer marketing in a different light. We flip the influencer

search and selection process to start with the people you are trying to reach - your ideal audience.

By analyzing the interests of your audience first, you can identify influencers who already resonate with your target.

Let’s start by looking at the audience we already analyzed. As you can see in the Interest Graph, the interest-based communities are all centered around health and fitness. While you may be able to find an influencer that encompasses the entire audience, it’s better practice to select influencers unique to each audience segment to ensure your message resonates.

PART TWO: Identifying the right influencers

Featured below are 100 of the most relevant individuals to the entire audience. As you can see, they are fairly general interests.

Cyclists

Health & Fit

Fashionable & Fit

CrossFitters

Yogis

Foodies

OutdoorsyPilates

9PART TWO

Instead of looking at the entire audience, if we dive into an interest-based community, we can see how the interests cater to that audience.

Who is influencing this community?

If you are familiar with the CrossFit world, you likely recognize all of these names as they are mostly professional CrossFitters. In some cases, you would prefer to work with long-tail or niche influencers for budget or strategic reasons.

Let’s look at the CrossFitters community:

Using the Affinio Interests section, we immediately have the insight into how likely this audience is to follow a given account (relative to network users) and how relevant these interests are to your particular audience. By toggling between the “Global Relevance” and “Global Affinity” options in-platform, brands can identify the “Top Influencers” for this audience as well as “Top-Niche” (smaller scale) influencers.

10PART TWO

Once you have an in-depth understanding of your audience and have identified the influencers already resonating with them, brands should then verify that the influencer’s following is authentic. The reasoning? Today it is more common for influencers to have purchased followers (robots) or a following that doesn’t fit your desired customer profile. With the growing demand of ROI on marketers, brands must ensure that their investment in an influencer is a strategic one.

For example: While an influencer may have +200,000 followers and a steady stream if engagement, these numbers do not matter unless the are reaching your ideal audience. Not to mention, engaging an influencer of this audience size, ideal or not, likely costs a nice chunk of change.

While the individual with +200,000 followers may be alluring, unless they are reaching your ideal audience you’re paying to reach people that will never be your customer.

Choosing influencers using vanity metric is not an effective strategy. There is a shift happening - no longer does it matter how many followers an influencer has, it matters who follows them.

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11

Once a brand has identified their influencer and the ideal audiences they wish to

target, they need to be able to truly measure the impact of their influencer campaigns over time.

Using Affinio’s premium Monitoring feature, brands can actually measure the growth of interest-based segments and their date of acquisition. As your influencer efforts ramp up, your following, awareness, and sales should grow in tandem.

Using Affinio, brands can also see how the interests of their audience change over time. This allows brands to identify up-can-coming influencers who are gaining traction with their idea audience - or - identify which influencers may be losing influence over their ideal audience.

PART THREE: Measuring the success of an influencer

Affinio’s premium Monitoring feature enables you to update your Affinio reports at regular intervals to see changes in followers, interests, topics, and trends.

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12WANT TO LEARN MORE?

By leveraging interest-based segmentation and affinity data, brands remove the guesswork from influencer selection.

Immediately brands have a list, based on relevance or affinity, of individuals big and small which they can engage for an influence marketing campaign.

By understanding who is already resonating with an audience, vetting them, and measuring their success, brands can increase the likelihood that their message will be heard and resonate with their target audience.

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