Published by Econsultancy in association with Offerpop

Influence the Influencers - The Magic of Co-Created Content

By Lee OddenCEO TopRank Online Marketing

Masters of CX

Digital consumers are facing a deluge of options when it comes to making information choices online.

Influence the Influencers / Lee Odden

According to a recent study out of the Marshall School of Business, the average American will consume 74 gigabytes per day.

That’s roughly 15 and a half hours of media per person.

// Source: ecly.co/1rq8Kt8

New challenges, new opportunities

Today we live in an age of information overload where the speed of content discovery and the variety of options for media consumption across computer, tablet and mobile devices present new challenges for brands and consumers alike.

The natural response for consumers is to filter their choices and focus those few sources which are most trusted, credible and meaningful. For brands that want to differentiate and even dominate in their category, becoming known as ‘the best answer’ for their domain of expertise will have enormous impact.

The challenge of increased digital sophistication brings an opportunity: businesses can differentiate and capture market attention by growing their authority and influence. First, they must embrace a content-centric, customer-focused model based on an understanding of target audience preferences for information discovery, consumption and interaction.

Content is a top priority for brands

According to Econsultancy’s 2014 Digital Trends briefing, content marketing is the top priority for marketers and one of the most exciting opportunities in the field.

But various studies suggest that content also presents some challenges; companies find it difficult to produce enough content, as well as create content that engages and has enough variety.

Even when companies are able to produce high quality, relevant content on a regular basis, the challenge of distribution and reach plagues many. Part of the solution is to connect content creation with influencers that already have communities they engage with on the same topics.

Managing the Content Agency

Stefan Tornquist, VP Research at Econsultancy and Editor of #MastersofCXBroadly speaking, the best content comes from people who are deeply invested and knowledgeable in the subject. That’s why Lee’s advice on influencers is so important – they’re going to provide that knowledge and passion even though they aren’t in-house.

Many companies are under pressure to efficiently produce a high volume of content, and they turn to agencies for help. But ask ten marketers about using an agency for content and you’ll get ten opinions from negative to enthusiastic. Like any agency vs in-house debate, it’s all about how the individual relationship is managed;

It’s not turn-key (at least not for a while) – the first weeks or months of an agency relationship need to be collaborative. If you want to sit back down the road as your agency produces great, relevant content, then make sure to spend the time up front making them familiar with your company, your products and the content pools they’ll be swimming in.

Generate ideas and strategy together – even as the relationship matures it’s vital for the brand (you) to stay involved in content strategy. One of the best ways to do that is to be part of regular idea sessions (monthly at least) where you are the voice of your long-term strategy.

Get past the numbers and be the consumer – like many things in marketing, it’s a lot easier to measure content success by volume than long-term impact. One way to encourage deep positive results like increased retention rates is to think like your target market. Is the content you’re producing meaningful or is it just so consumable that lots of people are interacting with it? Hopefully it’s both, but you are ultimately the one to speak with the “voice of the customer.”

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There are now over 250 million Tumblr and Wordpress.com blogs alone.

Consumer content and authority.

Brands aren’t the only non-traditional online publishers. Consumers are also able to publish through social networks and media, blogs and increasingly easy contributions to online publications. In fact, there are now over 250 million Tumblr and Wordpress.com blogs alone.

Besides creating topically competitive content, consumer publishing has empowered individuals to attract their own audiences and become as influential as some of the companies they buy from.

In addition to working with established influencers, brands can nurture future influencers to create a more effective brand community that exponentially scales reach and engagement.

The shock of content proliferation.

As a result of the content explosion, brands are faced with the reality that the majority of the content they produce might never be discovered or engaged. At the same time, brands must recognize that their own consumers are becoming more influential about the same topics brands are spending advertising and marketing budgets on.

When consumers are empowered to create, consume, publish, interact and transact anytime, anywhere, how do brands break through to create meaningful connections and engagement? How does the dynamic of content and influence help fulfill consumer information discovery, consumption and engagement expectations while delivering on business outcomes for the brand?

As a vehicle for influence, content is one of the most powerful tools in a digital marketer’s mix to attract, engage and inspire buyers to act.

Content is the currency for building relationships that can boost credibility, influence and action.

The content + influence solution.

A content and influencer marketing strategy can be one of the most effective combinations a marketing and communications organization can make. By incorporating relevant influencers that can inspire action with content marketing efforts, marketers can reach new audiences with brand messages that are credible and trusted.

Influencer-driven content marketing is also one of the best examples of how digital marketing and public relations are converging. The integration of messaging, content, social media and engagement right along with the promotion of information and media, designed to inspire transactions, should be the focus of any business that wants to differentiate and grow.

Buyers trust influential experts.

A study from inPowered & Nielsen reveals that 85% of consumers seek out trusted experts when considering a purchase. Additionally, expert content resulted in an 88% lift in brand familiarity and 38% lift in purchase intent over branded content.

While brand content and native advertising are effective, working with industry influencers to co-create content is an approach that yields surprising results.

85% of consumers seek out trusted experts when considering

a purchase.

88% lift in brand

familiarity as a result of expert

content.

Influencer eBooks Get Results.

A recent influencer content program run in conjunction with Content Marketing Institute and sponsored by Curata yielded a series of eBooks and infographics featuring influencers from 40 major brands. Within 30 days the series attracted over 125,000 views on SlideShare, over 3,000 PDF downloads and 800-plus requests for more information. These metrics are in addition to blog and media coverage, social shares and links which will contribute to continued exposure of the campaign assets via search and social media.

By connecting with market and niche influencers and working with them to achieve mutually beneficial goals, modern marketers can create invaluable relationships with authoritative experts. These connections can result in the creation of high quality, relevant and authoritative content that serves the interests of the influencer and the brand as well as providing access and reach to the influencer’s community.

Everyone is influential about something.

Influencers can be industry professionals, they could also be inside a company as subject matter experts or a company’s own customers. Influencer relationships with brands often include a value exchange of some kind and it’s up to the company and influencer to decide whether that’s an exchange of information, visibility, compensation or something else.

The essential questions.

To be effective when working with influencers, businesses need to consider what they want the influencer to do for them beyond a simple endorsement.

• How will the influencer’s involvement help the company reach a particular business goal?

• What will an ongoing relationship with influencers mean to the brand’s marketing efforts and reputation in the industry?

• Also, what kind of content does it make the most sense for the influencer to contribute to?

• How does the brand want to be known and which influencers already have that credibility and authority?

These questions and more will be answered in the following model for influencer content co-creation.

Influencers are credible, authoritative individuals who have an engaged community that follows and acts on their thought leadership.

Influencer marketing is working with influencers to effect change in thought and action among a network towards goals that are mutually beneficial to the brand, the influencer and their community. Whether it is a partnership to co-create content or more general advocacy, influencers open doors for brands to connect with engaged consumers they might otherwise never reach in a meaningful way.

best practices for working with and influencing influencers to co-create content:

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Identify Influencer Program Goals

Research, Engage and Recruit Influencers

Develop Co-Created Content with Influencers

Influencer Measurement and Program Optimization

Ongoing Influencer Relationships

Inspire Content Promotion

SixInfluence the Influencers / Lee Odden

1. Identify Influencer Program Goals

Serving different audiences (influencers, brand, prospects, industry media) requires a strategy that identifies distinct goals. While most influencers desire increased visibility, brands will want to grow their expertise for a topic among a target audience and attract new business. Consumers of the influencer content will want expert information from someone they trust. Industry news media will want examples they can reference and subject matter experts they can cite.

Just starting out, co-created influencer content can be as simple as a value exchange: increased exposure for both the influencer and the brand with the objective of attracting new target audience engagement and influencing a spectrum of conversion actions: subscribe, download, register, request information.

As an influencer content program matures, goals can become more sophisticated and multi-faceted to include public relations, recruiting, customer marketing and more advanced customer acquisition.

Influencer content programs should be tied into the content marketing plan and editorial calendar. An important part of designing an effective influencer content program is to identify the specific topics to be covered. Specifying topics and themes will drive all subsequent actions in the program from influencer recruiting, to planning which media type to create, to content promotion.

2. Research, Engage and Recruit Influencers

It’s important to identify the key themes that represent topical focus for the brand, the product or service and the campaign or program that you will creating with influencers. The sooner your company specifies these topical areas of focus, the sooner influencers can be identified and engaged.

It’s often useful to start with executives, marketing, communications and product managers to develop a list of topical experts and even nominations of specific individual influencers. Attending industry events can also reveal influencers who are presenting, and meeting them in person can initiate a relationship.

Influencer sourcing and engagement takes time. Many influencer co-created content projects will draw from both existing influencer relationships and involve making new influencer connections. Initial recruiting

“The time to start recruiting influencers is long before you need them. Romance takes time.”

might be limited to small, easy projects that advance the relationship to more robust and substantial time commitments.

The most common mistake businesses make with influencers is to qualify them based purely on network size (fans, friends and followers) and affinity to a certain industry or area of interest. Without the ability to affect the way a network thinks and how they act, an influencer isn’t really influencing anyone. It’s more likely that they are a ‘brandividual’.

Those characterizations will be useful with influencer discovery tools like Followerwonk or Little Bird which both focus on Twitter. There are also robust tools like Traackr, BuzzSumo or GroupHigh.

After you use a tool to identify and initially qualify influencers for each topic, then you can bring that list back to your internal subject matter experts to manually review and filter. Of course, no influencer discovery tool is perfect. Correlation among multiple tools and sources might take more time, but it’s a best practice for distinguishing between brandividuals and effective influencers.

When recruiting influencers, there are several important considerations:

• Relevancy and effort to ask ratio - It has to be timely and on message with what they stand for. It also has to be easy for them to do. Popular, smart people are busy!

• Be clever or humorous - Nothing cuts through the crap like humor but most of all, be a real person when you communicate, not salesy, pushy or entitled.

• You are a known entity - Having a reputation as a brand or being a well-known person in the industry is very useful. Previous personal contact with the influencer is even more valuable.

• Vision of the project - Be able to articulate what the influencer’s involvement will be and what it will do for them personally. Also show how the project will help others.

• Optimize for attract - Create influencer projects so good and so well known, people compete to be involved.

What doesn’t work Presumptive, high expectation recruiting pitches with no personalization and little upside for the influencer rarely work. It’s the equivalent of a stranger approaching you and saying, “Let’s get married”.

The time to start creating relationships with influencers is long before you actually need

them. If a company is thinking that working with influencers is even a remote possibility, they should start identifying, qualifying and engaging with them now. That way, when the time comes to work together on a project, there’s already some familiarity and credibility before “the ask”.

Effective influencer recruiting for content co-creation projects comes down to being relevant and interesting, respectful and delivering a great experience that results in a desire for more.

3. Develop Co-Created Content with Influencers

The content marketing plan for co-created influencer content should identify the primary and sub-themes, the influencers to work with for those assets, the types of contributions the influencers will make, the type of content to be created, deconstructed component parts, social share messages and details on repurposing.

Go modular Modular content planning allows pre-promotion of the co-created content project to build momentum for launch and then deconstruction of the content for customized repurposing and social promotion on networks, blogs, and the media.

“A brandividual is popular. An influencer is effective at creating popularity.”

Select topics Topics represent the themes and areas of focus for planning editorial and for sourcing influencers. Topic alignment between brand, influencer and community is essential for mutual value to be created.

Identify type of content or media mix Types of content are often determined by the content marketing plan and target audience. At the same time, there are some types of content more amenable to co-creation with influencers such as eBooks, reports, blog posts, quoted infographics and video compilations. A clear line of sight must be present between the co-created content and the content objectives in the marketing plan.

Once influencers, topics and media types are identified, a campaign to request content is initiated. Setting expectations during the recruitment phase for how participation will work is essential. Influencers are busy people and providing a timeline with due date, clear instructions and even examples will result in a higher participation rate.

Influencer content collection requests are effective when a few A-list influencers are already on board with the project. Leverage their name recognition to influence other influencers to participate.

Be prepared to send two to three content collection emails and when the deadline arrives, do not be afraid to use a fear of loss pitch. But by all means, be cordial, helpful and respectful.

4. Inspire Content Promotion

Influencer communications should provide expectations and clear timelines along with the benefits for all when a co-created influencer content project is successful.

Providing influencers with tools such as sharing images, pre-written tweets, embed codes and short URLs can substantially increase promotion participation and reach.

There are four important considerations when encouraging influencers to help promote the content they helped your company create.

Create content worth sharing. Topics that address issues that are important to the influencer will get your foot in the door and useful, visually compelling content will inspire them to open that door and share. Reaching out blindly and asking to share doesn’t work as well as having a connection first and then asking.

Let the ego do the talking. Content that includes an influencer’s contribution will probably get shared even more. Because let’s face it, people love to see themselves get recognized. Better yet, ask them to participate in the creation of the content.

However, when mentioning influencers in content it’s essential that it be credible, high quality and creative. Most influencers have caught on to the tactic of simply mentioning famous industry people just to get them to share. There must be value created that inspires and earns the share.

Make it fun and easy. When emailing a promotion request, consider making it funny or at least clever. We’ve gone so far as to write outlandish examples of what NOT to do or suggest fake prizes for contributing like his/her beard scarves or beef jerky underwear.

Also make it especially easy for the influencer to share. Capture their attention, succinctly explain what it is and what you want them to do. Then offer pre-written social share text that’s even personalized just for them. You may even create a resource page with images and other share options for them to use.

Pay them. Either compensate the influencer with information and promotion or simply pay them to share your content. Once you start down this road, it’s pretty difficult to get off, so plan for continued compensation once you start.

5. Influencer Measurement and Program Optimization

Individual influencer promotions of the co-created content project can be measured based on social network shares, sentiment of those shares, engagement on the topic, links and blog pickups.

Embeds used by influencers to create blog posts can be tracked for referred search traffic along with referred social traffic from their links. Referred traffic that results in website visits can be further analyzed for metrics such as time on site, categories of content consumed, leads and sales.

Overall reach, engagement, traffic, leads and sales for the content project can be tracked as well, taking note of the contributions made by influencers towards key performance metrics like growing affinity between a topic and the brand as well as business outcomes like leads and sales.

6. Ongoing Influencer Relationships

Beyond the campaign or program at hand, do make the effort to continue the relationship with influencers you have worked with. Focus on creating a great experience for them and they’ll be very interested in working with your brand again on future projects.

The more influencer programs you develop, the more influencers you will have connections with and draw from. When it comes to promotions, you can ask past influencers who are not part of your current program to help, since they are aware of the value that would bring and the effect of “a rising tide lifts all ships.”

“The more influencer programs you develop, the more influencers you will have connections with and draw from.”

Ways to stay connected with influencers in a meaningful way include:• Offer them feedback after the

program about the effect of their contribution

• Cite influencers in your future blog posts

• Connect and engage with influencers on social networks

• Refer influencer expertise to other companies that could use them (i.e. help them get work)

• Cite influencers in contributed articles to industry magazines, newspapers, web sites and newsletters

• Include them in future projects

Influence the Influencers / Conclusion

Whether your brand is engaging with influencers to provide useful information or you’re co-creating content with influencers to create a useful industry resource that will be shared with new communities, there’s a value exchange that can benefit everyone involved.

Content is the key to that value transfer between brand and consumer, brand and influencer and for the overall community involved.

// Lee Odden

The Masters of CX series features true marketing thinkers and industry heavyweights, covering the issues surrounding your customer experience approach and strategy.

These unique reports will be published between October and December 2014, along with two dedicated webinar sessions where you can gain first-hand insight from the authors on the key issues raised.

We’re delighted to be working with some of the most influential authors within digital marketing.

Reports in the series include:

Winning Hearts in Real-time by Jay Baer

Influence the Influencers - The Magic of Co-Created Content by Lee Odden

Beyond the Sale: Building Customer Relationships for Life by Brian Clark

Empower your Employees to Power your Customer Experience by Ted Rubin

Customer Loyalty Lessons from Medieval Times by Mark Schaefer

Why Brands are Stuck on Like and Failing at Love by Mitch Joel

Find out more about the authors and reports athello.econsultancy.com/masters-of-cx and join the discussion using #MastersofCX

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