GUIDE TO INFLUENCER MARKETINGHOW TO CAST A SMART NET AND MAKE WAVES

TRAACKR

GUIDE TO INFLUENCER MARKETINGHOW TO CAST A SMART NET AND MAKE WAVES

TRAACKR

Learn how savvy organizations are using influencer discovery and analytics to identify, engage, support and learn from the people creating conversations impacting their brands, products and services.

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Influencer Marketing is the process of identifying, researching, engaging and supporting the people who create the conversations impacting your brand, products or services.

At the core of Integrated Marketing Communications, Influencer Marketing aligns PR, marketing, sales and product around a common strategy.

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WHY FOCUS ON INFLUENCERS?Influencers by definition have an audience. One person can easily encourage 10,000 people to visit your site. One person can easily send hundreds of leads your way. One person can stop a rumor and save you face. Influencers make it possible to go from one to many, effectively.

Influential people serve as filters on the web. If you happen to blink, or heaven-forbid sleep, you shouldn’t miss out on what matters to you. Influencers act as conduits to the most important content, thereby saving you from wading through the irrelevant muck.

Influencers are also trendsetters. They create waves. Since they are passionate about their topics, they not only pay attention to what’s next, they define the trends. Influencers shape the future of the conversation. By listening, you anticipate obstacles and harness opportunities.

Marketing to and with these wavemakers will make it dramatically easier to do three very valuable things:

•Get your messages out to your audiences.

•Pick the right content and channels.

•Make better decisions about content and strategies.

WHAT IS AN ONLINE INFLUENCER?Blink. I dare you. Do so and you’ll miss more than 1600 tweets, 48 minutes of video and 18.5 blog posts. People are creating, consuming, and acting on digital content at rates our Mad Men predecessors couldn’t have ever imagined.

In this highly social web, information travels like waves. These waves are created by people who generate content and build followings. A subset of these people create stronger waves than others. These wavemakers drive their audiences to believe, buy and care. So, what makes someone a wavemaker? Influence.

Influence simply means you are recognized as a thought leader or expert on a topic. People want to listen to you and relay your opinions and ideas when it comes to that topic. Influence is inherently authentic, contextual and, in many cases, geographical.

For the marketer, these wavemakers are doubly important:

Filters: Wavemakers serve as a proxy to the larger, unruly web and help focus limited time and resources on the most powerful channels and conversations.

Amplifiers: Wavemakers are the most effective partners for sharing your messages and driving business your way.

Influencer Marketing is the process of finding, engaging and learning from your organization’s specific wavemakers to support your business goals. This guide will show you how Traackr helps you discover your influencers and what to do with them when you find them!

Traackr’s influencer discovery and management tools support influencer marketing initiatives for over 140 enterprises and 40% of the top communications agencies. Broken down by marketing objective, here’s a look at the top five ways marketers and communicators have used Traackr’s people discovery engine and influencer analytics to reach their goals.1. Drive Awareness for Products, Events & Campaigns2. Cultivate Advocates & Community3. Build Owned Media Programs4. Research & Uncover Insights5. Measure Impact & Report on Performance

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PRODUCTS, EVENTS & CAMPAIGNSTo create or raise awareness, you need to discover who has the greatest ability to support your messages and relay your news to the right audience. When you work with influencers, your message can go from one to many without relying on paid media.

Traackr helps by automatically discovering the right people and pulling together their relevant content based on your custom criteria.

LAUNCH A NEW PRODUCTGenerate buzz and drive interest for a new product.

How to do it:

• Define the online conversation you need to be a part of using keywords. Tip: think about terms your ideal customers would use to discuss your product category or to describe the context where they would use it.

• Use those keywords to find the people who are leading the conversation you are interested in and create your list of influencers.

• Reach out to these individuals with a compelling offer that adds value to their work and creates an opportunity for you to earn their attention.

• Monitor mentions of your product and other terms that indicate awareness as your campaign unrolls to measure the success of your outreach.

Traackr Features:Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Share of Voice Report

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PROMOTE AN EVENTDrive attendance and extend your event online.

How to do it:

• Use the event themes or conference tracks to define several lists of keywords that encompass the content.

• Using keywords, find people interested in the theme of your event who can help you spread the word. Tip: geo-target your search to find people near the event venue.

• Make influencers aware of your event (share event hashtags) and offer a discount for their audience or create a referral program to drive registrations (point them to the specific sessions that are most exciting for them).

• Follow real-time when influencers mention your event and promote their content to attendees. Tip: engage during the event and point influencers to content that interests them.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Pulse, Share of Voice Report

LAUNCH A BRAND AWARENESS CAMPAIGNIncrease share of voice and boost positive brand mentions.

How to do it:

• Identify conversations where your brand should be noticed.

• Define your influencer lists by thinking about the bigger stories your company plays a role in: industry trends, corporate philanthropy projects, new markets, etc.

• Reach out to the influencers to brief them and build a relationship. Some ideas include inviting them to your events and introducing them to your leadership teams.

• Monitor mentions, message pull-through, sentiment and share of influential voice to measure brand awareness.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Sentiment Report

Influence Drives Revenue NetBase

NetBase, the enterprise social intelligence company, was getting ready to launch an entirely new product line into the social media market while also overhauling its brand. Spearheaded by its strategic communications agency, Eastwick, NetBase used Traackr to identify the top influencers in their target market and then crafted a strategic and personalized outreach program, pairing key members of their executive team with specific influencers. The program created influencer relationships that have so far spanned over three years and what’s more, these relationships lead to articles and webinars, which directly resulted in winning significant enterprise business.

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2 CULTIVATE ADVOCATES & COMMUNITYAn advocate is someone who promotes your company without being on payroll. Finding and cultivating influential advocates is the Holy Grail for brands.

Traackr helps you identify and learn about your potential advocates by giving you their entire online footprint and letting you filter your social listening to these impactful individuals.

SEED A PRODUCTFind early adopters who will jump start activity in your product or platform.

How to do it:

• Start with your customer personas and pull out their major interest areas.

• Use these keywords to create lists of people who are likely to use and have strong opinions about your product.

• Invite them to participate in a beta cycle or give them a direct way to contribute to shaping the product.

• Acknowledge their feedback, share it with your product team, and let influencers know how their contribution has been be accounted for or incorporated.

• Track when they talk about your product on the social web in real-time so you can engage and set up monitoring projects to stay on top of global conversations.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Pulse, Share of Voice Report

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CREATE A COMMUNITYHelp a group of influential customers and advocates connect.

How to do it:

• Find common attributes that unite your most influential customers and advocates.

• Study their profiles for clues to what motivates them.

• Invite them to your community where they can meet like-minded people and get access to your resources.

• Keep this community invite-only and only expand it to a larger audience once it’s reached critical mass.

• Stay on top of your influencers in real-time so you can engage with them at opportune moments.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Detailed Influencer Profiles, Share of Voice Report, Pulse

MANAGE A CRISISReduce the impact of a communications crisis.

How to do it:

• Start by briefing the trusted circle of influential advocates with whom you have already built a strong relationship.

• Engage in a conversation with your detractors. Share facts to avoid the snowball effect of misinformation. Acknowledge the problem, if necessary apologize, and communicate your plan to remedy the situation.

• Closely follow key conversations that represent risks (competitors, weaknesses, industry scandals, etc.).

• Track how the tone of the conversation changes over time.

• Watch during good times how others handle mishaps.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Pulse, Sentiment Report, Share of Voice Report

Look for Win-Win Opportunities Mi6 Agency & SAP

Mi6 Agency is using Traackr to discover and monitor thought leaders and influencers in the areas of Finance and Retail as part of an Influencer Network program for global enterprise software provider SAP. This program provides network members with research, exclusive interviews and unique engagement opportunities that help further educate key stakeholders in Finance and Retail on key issues and opportunities to improve productivity, reduce costs, increase corporate performance and predict business outcomes.

Executive Activation Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks, the industry leader in network innovation, recognized the power of a strong influencer community and set out to build individual relationships with the thought leaders and conversation drivers in the enterprise networking industry. Early on, Juniper Networks empowered its executive team to directly own the relationships with influencers. Using Traackr, Juniper Networks matched executives with specific people from the influencer lists and gave them social media training and guidance to get going.

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3 BUILD OWNED MEDIA PROGRAMSLeading consumer and business-facing companies use their own media platforms to provide timely, compelling and useful information. To develop content an audience will appreciate, the marketer will always start with research.

Traackr helps by surfacing social insights so you can identify topics and trends that impact your editorial decisions.

DEVELOP PARTNERSHIPS FOR WEBINARSFind thought leaders you can work with to deliver compelling presentations.

How to do it:

• Use your content strategy and communications pillars to identify keywords that define your topic areas.

• Instead of building your webinars in isolation, look to your influencer lists for people who could augment your content or share a different perspective. Tip: don’t be afraid of people with opposing viewpoints, they could provide the right dose of intrigue to bring your audience to the screen.

• Zoom in on your influencers’ content to discover who is passionate about specific topics within your campaign.

• Reach out to individuals to be part of a panel or featured guest on a webinar. Keep in mind you may need to compensate people depending on their experience and the work required.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Detailed Influencer Profiles

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CREATE CREDIBILITY THROUGH CONTENTBecome a go-to source for trusted information.

How to do it:

• Organize your influencers by content themes.

• Review the content written by your influencers to figure out what is trending, what types of questions they may have and what types of information they and their audiences are looking for.

• Build your content and SEO strategy around the topics your influencers are talking about.

• Track your progress by monitoring what influencers are talking about on social streams and following your themes in your influencers’ content.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Pulse, Keyword Report, Theme Report, Share of Voice Report

RAISE YOUR OWN INFLUENCER PROFILEBecome influential through content curation.

How to do it:

• Listen to the social web through a highly focused filter to find the most relevant content and identify trends you see across influencer conversations.

• Choose the most interesting content to curate through your own channels.

• Setup monitoring systems to easily track specific topics and themes.

• Publish your curated content to your site.

• Monitor how your profile rises through the ranks.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Pulse, Curated RSS Feed, Share of Voice Report

Become a Leader in Your FieldLogicworks

Logicworks, a world-class scalable cloud hosting solutions provider headquartered in New York City, operates in a noisy space with heavy competition. Looking to stand a cloud above the rest, Logicworks created an industry-specific blog, Gathering Clouds, focused exclusively on news and opinion on the cloud/IT spectrum. Logicworks uses Traackr to identify niche themes within the overall technology field based on the conversations influencers are having online. Contrary to most companies, Logicworks foregoes self-promotion, even going as far as, featuring a competitor on their blog. Their mission is to build a solid reputation as a trusted source of information for the entire industry.

Make Yourself the Center of InformationEastwick Communications

Eastwick, a leading independent public relations agency, helps technology companies shape markets and connect with audiences. To lead in this space, Eastwick must convey their industry expertise to prospective clients and understand how to identify the highest-impact tactics for each client. Using Traackr, Eastwick forms strategy and unique tactics for each influencer, for each client. As a result, Eastwick is able to create holistic campaigns that encompass media relations, analyst relations and influencer cultivation to maximize message penetration and impact for its clients.

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4 RESEARCH & UNCOVER INSIGHTSHarnessing the power of the social web starts by listening and understanding the dynamics of the communities that interest you. But from listening should come action. At the very least, listening enables you to react in a timely manner. At the very best, listening makes it possible for you to anticipate needs, problems and opportunities.

Traackr helps by focusing your social listening on the most important people and content so you are more prepared and act faster than your competition.

GET FEEDBACK FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENTGain essential insights on the feelings and opinions around your product and drive a smarter product development.

How to do it:

• Identify the top influencers around your product category.

• Collect data and insights from your influencer’s content.

• Find the themes driving opinions of your product.

• If you want to generate more direct feedback from your influencers, allow them to test the product, provide feedback or get members of their audience to participate. Tip: create a product advisory board with members from your influencer lists.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Detailed Influencer Profiles, Keyword Report, Theme Report

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CONDUCT COMPETITIVE ANALYSISUnderstand your competitors and track how your organization is situated in the competitive landscape.

How to do it:

• Use keywords to find the influencers who cover the general conversation where you compete.

• Track how often influencers mention you and competitors.

• Segment mentions by theme and sentiment.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Share of Voice Report, Sentiment Report, Theme Report

GET TO KNOW YOUR PROSPECTSFollow prospects and generate high quality leads.

How to do it:

• Create a list of your top prospects.

• Identify all of the places they publish and share online so you can access all of their content.

• Set up monitoring systems so you know when your prospects talk about important topics in real-time.

• Study your prospects’ content to tailor your materials and reach out on social channels.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Detailed Influencer Profiles, Pulse

Sell SmarterWidmeyer Communications

Widmeyer Communications, a leading independent public relations agency uses Traackr to follow their prospective clients so they know which issues are most important to them, what types of activities they are trying, the tone of their conversation and the challenges they may be facing. This way Widmeyer Communications has all of the information and insight they need to win the account when the time is right.

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5 MEASURE IMPACT & REPORT ON PERFORMANCEIf a marketing campaign is successful, but no one measures it, does it make an impact? Jokes aside, it’s vital to track progress towards business objectives. In communications, there are a few notable measures for demonstrating performance: share of voice, topicality, sentiment and message pull-through.

Traackr helps by keeping tabs on important metrics, generating presentation-ready reports and making it easy to track message-level themes and sentiment.

DEMONSTRATE SHARE OF INFLUENCEReduce time required to track and report share of voice.

How to do it:

• For each group of influencers, follow specific keyword mentions (company name, product name, key people, competitors, etc).

• Create reports and visualizations to demonstrate to your team or clients the number and frequency of mentions.

• Break out important content by keyword and influencer to show trends in coverage and message pull-through.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Share of Voice Report, Theme Report

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TRACK CRISIS MITIGATION EFFORTSDetermine if communications programs and messaging are making an impact.

How to do it:

• Create a list of people who are influential in the topic affected by the crisis.

• Target your mitigation efforts on the individuals who can help you spread your messages widely.

• Develop a system to categorize posts and mentions by the themes of your campaigns.

• Run reports to show how messaging is being picked up and transmitted by your influencers.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Detailed Influencer Profiles, Pulse, Theme Report

FOLLOW CHANGES IN SENTIMENTReport accurately on sentiment.

How to do it:

• Read the most recent content by your influencers.

• Monitor their content to associate sentiment to mentions (positive, negative or neutral).

• Report on changes in sentiment across your influencers.

Traackr Features: Influencer Discovery, Dynamic A-Lists, Pulse, Sentiment Report

Keeping an Ear to the Ground JPMorgan Chase

For JPMorgan Chase, listening is a critical part of its social media strategy. While the social noise around a large brand such as Chase can be almost deafening, Chase uses Traackr to navigate through all the sound and take away clear, actionable messages – about the brand, its products and the industry as a whole. With this knowledge, Chase can then tailor its messages in a way that is productive and meaningful, rather than just adding more noise.

Using Social Listening to Monitor Trends SocialxDesign

Traackr helped SocialxDesign, a strategy firm that builds brands and loyalty by bridging online engagement and offline experience, follow the 2012 US Presidential Election and map campaign issues to social conversations. This sped up understanding, response, and above all, engagement in the audiences that mattered most. Traackr enabled SxD to pinpoint the most influential conversations as they happened, letting them cut throughout the chatter and follow key ideas and topics in a way that drove action. This research paid off not only in engagement, but in follow-up reporting and data sharing reported by SxD in publications like Forbes.

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Engaging with influencers is more an art than a science. What makes excellent influencer engagement stand out from mediocre attempts is creativity and customization.

This is a lot easier to accomplish when aided by Traackr’s influencer insight and analytics tools that let you deep dive into the online profiles of the people you want to engage.

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BEST PRACTICESFOR ENGAGEMENT

BE RELEVANT, DO YOUR HOMEWORKLook at an influencer’s entire online footprint including everywhere they publish: blogs, co-authored sites, Twitter, Quora, etc. Before reaching out to someone, find out their topics of interest, how often and where they publish, and what they enjoy doing outside of their influential zone. “I always start my influencer outreach with research. With Traackr we are able to go really deep for each of our influencers – digging into their interests, communication style, resources they use, etc. We are able to create very personalized pitches from this research that results in great relationships and stories for our clients. I was struggling to get our client on the radar of an influencer and after some digging on our Traackr list, I discovered he had a side blog covering his interest in sports technology! When our client (a tech company) held an event at Fenway Park, I was able use that knowledge to send him exactly the right information to secure his attendance and long-term interest in our client.”

Jesse Hamlin, Account Manager, Eastwick Communications

ENGAGE EARLY, OFTEN AND AUTHENTICALLYSometime influencer relationships take off quickly on the first email or Tweet, more often they require nurturing. Engage by joining their conversations, leaving comments, asking them questions. You’re interested in them so there will be opportunities to connect.

EMBRACE COMPETING VIEWPOINTS Different opinions make the world go round! Embrace alternate views and use them to your advantage. Find your comfort zone and understand how your point of view is different than others. What’s great about competing ideas is they make for truly engaging conversations.

COMMUNICATE WITH CONFIDENCEWe all want to be valued and influencers are just like the rest of us. Imagine how great you would feel if you received a thoughtful email asking for your opinion. The only difference between you and an influencer may be they have an audience and topic matter experience. Bear in mind you don’t need to convince a well-chosen influencer that the topic you care about is important, they know as they are an opinion leader in that conversation. “What makes an influencer an ‘influencer’ is that they are connecting good content – content that’s interesting, useful, provocative, funny – with an already-engaged audience. This audience is inherently interested in what this influencer has to say or share. But they don’t necessarily create all of that themselves. You can help both the influencer and yourselves by reaching out to the right influencers with the right content at the right time.”

Alan Belniak, Director of Social Media Marketing, PTC

TRY ALTERNATE CHANNELSA good rule of thumb is to start by engaging influencers on active online platforms they own (rather than contribute) but not everyone you address will be game to engage with you. They could be busy or simply uninterested. Some will respond to let you know and others will leave you hanging. It’s a good idea to follow up or try alternate channels. Set goals and make adjustments if needed.

COMPENSATE WHEN IT MAKES SENSEInfluencers are excellent sources for content, but keep in mind the difference between briefing an influencer and asking them to generate fresh content for your benefit. When it makes sense, approach the relationship as you would with a service provider. Trade carefully though as ‘real’ influencers will always value their audience over a deal (as the trust they earned in their community is their real currency). If you enter in a business relationship with an influencer, you’re really buying their expertise, not their influence.

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ABOUT TRAACKRTraackr is a powerful influencer analytics suite that supports successful influencer marketing strategies by giving you the knowledge you need to craft smart strategies and effective plans. Traackr helps you understand your audience and focus your attention on the most important data on the social web.

Influencer Discovery

Traackr’s Discovery Engine finds the most influential people on any topic as you define it. Traackr automates the influencer mapping process to give you a complete list of relevant people based on your custom keyword phrases.

Dynamic A-Lists

The dynamic influencer lists refresh on a regular basis, continuously pulling in fresh content and changes to influencer ranking. Your A-lists are fully customizable so you can add your own influencers to the list, exclude individuals and export contact details.

Detailed Influencer Profiles

Influencer Profiles give you the entire online footprint for every influencer on your list, including contact information, direct links to their publishing platforms and relevant posts on your specific topics.

Pulse

For real-time listening, Pulse helps you stay on top of what your influencers are saying as they publish and interact. You can configure Pulse to display real-time brand mentions, event hashtags or any other keywords.

Sentiment Report

Assign sentiment at the influencer- and content-level from anywhere in the application. Then run reports to monitor changes to opinion on your brand or topic over time.

Theme Report

Throughout the application you can apply custom themes to content so you can simplify processes like tracking message pull-through, managing influencer follow up and keeping on top of your outreach to influencers.

Share Of Voice Report

Automatically track mentions of your products, brand, or competitors by influencers and monitor your share of voice over time. You can also create presentation-ready performance reports for custom time frames.

Keyword Report

Get deeper insight into your influencers and emerging content trends. Browse content by your influencers and see which topics are most talked about by influencer.

Geo-Targeting

Geo-target searches to include or exclude geographical areas. All influencer lists can also be sorted by location to find influencers by geography.

Curated RSS Feed

Get a curated stream of your influencers’ content for yourself, team members and clients. From the Share of Voice Report, you can grab an RSS feed of content to integrated into your reader or mobile app.

THANK YOUSpecial appreciation to the following people for sharing their stories with us. These individuals are at the leading edge of influencer marketing, making waves and showing the way.

Manny Ataebi, Logicworks

Alan Belniak, PTC

John Demarchi, Social Czar

Jake Gardner, Logicworks

Jesse Hamlin, Eastwick Communications

Chris Herbert, Mi6 Agency

Barry Reicherter, Widmeyer Communications

Giovanni Rodriguez, SocialxDesign

Lisa Joy Rosner, NetBase

Jessica Sheehan, JP Morgan Chase

Ben White, Edelman

For more informationcontact info@traackr.com

“We all know that influencer marketing has been around since the beginning of time. So, what’s new today? There is just so much noise out there that it’s increasingly difficult to know who is authentically influential to your target customer. The value of Traackr is that it surfaces the right people who can have a disproportionately powerful impact on your brand so you can get the most out of your engagement efforts. If you don’t know who your influencers are today, it’s time to get started!”

Lisa Joy Rosner, CMO NetBase