Influencer marketing is a $22 billion dollar industry—and growing.
But not all influencer marketing plays the same role, says Lee Odden.
The key is to find knowledgeable influencers to build content with, addressing different parts of your customer’s journey.
Lee shared his insights on influencer marketing in his B2B Forum presentation in 2023.
Watch a clip from Lee’s session or read the transcript below.
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If you want your brand to be the best answer for your customers, you’ve got to understand this idea of search intent, right?
Search intent.
And what I’m talking about here is the intersection of SEO and influence.
And I promise this is just not a topic very many people are talking about, and I don’t know why.
Because whenever you create content and you publish it digitally on the web, there’s an opportunity for it to be crawled by Google and be an entry point for someone who’s searching.
“I need to buy this that you sell,” right?
So it’s remarkable, and influencer content is prime. Because if you understand EEAT—expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness from an SEO standpoint—these are things that are very, very important for Google to, well, Google’s quality raters to decide what’s a good search result.
Influencers, experts in a topic, are an awesome source to make brand content fulfill those Google expectations.
So search intent. There’s four different kinds of search intent.
Informational is basically, “what is a thing.”
Transactional is like, “I’m looking for a particular page,” or maybe, “I saw an ad, I’m looking for that particular ad.” Or maybe you see me speak today and you’re like, “I need to remember where that Lee Odon download, influencer marketing report page, whatever.”
That’s less important—probably—than some of these others.
Commercial intent is where they’re looking to compare. They’re actually evaluating. And then transactional is that they want to take action of some kind, right?
So, “what is a customer data platform?”
And then commercial, “what are the best customer data platforms?”
And, “I would like to buy Adobe’s customer data platform.”
You want to make sure that we understand those different levels of search intent.
So what we do is, we can drill a little bit deeper and use what we call the “search intent content matrix.”
So it’s basically, on one access, we have the different types of search intent—why are people searching—intersecting with the stages of the buying cycle, all the way to post-purchase.
We can figure out what questions people have at these intersections and use those insights to more intelligently architect the kind of content people are going to react to.
Now, it’s one thing if a brand answers these questions. I mean, that’s awesome because a lot of ’em aren’t. They’re just pushing out, “here’s what we want you to know.”
But if you partner with the most trusted people in your industry to answer these questions in the context of your brand, now you’ve got something that’s really special.
So you can manage this through a search intent keyword glossary, which has got all the data you can imagine, including keyword volume, whether we rank for a page or not, competitor information, obviously the stage of the buying cycle, what we assign is search intent for that particular keyword, and so forth.
So what’s a tip-of-the-iceberg example?
Cisco wanted to engage a particular target audience and basically just get those people over to particular pages on their website. Very, very simple.
But the brand topics were topics like “value engineering” and “digital value.”
Who’s searching on that? That’s like inside baseball.
But “digital transformation,” yes, this is the broader concept that was relevant.
So the idea here was to do some digging into SEO and social. What are people talking about relevant to digital transformation? The keyword list is monster, so I’m just giving you a little taste, but “digital transformation strategy,” “digital transformation and customer experience,” and so forth.
Understanding what is it that people are actually looking for and talking about.
And then the search intent.
What are the questions people are asking specific to that topic? Like “how digital transformation is driving customer experience,” so that we can get the most respected people in the industry to answer those questions.
And that was the strategy. Finding 10 plus people who are influential on digital transformation, but on subtopics of digital transformation as well, to help co-create content assets.
Now, the outcome was social engagement. A goal was reach, but then 68% more than that.
Engagements or interactions as a result of influencer shares was 280 [engagements], and I’m sorry, I don’t have a point of comparison. Shame on me, but that was good.
And solutions page interactions.
So the goal was getting people that represent the target account to come over to specific destinations. Now, there were 340 of those. That was a good thing. Mission accomplished.
Now let’s talk about connection. Relationships.
How can we make sure we’ve got the right influencers that we’re partnering with to move the needle?
To do that, you’ve got to understand the types of influencers.
And broadly we use categories like brandividual, superuser (or niche expert), up-and-comer (or macro-influencer), internal expert, and your customers.
And underneath each of these, we have different metrics.
Now, these look illustrated to look like sliders, but there are actual numerical values associated with these.
The knowledge is their depth of expertise on the topic at hand.
The reach is popularity, an indication of how popular they are.
Resonance is the degree to which the topic is something their audience interacts with when they publish.
And relevance, of course, is an indication of how often and how qualitative they publish on the topic at hand.
So taking those things into account through the influencer marketing platform, you can get recommendations and you can do tracking and do all kinds of fun stuff to create campaigns.
And this is a bit oversimplified, but just imagine this thing, this triangle, it’s not a sales cycle so much. It represents different volumes of content.
We typically create a lot more content for awareness than we would at conversion. That’s what that represents. So what we use is that information about those different types of influencers and our knowledge about search intent and stage of the buying cycle to match up influencers.
So for top of funnel, we’re going to use brandividuals. They’re bringing the party to the situation because they’re super famous, super well known.
And we get so from informational search intent. That’s what’s relevant.
From a commercial search intent, or middle of funnel, we’re talking about niche experts that are going to explain, “okay, why is our product better than some others?” Or, “let’s do some comparisons,” and so forth.
And then when it comes to conversion or transactional intent, then we’re looking at internal experts or actual customers that will do testimonials.
And so what’s important is what most folks are doing is they’re using influencers as if they’re all the same, and they’re not segmenting specifically like this at all.
Now, maybe some folks in here go, “I want to argue with you about that.” Well, let’s talk afterwards. But the vast majority of folks are not being so specific.
And as a result, they’re leaving money on the table in terms of influence, building trust, accelerating pipeline, and seeing all the other benefits.
So there’s a process to this that we follow:
Obviously there’s investment in time to do research for strategy. Recruiting: identifying and recruiting the right mix of influencers. Setting up or negotiating contracts. (And a lot of folks don’t have experience or that’s not the funnest thing to do.) Creating the content. The actual collaboration. Activation and promotion. And then, obviously, reporting and optimizing.
Published August 21, 2024
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