This article is part of a series "Activating influencers across the customer journey" comprised of the following stages:
Overview (this article) - Awareness - Consideration - Conversion
People on social media are driven by their passions and interests. They follow other people and pages with whom they share a connection rooted in these passions and interests. Influencer marketing is about leveraging the value of the connections within these digital communities and penetrating them. The aim should be for your product to become what your audience is interested in rather than interrupt their experiences with ads about your product.
Interruptive ads on social media behave akin to a person walking around in a mall and getting stopped by a sales person every few steps - It is only natural for people to neglect that interruption. However, imagine this scenario instead: Say a friend has invited you over and you happened to notice a product you liked. The next time you go to the mall and a sales person interrupts you to sell you that same product, you're far more likely to engage and possibly buy.
People on social media behave in the same way and as a business, your objective would be to natively bring your product to life in active communities and collaborate with influencers who have a high intensity connection to their followers.
💡 You can measure the intensity of an influencer's connection with their audience thanks to the iScore. A high iScore reflects strong engagement rate and viewership rate which is indicative of how well they influence their audience.
Now the key to marketing success is to look at your prospective customers in the view of their journey and to be able to measure your performance across this customer journey. This is where the (simplified) marketing funnel, represented by awareness, consideration and conversion, comes in.
The customer journey is deployed in various manners, depending on the current positioning of the product or service among consumers. The goal can be to fill an awareness gap, a consideration gap, a conversion gap or a combination of them, and this will determine your choice of influencers.
Hence, mapping the customer journey to the influencers journey requires identifying those who are most effective in targeting the specific gap you're focusing on. Each influencer has his or her own strengths, some are great at generating awareness while others are better at triggering interest and a different group is great at sales.
There is a whole industry formed around affiliates who generate sales for eCommerce brands and they happen to perform well when compared to ads. This has been very evident in the massive growth of LTK, an affiliate marketplace that has recently been valued at $2B.
However, not all influencers are experts and can sway prospects to buy. They can however trigger their interest by showcasing the product in a relatable context. In effect they would be getting the prospects to the consideration stage and the opportunity here lies in the ability to detect these considering prospects and be able to convert them down the line through retargeting.
💡 Retargeting prospects among the influencer's followers who are at the consideration stage can save you up to 30-40% of customer acquisition costs.
We are only scratching the surface here. you can delve deeper into the strategies and best practices on how to best utilize influencers across the full customer journey with our dedicated customer journey series focusing on the different stages or objectives: awareness, consideration and conversion.
Read next article ➡️ Awareness
