With the right tools, marketers can make the most of the relationships they build with brand ambassadors, tracking and optimising influencer activity to inform smarter business decisions.
Essentially, brand ambassadors’ personal networks are used to communicate a message about a specific brand. They influence what’s being said about the brand and they play an integral part in any marketing strategy. Remember, people trust people more than they do brands.
That said, you need an accurate indicator to track the influence of brand ambassadors – as well as a means to visualise, react and intelligently respond to this influence.
Why the need for a tracking tool?
An effective tracking tool allows you to measure not only what an influencer is talking about but also people’s behavioural responses to it. You can tap into conversations you might otherwise have missed, and measure the success of different types of activity such as re-tweets, post frequency, responses and interactions. All this ensures you’re getting the most from your spending on the influencer.
It is also important to make posts easy to track, which will mean that they’re more likely to be seen by your audience and add value. To make content measurable on each platform, influencers should be briefed to stick to a few simple guidelines. Hashtags, for example, are important to make sure that all posts about a particular campaign can be measured and tracked – particularly important on Instagram. In addition, local brands should be tagged for maximum exposure, as well as making it easier to locate and analyse relevant mentions.
But don’t rely solely on tagged images. While many social media sites allow users to tag profiles in a picture, these are often not available in search. Influencers should also tag the brand in the text of the post. Content should be shared on pages and not on personal profiles if posts and engagement are to be measured – @Brand-page posts must be on a public page or shared onto the brand page itself.
Accurate tracking offers a number of benefits: you can discover themes and sentiment trends without too much manual intervention. Social media engagement may be tricky to measure in terms of absolute return on investment, but analysing conversation metrics can go a long way towards understanding whether your influencer relationship actually benefits your brand.
The data gleaned from tracking allows you to analyse engagement to see how many new authors engaged as a result of influencer content. It also enables you to benchmark influencers to understand who is driving the most conversation and engaging the most influential people. Examining themes in conversation means that you can plan content strategy. Finally, you can measure changes in sentiment to see whether ambassador content is creating a positive splash.
The big take-out: Tracking tools allow for the effective measurement of brand ambassador relationships and provide useful data which can be used for maximum benefits.