You Ask, I Answer: Managing Brand Expectations for Influencers?

This is the fourth in a series of questions from the B2B Influencer Marketing Summit held recently by SAP and Analytica. These are the questions from the panel discussion that we just didn't have enough time to dig into depth about. So I'm answering them here. Today's question how do you manage brand expectations within an influencer marketing program? And this to me is very much a measurement question, right?

How do you measure influencer marketing so that the influencer and the brand are measuring the same things and the influencer and the brand are setting expectations appropriately based on this the scope of measurement? So let's start with a few different things, because there's a lot to unpack here. First, it depends on the kind of influencer, right? We have a tendency, and I mean we in B2B marketing, have a tendency to think of influencer marketing as social media marketing. And that is partly true.

Social media is a component of influencer marketing, but it is mostly not true, especially in B2B. Here's why. They are in archive and bioarchive online. They are in published uh academic papers. Um they are uh in peer-reviewed journals.

You know, that's where those those folks are who make who will influence decisions. If you were in law and the legal realm, where are your influencers, right? They're going to be in Lexus Nexus and Fine Law and all these places where um influential people, people who can change a conversation, are hanging out. Again, probably not on Twitter, right? Uh even though for a lot of influencer marketing tools, they seem to overfocus on Twitter.

Well, that's going to about to change. If you are in real estate, right, where are your influencers? A good chunk of them are going to be on places like YouTube and Instagram, sure, publicly. Behind the scenes, there's you know back end systems like MLS. There is understanding how to manipulate those systems to accomplish different tasks.

If you are in coding and development, where are your influencers? They're on GitHub. They're on GitHub, they're in code repositories. Maybe they're on Reddit, maybe a few of them are on Twitter, but they're in GitHub. And if you know GitHub's data model, uh, you know how to find those influencers because it's they're the ones who are doing lots of commits on public projects that are about the subject area that you care about.

Influencer marketing extends way outside of social media. Right. Where if you are in your industry, where do you see prominent people getting attention? And chances are for a lot of B2B, it's not social media. It is someplace very specific.

It is some kind of realm where they have expertise. So that's first. Where are your influencers? Second, how do you measure the impact of influencer marketing? Influencer marketing is very similar to public relations.

There are two primary outputs, right? One is awareness to drive awareness to a new um to a brand, it's products and services. How do you create that awareness? And the second is trust. You're bringing in influencers because consumers rightfully, and consumer we use here in the B2B and B2C sense, customers don't trust you.

They don't trust you to talk honestly about your product. And so you have to bring in third parties to do so on your behalf. Public relations uses a lot of influencer marketing. And so if you think about how you measure public relations, then you should have to have a pretty good idea of how to measure influencers. You have basic sort of top-level metrics like uh impressions, media impressions and things, which are not worthless, right?

If you have zero media impressions, you don't have anything else because you no one saw you. So that clearly that number does mean something if if zero is bad. But then you have more complex forms of measurement. Uh example, uplift modeling is something that if you're engaging influencers to do influencer marketing, uplift modeling should be part of your toolkit, uh, which is a statistical method to look at what was business as usual, right? What would you have gotten no matter what?

And then you have the influencer campaign. What's the delta on that? Right? What's the what's the impact in the days and weeks and months after an engagement above and beyond what you're going to get anyway? And there are statistical techniques for doing that that are, well, statistically valid.

Media mix modeling, another example. Your influencers should be part of your media mix model to see how they impact outcomes that you care about. Setting brand expectations means having a conversation about measurement. Asking them how do you measure things? How do you want to measure this program?

How will you know what success looks like? How will you know what failure looks like? And if a brand doesn't have those answers, it's probably not going to be a successful long-term partnership. If you can't say to somebody, here's what we did, and here's the line of sight, the dotted line, the path to a metric that you care about, right? If the CMO is in charge of marketing qualified leads, something that you provide in measurement wise had better have a correlation to marketing qualified leads in some statistical capacity so that you can say, Yeah, we did X, Y, and Z, which resulted in a you know a 6% lift in marketing qualified leads.

That's something that a stakeholder can take to the bank or at least take to the boss and say, hey, we got 6% more leads because of this program. Let's keep doing it. So setting expectations with a brand is about setting expectations around measurement. And what you're willing to provide, what the brand is willing to provide, and what you're willing to agree on to say, like, yeah, this measure doesn't make sense, right? If there will be cases where if you're providing awareness and trust, you're probably not direct selling.

Might be, but you're probably not. You're probably just trying to get people to recognize this brand even exists, that they even belong in the consideration set. What are your consideration metrics? What are the things that people would type into a search engine or ask on a social media channel? Um here's here's people talking about how to learn more about this thing.

That's awareness. So that's how I think about managing brand expectations in an influencer marketing program. It is what are you measuring? What does success look like? And then can we create modeling around that that helps you understand?

Yep, you're you're getting what you you wanted. And it is a partnership for both the influencer and the brand to collaborate on measurement, to agree on a common standard of measurement, and then to implement that measurement as part of the program. So that's uh part four of the uh questions from the influencer marketing summit, the B2B Influencer Marketing Summit. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.