Emotional Versus Traditional Marketing

As Danny Brown states in The Law of Emotional Connection, the traditional methods of advertising and marketing are all about attracting customers with an attractive product and an attractive message. Emotional connections, however, mean you should be (or are) tuning in to your prospects, listening to what they like and dislike, and learning what it is they really want and need. And on top of all that, it involves learning what triggers purchases and using what you learn to connect with your prospects and influence them to buy. This is an important part of what influence marketing accomplishes.

From Brand to Influencer to Customer

With influence marketing, your brand connects with influencers. Then, your influencers promote your brand to their audiences. As such, it is your influencers who make the emotional connection on behalf of your brand. For example, having your influencer answer semi-personal questions as they relate to your products and services can emotionally engage your audience.

As with most any other type of marketing, the story creates the emotional connection. Some stories simply set a familiar scene, something customers can relate to, and then share a familiar emotion, such as anxiety over making the right choice. These stories then drive home that a product is the right choice by sharing the transition from anxiety over choosing to confidence in having made the right choice. And influencers can often tell these stories far better than a brand can directly.

Influencers also establish emotional connections by showing how a product or service meets a basic human need. For example, an influencer may create content that demonstrates how a product will help make their life easier, make the buyer feel younger at heart, or make them feel more attractive and desirable. An influencer promoting a child safety product, for example, could encourage an emotional connection by demonstrating how the product meets the parent’s need to feel useful and capable of protecting his or her family.

The Relationship Era

Your influencers don’t just tell your story; they also stimulate discussion that produces valuable feedback from your customers. And this feedback helps you improve your offerings and your service, further encouraging customer loyalty. Because as we’re all rapidly learning, this is the new “relationship era.” Authentic relationships have become more critical than traditional advertising. In working with influencers who trust and feel loyalty to your brand, you fulfill your customers’ desire to feel important, listened to, and connected to your brand.

Because we’ve been thinking about trust a lot around here, we’ve been looking at how much Gen Z trusts various types of marketing. Here’s what we’ve learned.

Brand Social Media

In general, consumers don’t trust brand advertising or brand social media very much. But the picture is much rosier when it comes to Generation Z. Of the Generation Z consumers included in a Forrester Research survey, 22 percent indicated that they trust the posts brands and companies make via social media. That represents a significant difference when it comes to the level of trust other generations say they have for such posts. In fact, it is 49 percent higher than non-Generation Z trust levels.

Online Reviews Versus Brand-Created Content

Though Generation Z consumers are more likely to trust brand-generated texts, emails, and posts than other consumers, they are still more heavily influenced by content produced by other consumers and non-brand sources. While 13 percent trust company/brand-generated texts and 22 percent trust emails from brands and companies, a whopping 53 percent trust consumer-generated online reviews. Professionally written online reviews score high with this generation as well: 59 percent trust reviews provided on sites like CNET and Consumer Reports.

Search

Search is an important part of the consumer decision-making process overall, and 50 percent of Gen Zers trust natural search engine results. This is in contrast to the 29 percent that put their faith in sponsored search engine results.

Mobile

As far as mobile applications are concerned, 18 percent of Gen Zers trust the information they provide. And this number is 48 percent higher than that of other generations overall.

Developing the Plan

It’s clear that the two-way conversations Generation Z enjoys with brands makes them much more comfortable with social and digital advertising. However, the same digital savvy that makes them amenable to trusting brand content may likely translate into higher expectations. Brands who wish to earn the attention of Generation Z should do so authentically, on the platforms they care about and trust most.

Image credit: flickr – wwworks

Angelina has quickly risen to the top of the list for influencers on “Breast Cancer,” according to our scientific influence marketing platform.

Angelina’s admission on Tuesday, via an op-ed in the New York Times, that she’s had a preventative double mastectomy in order to lower her odds of developing breast cancer, which she has a strong genetic predisposition for, has instantly changed the conversation on breast cancer.

Breast Cancer Influence Measures

On May 13, before Angelina’s op-ed appeared, the volume of opinions (we use opinions, not mentions, to measure influence) was an average of 39 per day. On May 14, the day of the op-ed, the total opinions rose to 642. The net influence score (NIS), which is how we measure the overall influence of a topic, jumped from 123 on May 13 to 171 on May 14.  The huge jump in the number of opinions, plus the rise in NIS, indicates that not only did Angelina engage in the conversation about breast cancer, but others must have too.

And our data bears that out pretty easily.  In the days before the op-ed, the most influential people in the breast cancer conversation were Kathleen Hammett, a runner with Race for the Cure, and Megan Charles, a writer for The Inquisitr, who writes about health topics.

Influencers in the Breast Cancer Conversation

Since Tuesday, Angelina Jolie has become the most influential person in the breast cancer conversation. Also new to the list is Alice Park, a writer for Time who covered the news extensively this week and has written a cover article for Time which will launch on Thursday.

Three other top influencers now engaged in the conversation include: Sheryl Crow, another celebrity breast cancer survivor; Bonnie Fuller, Editor in Chief of HollywoodLife.com; and Maria Eugenia Alcon, Deputy Editor for NBC Latino, who wrote on Tuesday about breast cancer and Hispanic women.

We’ve seen Angelina’s effect on humanitarian and social causes before: her work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is well-documented and has raised awareness for those missions overall, and she’s supported numerous other causes, primarily children- and health-related.

It’s illustrative to see how one highly visible, and already influential, person, without any link to a specific charity or brand, could so quickly become the face of a cause.  For brands engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, understanding the effect a celebrity has on a cause could help frame future efforts.

The Time article announcing the Angelina cover begins, “Angelina Jolie has never lacked for influence.” We can emphatically, and scientifically, agree.

image: Time Magazine

At first, it is easy to confuse the two; thought leadership is a component of executive influence, so you might see them used interchangeably. But executive influence is a broader concept, and is measurable, while thought leadership may be somewhat less tangible.

Here is what you need to know to understand what each term means and how to tell the difference between the thought leadership and executive influence.

What is thought leadership?

Michael Brenner, writing at Forbes, defines thought leadership as “becoming an authority on relevant topics by delivering the answers to the biggest questions on the minds of your target audience.”

Great thought leaders have an ear for their audience’s questions and concerns and can eloquently speak to the most important of those topics. Their audience determines what their agenda will be, but each executive answers questions with their own unique point of view, enabling them to have an individual voice and, ideally, stand out amongst their peers.

Thought leadership is, unquestionably, important for your brand, as it provides your customers with a level of trust that the leaders of your company, and therefore your company, have the answers and solutions they seek. For your brand, thought leadership provides a way to become a part of your audience’s thought processes very early in the buying/decision-making cycle. Thought leadership also allows you to put personal faces to your business, and enables your business to become more social.

What is executive influence?

Executive influence encompasses thought leadership and then goes beyond it. Executive influence involves leveraging the talents of your executives to influence other individuals across your industry and within your marketplace to take actions which benefit your brand: talk about your company, your executives or your products or services; or amplify the content or messages your executive or your brand creates.

What does it take to engage other individuals? We think of it in three pillars:

1. Thought Leadership

If your executive is an expert on a topic and can create compelling content on that topic – in the form of written content, video or appearances at events, for example – those are the messages that influencers in your industry may discuss, dissect or amplify.

2. Traditional Media

Is your executive a go-to person for industry press when they have a question or they’re looking for a statement on something relevant to your brand?  When your executive’s opinions are made known through traditional media, their overall influence is raised, in part because most traditional media outlets are considered influential in their own right.

3. Social Media

Executives with their own social presences can use those networks to amplify their content (and other brand content) as well as engage and network with other influencers in their industry sphere. This social piece of influence is often underutilized (or not used at all) by executives; however, as it can have a considerable impact on an exec’s overall measure of influence, it may be worth considering if you’re looking to raise your their influence.

Measuring executive influence

At Appinions, we measure executive influence by understanding where an executive’s opinion has been published, and whether or not others took action on that opinion. To us, nothing is more powerful than action: social media followers are good to have, but engagement with an executive’s social media is far more important. Ditto for thought leadership – it’s one thing to publish something smart, but entirely another to know that that piece was quoted or amplified by other key voices in the conversation.

Executive influence has been known to increase employee loyalty and customer trust.  Greater executive influence can also lead to increased brand awareness, enabling customer movement along the purchasing journey, and sales.

Both thought leadership and executive influence could raise visibility of your executives and brand. But executive influence, if done well, can provide a deeper connection with customers and your marketplace and can become a measurable metric of success for your company.

image source: flickr (usembassykyiv)

This week’s round up of top influence marketing news from around the web focuses on understanding what it means to be an influencer and what it takes to become one.

Here’s what we’re reading this week.  What’s in your reader? Leave us a note in the comments section at the end of this post.

The State of Play for Influence Marketing in 2013 – Infographic
Before purposing yourself to become an influencer, take a peek at what the future looks like for marketers and influencers.  Sam Fiorella and Danny Brown, who literally wrote the book on Influence Marketing, published an infographic with some tasty morsels of knowledge. For example, 50% of survey respondents indicated they will be allocating budgets for “influence marketing” strategies.

Read the full post here: The State of Play for Influence Marketing in 2013 – Infographic

The Influence Hierarchy
Jason Keath tells us, “Influence marketing is cool.  It is fun.  It is sexy.”  Why yes, it is.  That’s why you want to be an influencer, right?  We particularly like this post because Jason explains all the basics and helps everyone understand the difference between being a Bieber and a Blogger.  He also uses a lot of visual aids, which makes Friday reading even that much more enjoyable.

Read the full post here: The Influence Hierarchy

The State of Influence Marketing and Scoring Platforms
One thing a potential influencer should understand is that there is a big difference between the various social scoring systems.  Some are more weighted towards a particular platform and most don’t take into account offline influence.  Except, of course, here at Appinions where we take all channels into consideration, as well as topical context.

As a potential influencer, it’s important to realize that brands and companies don’t take many of these platforms as gospel.  In fact, over 68% think it’s only a starting point, as Francisco Rosales shares in this post at Social Mouths.

Read the full post here: The State of Influence Marketing and Scoring Platforms

Content isn’t King.  Trust is King.
Last, but not least, is this piece of advice that is practical for both brands and bloggers wanting to position themselves as influencers and the title of this post says it all, “Trust is King.”  Yes, content is important, very important, to build your readership, but if you don’t have trust, you’ll never have influence.  This post from SEOMoz shares 10 pieces of wisdom on how to develop trust.

Read the full post here: Content isn’t Kind.  Trust is King.

Local Versus Global
A smaller following may be big enough if you have a business that caters to a small, local audience. In such a case, an influencer with a few hundred followers in your local area may prove more beneficial than an influencer with a large following that is spread across the country and unlikely to be interested in your local offerings.

Niche
An influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers is unlikely to prove an asset to your brand if those followers have little-to-no interest in what you have to offer. For example, if your brand caters to parents of preschoolers, but your influencer’s fans consist mostly of parents of teens, it’s a poor fit, even if the influencer has a huge audience. If, on the other hand, you sell a highly specialized product and your influencer’s followers all have a need for that product, that influencer may prove an asset, even if their following is small.

Engagement
Of course, engagement matters as well. A huge number of followers doesn’t mean much if they aren’t well engaged. Remember, an influencer can’t get a number interested in your brand: it’s people you need to engage. As such, an influencer with a smaller number of well-engaged followers may help your brand more than an influencer with a large list of followers who initially connected with her but don’t actually trust her, pay attention to her posts or interact with her anymore.

Worthiness Meter
Follower size can matter if your brand needs an influencer who is seen as an authority or a leader in a particular industry. In such a case, having more likes, fans, or followers (with commensurate engagement, of course) may give the impression of knowing more about the topic, being better connected with the industry, and therefore offering more value to the audience.

Each brand’s market is as unique as its goals, which means there is no one-size-fits-all for follower size. Instead, brands can maximize benefit by choosing the influence marketers who best fit their market and their goals.

Image credit: Skakerman

In pre-internet days, the buyer’s process was fairly straightforward: stimulus, shelf, experience. A stimulus sparked a buyer’s interest in a product, they went to the store or called a salesperson to buy it, and then they experienced the product. There were very few places where a brand could intersect with the buyer: an advertisement, which may have been the stimulus; the packaging and display, which spurred the purchase; and, possibly, after the sale in customer service – though if it came to that, it was inevitably because something had gone wrong.

A New Purchasing Journey
Today’s purchasing journey, whether for a consumer product or complex business purchase, has infinitely more touchpoints where a brand and buyer might intersect.

Buyers get information about a brand, product or service through an ever-increasing number of sources: as many as 10.4 sources in 2011, vs. 5.3 only a year earlier, according to Google research. These sources are comprised of both brand and non-brand touchpoints, including advertisements, product reviews, recommendations from friends, family and colleagues, mentions in mainstream media, and brand social media.

While company-driven marketing can have a significant impact on the consideration of a purchase, brand marketing loses effectiveness in the evaluation and closure stages of the purchase journey. The most trusted touchpoints are socially-driven: recommendations and other consumers’ opinions are more highly trusted than any brand, or even editorial, content.

A New Buyer’s Journey
So how can a company increase the likelihood that a buyer will find and develop trust within a touchpoint?

We suggest making them Trust Points™ instead.

We believe Influence Marketing can significantly upend the buyer’s journey, again, by giving brands the ability to create more, and more trusted, points of contact between a buyer and brand information. These points, which we call trust points™, are the moments when buyers encounter an influencer’s opinion or endorsement of a brand, product or service.  A trust point™ can enable the buyer to leapfrog over one or more of those 10+ touchpoints and accelerate the purchase process. Buzzfeed recently found that content reaching its target through sharing from a credible third party created a lift in consideration of 200-400% over similar content delivered directly from the brand. 

These influencer moments, these trust points™, happen when an influencer: 

• Mentions a product or service in an interview in mainstream or online media
• Writes about a product or service on their blog
• Uses a product and is captured doing so in a public photograph or video
• Mentions a product or service in their social media channels
• Appears on behalf of a brand at an event, tradeshow or conference
• Writes a review

Each time an influencer engages in one of these activities, they expose their friends, followers and fans to a trusted point-of-view on a product or service they appreciate.

A Shorter Journey
It’s easy to see why influence marketing is so powerful, and becoming increasingly more important. Influence marketing gives brands the ability to identify and create relationships with influencers; those influencers will provide the validation that we identify as trust points™ to help a buyer through their journey.   According to McKinsey, word of mouth recommendations are the only factor that is key in all of the critical phases of purchase, from awareness through shopping and purchase. And in fact, word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchases across categories. 

Trust blocks
Whenever a buyer experiences too many choices,  an uncertain future due to an economic crisis, or simply a long, complex purchase process, the result is often stagnation, delay, and an elongated purchase process that may never reach its conclusion. For most buyers, a lack of trust in the brand, product or company slows you down.

The kinds of products and services where trust points™ are needed most are:

• New products/services because new is inherently risky
• High ticket or luxury items where the risk of capital or social embarrassment is substantial
• Business-to-business purchases, which are usually complex, and also fraught with politics

Influencer-driven trust points™ resolve these obstacles and put the buyer back on the path to purchase.

Back to a 3 step journey?
The way we see it, there are really only three steps in the purchase process that matter:

1. I’ve heard of you but don’t trust you (because I haven’t encountered a trust point™)
2. I trust you  (because someone I trust said you were good )
3. I bought you and know you are good/not good, and am now an advocate/detractor

Note that the power inherent in each of the three phases is geometrically more potent than in the stage before it. The stakes get high quickly, so it is essential to provide a positive experience all the way through.

Good news/bad news
The good news about influencers is that most of their commentary about brands is positive. The bad news is that when it is negative, the results can be devastating. Influencers are too powerful today to be left to their own devices. Appinions provides all the data and analysis you need to create trust points™and proactively manage your brand and corporate reputation.

Image credit: The Legacy Project, Cornell University

Nobody’s questioning the fact that some of the names on this list are really great people; they are questioning the criteria used.   One individual who commented on the Forbes list says, “What is the standard/ criteria to define exactly what their level of influence they are providing to the mass majority of the industry they represent? Who? What? are they influencing? on what particular topic? When did it occur? Why? What results did they achieve to make them influential? How did this particular influence penetrate the market? What are the actual produced quantitative and qualitative results that can be identified and proven??”

We don’t blame them, either.  In fact, we’re glad to see that the conversation continues to evolve to a more elevated understanding of social influence.

So here’s what we’re reading this week: you’ll catch the theme pretty quickly.

25 Social Media Influencers Forbes Ignored, and Why
Mark Schaefer has a history with this annual Forbes list.  Last year, he openly criticized Mr. Shaughnessy’s methodology, despite the fact that Mr. Schaefer, himself, was on the list.  While our good friend didn’t make the 2013 list, he still openly questions how it was pulled together.  He tells us, “So the Forbes List of Top Social Media Influencers is 1) created by an individual, not a publishing company; 2) based on Twitter, not “social media;” and 3) admittedly not a measure of personal influence.”
Read More: 25 Social Media Influencers Forbes Ignored, and Why

Social Media Influence is Much More than this Forbes List Shows
“The power to sway,” is how Jure Klepic defines influence.  And he’s not wrong.   The question is “How do you measure the power to sway?”  It certainly has more to do than the number of times a person’s update is retweeted.  What’s really interesting in this piece is how Jure points out that list itself negates the criteria used to compile it.
Read More: Social Media Influence is Much More than this Forbes List Shows

Does Influence Marketing Have a Future?
Danny Brown makes it very clear, “Popularity is not influence.”  He further illustrates that influence is not only multi-layered but that Twitter is just one part of the social media ecosystem.  Because of this, any “top” list methodology that only looks at Twitter followers and retweets is immediately flawed.  Not only is it important to look at person’s entire social footprint, we have to put everything into context too.
Read More: Does Influence Marketing Have a Future?

Okay, maybe that was a bit of overkill on the subject, but we really couldn’t resist; the difference between an ”influencer list” and determining true influence is too important.

Have a great weekend – we’ll see you again with more influence marketing news in two weeks.

Image: Pink Sherbet Photography

To the uniformed, it may seem that influence marketing is all about convincing customers to, perhaps in an unsavory way, cajole other consumers into buying from you. Of course, brands do have the goal of selling more, but such blatant promotion and empty connection is most definitely not what influence marketing is all about.

Influence is About Connections

Instead of asking your customers to sling your wares, influence marketing involves making logical connections to people who have the right audience, and providing something of value that those influencers can feel good about sharing with their followers. It involves developing relationships and using those relationships to better inform and engage your target market. And influence marketing can help you do something so much more important than simply telling your prospects to buy: it helps you to learn what they want and need from your brand.

Influence is About Being Social

A lot of influence marketing today takes place in social media, with influencers using their blogs and social channels to connect with their communities. Your customers – who should be the audience of your influencers – use social media in ways that benefit and interest them, such as staying close to their friends and family members, following news stories, searching for jobs, or talking about their kids, hobbies or travels. They use social media for the things they value.

When a customer discovers your brand, or gets further engaged with your brand, via an influencer they trust, it’s often because they consider their connection to that influencer as a social connection or recommendation. That’s a very powerful thing for you and your brand.

Influence is About Conversations

Influence marketing can encourage the kind of conversations that help you build, launch, or improve your product or service. Your interactions with influencers stimulate conversations that provide valuable insight into how to make your products and services more beneficial for your target audience, and even discover how to make your marketing efforts more effective.

Influence is, Most Importantly, About Trust

Influential touchpoints for consumers and businesses are shifting away from company-driven marketing to consumer-driven marketing. By increasing the number of brand trust points™ you have with your consumers, you can increase the likelihood that they will engage with you and buy from you.

Influencers can create or be part of multiple trust points on your behalf. But trust is not bestowed on influencers by their audience, it’s earned. If influencers don’t stay true to their personalities, areas of expertise, and expectations they’ve developed with their followers, they risk losing their audience altogether. So when they work with your brand, it’s going to be only when they feel there’s a true benefit for their community, and that it will maintain their community’s trust.

When you use influence marketing for your brand, you aren’t asking customers to pick up their megaphones and shout to other customers, all for your profit. Influence marketing is both more subtle and more complicated than that. Make sure your influence efforts include carefully choosing influencers – people with the ear of your market – and enlisting their help to amplify your brand’s message and influence buying decisions in a trustworthy way.

Sophisticated Sorting

We’ve launched a new suite of topic filters that provides you with unparalleled flexibility to slice through mounds of influencer data, based on criteria that fit your objectives. These sorting options will speed up your ability to gather insights and find the right people by making the following information more accessible:

• Influencer Attributes – Name, gender, location, authors (great for media and bloggers!), opinion volume and influence score
• Opinion Attributes – Opinion keyword search, network types, and specific publishers
• Topic Trend Analysis – Common terms discussed by influencers within the topic

The ability to quickly filter and segment influencers will enable stronger influence marketing programs, which can be tracked and measured through our existing Programs functionality.

Profile Mapping

Our engineers have been hard at work, deploying significant linguistic capabilities to enhance our profile mapping algorithms and allow for robust keyword search in our new filters. What makes this function tick, and what makes the sophistication of this type of sorting so unique to Appinions, lies in the power of disambiguation.

Disambiguation allows Appinions to distinguish and match influencers with the same name to their correct personas across all networks. Thus we can assure that personas from Twitter, Google+, individual blogs, etc. are mapped back to the correct individual. (Read more on the importance of disambiguation for influence measurement from our Chief Technology Officer, David Pierce).

If you’re already an Appinions client, please contact your client services team member and they’ll be happy to provide a walk-through of our new features.

To learn more about how Appinions can ignite your influence marketing programs, please contact us today to request a demo.

Image: Appinions 2.0 Platform preview (topic: Electronic Medical Records)