Today’s media environment has become complicated by corrosive discourse, disinformation, and extreme online polarization as well as establishment platforms lurching under new leadership and market pressures. To compound challenges further for marketing and communications strategists, audiences are saturated by content making it harder and more competitive to capture attention and drive engagement.
Enter the Golden Age of Influencer
According to a recent survey, eight out of every ten consumers have purchased something after having seen it as a recommendation by an influencer. For Gen-Z and Millennials, influencers are now more trusted than celebrities as brand spokespeople. Needless to say, influencers continue to serve as reliable conduits for brands to credibly connect with target audiences. While marketers and communicators ramp up investment in influencer marketing, their greatest struggles are basic strategic imperatives:
- Finding the best influencers for campaigns
- Measuring ROI and campaign results
A data-led, audience-first influencer strategy provides brands with a way into the conversation and cultural zeitgeist reaching highly qualified audiences while also bridging the trust gap. With smart data influencer campaigns and activations can be established, optimized, and measured with the same precision as any programmatic effort.
By utilizing Porter Novelli’s proprietary omniearnedID platform and Pathfinder approach, we’re able to provide marketers and communicators with data confidence and design bespoke influencer programs to deliver against any strategic imperative.
Earned Audience Mapping
In the absence of a strong earned media pitch, we’ve shaped influencer strategies by modeling and mapping target audiences’ media consumption habits. In doing so we’ve helped clients successfully reach and engage publishers’ premium audiences.
Building Loyalty and Conquesting Competitors
We’re working with clients now to prioritize influencers based on brand preferences and predictive sales intent. Depending on the strategy, which may vary by audience segment or market dynamics, we’ll dial in on competitor audiences to drive home a message to switch.
Reputation and Purpose
As the agency with roots in social marketing we’re performing analyses, we’re utilizing data that includes interests, passions, and psychographics to inform influencer selection and activation that we know will inspire sustainable living, align with a brand’s values and purpose, and help drive positive behavior change at scale.
Supplementing Media Buys
By utilizing our taxonomy of 95,000 audience data points, we’re able to precisely match influencer audiences against programmatic targets and scale reach, drive efficiencies, and increase frequency.
Reaching Niche Audiences
Follower count is never a reliable measure for clout or influence. Gen-Z and Millennials report that authenticity and being knowledgeable are among the most important traits for influencers. With this in mind, we evaluate creators based on a proprietary methodology that analyzes audience fit, commercial fit, brand fit, and performance fit. The approach ensures that we can influence incredibly niche audiences from rare disease populations to business school graduates who recently started careers in finance.
With precision analytics, the opportunities for optimizing influencer strategies are endless. While sifting through the best data may sound daunting, we’ve found it can be simpler to begin with a priority challenge or two. As the data indicates, your primary pain point may be measuring ROI and campaign results. We’re implementing novel attribution approaches that can integrate seamlessly into existing measurement systems and provide actionable results without lag. Using one approach, which utilized IDs of audiences exposed and engaged by an influencer’s content, we found that the campaign resulted in sales uplift across the product category of 15% during the campaign and 9% post-campaign.
As influencer marketing continues to become a core tactic for marketers and communicators, data confidence is key to unlocking performance and driving success. More importantly, it’s critical for navigating the media landscape’s headwinds, connecting with audiences through authentic activations, and driving measurable performance.