By Alan MacDonald, General Manager of Digital and Creative, Aimia.
With the proliferation of online networking and communications tools, social media is playing a larger and more important role in today’s loyalty marketing efforts – in fact, it’s changed the game.
In the past, consumer likes or dislikes were limited and virtually “invisible” to the brand. If you as a consumer had a bad experience, you might complain about it over the dinner table and then you may change course going forward with where you took your business, but the brand would likely have no idea about a wide-spread problem or a great experience in this scenario.
Today, this is all transparent and out there in the digital wild. Not only out there for the buyer, but now for the internet audience, influencing others within their social network – which magnifies the impact of the experience either in a good way or bad way. The impact of this shift is that it dials up the focus on brands and leads to greater accountability to deliver a positive experience and to respond quickly to the bad ones. This may seem daunting, but it also creates opportunity in a brand’s favour because a fantastic customer experience can be amplified in the same way – and, in addition, the personal account of an experience also helps to humanize the brand.
In this social-savvy age where consumers now dictate the terms of brand connection and are reachable in increasingly granular groups, the idea of recruiting influential consumers as valuable brand intermediaries is compelling. As such, social media influencers can be viewed as the new brand loyalty royalty.
To become an effective marketing strategy, social media marketing must first become part of an effective customer strategy. Today, marketers must leverage a segmentation approach to identify, understand and influence customers through these channels. To that end, Aimia conducted research in the U.S. to develop six social media usage “personas” based on the twin behavioral drivers of Trust and Control:
TRUST = PARTICIPATION. The more trust consumers place in social media networks, the more likely they are to actively participate.
CONTROL = EXPOSURE. The more control consumers perceive over their social media activity, the more likely they are to engage with a wider variety of social media networks.
No Clear Formula for Influencer Success
There are currently plenty of conversations surrounding “influencer marketing”. The biggest challenge is identifying and motivating the right influencers from a sea of possible choices, since there is currently no widely accepted formula for defining what an influencer should look like. Furthermore, what is considered an influencer in different contexts may very well differ and measuring success in this arena depends on the behaviours marketers are looking to shift. As marketers navigate the shifting waters of influencer marketing, they must take a thoughtful and realistic approach that keeps end-goals in mind.
Here are five important social media influencer-tackling tips:
1. Understand what business goals you’re trying to achieve. As with anything in social media, having set goals before launching a program is key.
2. Consider influencer marketing a long-term play. A big challenge for most companies, when it comes to social influencers, is moving from an “advertising” mindset to a “relationship” mindset. Nurturing relationships requires persistence and patience and won’t necessarily work with traditional advertising timelines.
3. Don’t try to buy influencers. Some influencer-marketing efforts have become pay-to-play campaigns, where brands offer financial incentives to bloggers, for example, in exchange for recommendations to followers. But this can easily be recognized by the reader as a form of advertising and disingenuous. Instead, providing soft benefits such as status-enhancing knowledge to the influencers can sometimes work to strengthen a longer term relationship and provide genuine advocacy.
4. Not all influencers are created equal. According to the WOMMA Influencer Guidebook 2013, there are five distinct categories of key influencers with whom marketers can identify and engage. There are individual “advocates”, who are positive toward the brand but are formally unaffiliated; “ambassadors”, who have a transparent affiliation and brand endorsement; everyday “citizens”, who offer a neutral, objective stance; “professional” influencers who are highly regarded within an industry; and those with “celebrity” status. Which ones a marketer approaches depends on the brand, the industry, and the influencer attributes sought by the marketer.
5. Learn the basics of network science and social network analysis. Gaining an understanding of who influencers may be is no easy task – in fact, it has become a science that includes metrics such as the percentage becoming advocates, the percentage who show interest in a given brand’s offering, and the sway the mentions provide. Brands can also track individual influencer effectiveness, including the number of effective conversations, the leverage of conversations generated, and the reach of the influencers. Tracking these individual-level metrics will allow for better selection of influencers in the future and help design the best formula for finding effective influencers.
Lessons for Loyalty Marketers
Loyalty marketers have been in the relationship-building game for a long time, so they would have an advantage in harnessing the power of social influencers. As many social media influencers are also your customers, it’s important to continue to build that real relationship with them through every interaction with your brand. Social media can now be viewed as a thread woven into the fabric of a loyalty program or strategy.
It is also important to remember that social influence really starts with your brand as your greatest ambassador – as a company that offers consistent, engaging, and value-added conversations that help those long term and loyal customers.
Combining social media marketing with your loyalty programs and customer data analytics will help to ensure that every dialog opportunity is perceived by customers and social media influencers as valuable and relevant to the relationship. Leveraging social media as a tool to build those relationships that increase trust and facilitate the flow of information is key.
By understanding that consumers and social media influencers interact with social media based on the drivers of trust and control, businesses can place social media in its proper role: as a tool that helps build long-term customer relationships based on deep consumer insight.
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About Aimia
Aimia, a global leader in loyalty management, has proven expertise in launching and managing coalition loyalty programs, like Aeroplan, delivering proprietary loyalty services, creating value through loyalty analytics and driving innovation in the emerging digital, mobile and social communications spaces. For more information, please visit: aimia.com.
