If you’ve searched for the term “influencer marketing” in Google trends during the last 18 months, then you’d notice it’s not slowing down. Today, the interest in the practice remains at its peak.
But, you may be wondering how this translates into program maturity across organizations.
To investigate this matter, we ran a proprietary research study to learn more about influencer marketing today and its strategic evolution for the future.
We discovered that current influencer program growth is stunted due to a disconnect between program leaders and implementers. For example, only 16% of companies cite PR as the owner of influencer marketing, while 65% of companies report PR executing influencer relations that are owned by the marketing department.
Influence is catching fire. As an agent of collaboration, influence transcends departments and silos among enterprise organizations. This represents an untapped opportunity for B2B and B2C enterprises to normalize the influencer marketing process, standardize KPIs and scale impact--while maintaining authenticity.
That’s why Traackr shipped 176 product updates during 2016. Our influencer relationship management (IRM) platform has since evolved beyond a discovery or monitoring tool. Traackr’s technology enables structure and governance for mature influencer marketing programs. Without going into feature/function overload, here are a few of the most enticing benefits our customers have experienced:
Enable Mature Programs that Scale Across Geographic Regions and Business Units
Traackr’s relationship-focused approach to influencer management allows users to manage, measure, and scale touch points that align influencer activities with the customer journey.
During 2016, our product and engineering teams delivered updates to fully support global enterprise influencer programs. With new languages and geographies added, our global customers could run worldwide programs but focus on key influencers in each local region. This year, we added Arabic and Portuguese to our supported languages, which include English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish. We now support the following countries with full coverage: US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, and Singapore & Hong Kong (English-only).
And to help enterprise brands in managing complexities across multiple sub-brands, we introduced a tiered account structure. This further enabled standardization across all sub-brands and improved governance of influencer activities across teams and business units.
Align Global Influencer Management to Streamline the Engagement Journey
Influence isn’t a switch; it doesn’t go on and off. And marketers are catching on.
83% of brand leaders cited a top priority to identify and build one-on-one relationships with industry key influencers. To align global influencer management with an always-on engagement journey, we optimized our relationship funnel.
With our customizable relationship funnel, customers can keep their team members aligned with program goals. You can customize relationship stages to match program goals and business objectives while tracking progress. This visibility helps teams collaborate, coordinate influencer outreach, and visualize progress--eliminating silos in the process. This is critical when influencers are targets for multiple products or brand initiatives. The optimal outcome delivers an army of influential advocates that our customers can activate at will.
Measure ROI with Standardized KPIs and Metrics
Long-term influencer relationships require new standards and methods for measuring success and return on investment.
That’s why our product and engineering teams introduced an upgraded analytics suite to truly put user experience at the forefront of innovation. With our enhanced analytics, our customers can quickly interact with influencer data in a fluid, fast and familiar way. With improved data visualization, reports have become easier to consume. This enables our customers to get critical influencer insights when they need them.
Identify Strategic Content Opportunities to Crystalize Brand Message
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We exist in a content-saturated digital world, but it’s very difficult to separate the signal from the noise. That’s why we completely overhauled the influencer content stream in Traackr. With our upgraded visual influencer content stream, our customers can consume content as they would in its native platform to:
- Filter visual content to optimize for readability
- Drill deeper with on-demand post-level metrics
- Act on opportunities to engage with visual content
- Pinpoint the most influential posts with trending content
Above all, the new and improved content stream in Traackr delivers strategic insights to help brands crystalize their messages to create more impact.
The Key to Mature Influencer Marketing that Scales
Interestingly, we learned that 57% of marketers manage influencer relations manually. To move beyond this spreadsheets-based tactic, we are helping our customers track influencer engagements using one system of record. Our influencer relationship management (IRM) platform enables enterprise B2B and B2C companies to scale their influencer marketing across geographies and business units.