The fundamentals of Influencer Marketing

Whenever marketers refer to Influencer Marketing, they lay emphasis on identifying their influencers before starting to measure their activity and trying to start some kind of relationship with them. However, this might not be so effective: once you have found out who the influencers are, you should know what they talking about. The three fundamental questions about influencers are: who are influencer, what are they talking about and where is Influencer Marketing happening? 

Who

To answer the ‘who’ question, you should analyse their natural language to find out what are their reactions to opinions featured in news publications, blogs, or on social media. By making an analysis of millions of full-text documents every day, it is easy to determine who has demonstrated influence. 

Once the list of influencers is finalised, this information can be wisely used to build relationships, enhance content marketing, track thought-leadership, plan events, and build your innovative marketing plan. 

What 

What are the influencers talking about? Various natural language processing techniques can be used to identify the concepts (subjects and ideas) and entities (people, places, and organizations) from within the opinions that drives influencer scores.

By studying these lists and carrying out a bit of research into the context, tone, and specifics of the opinions that give a true understanding of what influencers are saying. If you’re doing content marketing, that’s a lot of ideas to re-share, amplify or add your own take. If you are working hard to understand why a competitive product is getting a larger reaction in your market, this is an incredible way to get inside the heads of their biggest advocates or detractors.

Where

Once you have answered the ‘who’ and ‘what’ questions, you must know where to go to participate or shape these conversations. Furthermore, you have to know which publications cover which aspects of your subject and which authors tend to write most frequently.  You can try to build a PR watch list, craft press releases, decide where to target sponsored stories, and learn which publication you should add to your daily reading digest.

As a conclusion, performing marketing without mastering the role of influence in your marketplace requires specific skills. You can’t gamble who is out there sharing opinions that are helping your brand, and who is out there pushing a competitor or even pushing directly against you. Influencer marketing is critical especially because it takes all this guesswork out of your innovative marketing strategy and tactics. 

More on: http://blog.appinions.com/2014/08/01/influence-marketing-the-who-what-where/