Last week, we met with the VP of marketing at a major Hollywood movie studio. When we got to the topic of how she evaluates the success of her content marketing, she said, “My team is going full bore all the time. We’ve got too many tools, and even less analysts who understand them. I need to minimize the workload while improving the insights and increasing the impact.”

What she shared is exactly the conundrum that businesses everywhere are facing -- they have to be “always on”. Today’s on-demand culture requires you to be part of the living consumer conversation, evaluating and adjusting along the way to be relevant. How do you solve this? Become part of the conversation or start a new one. And there’s nobody better suited to help you accomplish this than the influencers and advocates who are already talking about your brand. 

However, the challenge for today’s marketers is that credible influencers are emerging faster than ever before. Anyone with a smart phone and a spare minute is equipped to create, consume and engage with an always-on stream of information about virtually anything imaginable.

We previously wrote about the importance of influencer marketing and advocate marketing and this article takes it a step further, providing four simple steps you can take to help you leverage the information that current, new and emerging influencers provide so you can optimize your content marketing program.

Step #1: Pulse

For the “always on” marketer, you’re often so busy creating content and meeting deadlines that it’s not easy to take the time to identify new influencers to engage with on an almost daily basis. Further, the days of evaluating your content’s success on a campaign-by-campaign basis are long gone. Today’s marketer has to check the pulse of their topic, category, brand’s and competitor’s influencers and content performance on an almost daily basis so they can make adjustments to get the most out of their content.

How to do this? While you can take a manual approach, we recommend the use of technology-enabled social content and influencer analytics services so you can track specific pieces of content (yours or anyone else’s) and identify the most relevant influencers who could help spread your message. 

Step #2: Listen and Learn

Observe and listen to what current, new and emerging influencers are saying about your topic and content so you can gain valuable information that will help you optimize your content and uncover the new and optimal opportunities to engage with them. What type of content are they sharing most? What’s the topic? What’s the format? Of that content, what’s being shared most by their followers? And what’s getting the greatest network reach?

Part of the process is to ensure you have an influencer strategy that methodically plans and executes your objectives. With the help of social content analytics, you now have the ability to optimize your content on a more fluid, frequent basis than was possible with a manual approach.

Even if you feel like you know your influencers inside and out and your content marketing program is on-point, take what you observe to heart. You want to have a good sense about influencers as people with the potential to influence your future buyers and a window into what you can do to optimize your content.

Step #3: Reprioritize

By keeping your finger on the pulse of current, new and emerging influencers, you’re better positioned to quickly pinpoint your highest value content opportunities, reprioritize your content and capitalize upon the biggest opportunities. You’re trying to gain the most impact for your current content with the least impact upon your workflow. Why spend the time coming up with a new blog post topic when the last one received great traction and you could get more life out of it by turning it into an infographic, video or other shareable piece?

Step #4: Rework But Don’t Reinvent

Let’s say that, in your daily pulse, you discover a new influencer who achieved the highest network reach of any sharer of your blog post yesterday. As you listen more closely and observe, you notice that she regularly shares posts about your category (mid-priced hotels) and shares a high number of posts which include video. You also notice that she achieves a greater than average network reach when reposting content on family friendly travel topics and a recent post she shared from your competitor’s Twitter feed achieved a very large network reach.

What does this tell us? She is likely a credible influencer with her audience of those interested in family-oriented travel and you may have an opportunity to share more content with her that has a high likelihood of being shared by her and her followers.

Perhaps it would be a great idea to take your past blog post on “10 Packing Tips for Your Family’s Next Beach Vacation” and turn it into a short “how to” video to share across your social networks. You just built upon and repurposed content that you have already researched, written and you know resonates. Others will see it as new, fresh content that solves a consumer need but, in reality, you applied what you learned to optimize your current content and moved your brand up the value chain in the consumers’ mind.

Important to Note

What’s not detailed here is the importance of building relationships with and engaging influencers most likely to support your marketing efforts. We provide more detail about this critical aspect of influencer marketing in our free eBook, Making Sense of Influencer Engagement: The Essential Elements of a Successful Influencer Outreach Program.

To learn more about how VizSense can help you solve and simplify the influencer and content marketing conundrum, contact us here.