Do any of these concerns resonate with you?

• Influencers in my category, for my competitors and for my brand are changing everyday. They sometimes seem to come out of nowhere overnight.
• The CMO has challenged us to have more insights on how influencers can help us move the needle, yet the CFO has challenged us to be more cost efficient while doing it.
• There are so many analytics platforms out there. I have no idea where to start.
• We’ve purchased several suites of tools and I’m already overloaded with data.

I’m sure there’s more. These were just the ones that came to-mind before you had your first cup of coffee today, right?

I know I hear at least one of these statements every day from customers. Being a marketer in today’s rapidly changing, fast paced consumer and business environment is not easy, and it’s why we meet with so many companies that are looking for a solution to help drive more impact without adding more work – or headcount – to their team.

In this post, I’ll share these common concerns that businesses have and why so many need an analytics partner to improve influencer engagement results without the risk and expense of going it alone. 

Influencers in my category, for my competitors and for my brand are changing everyday. They sometimes seem to come out of nowhere overnight.

Credible influencers are emerging faster than ever before. Not long ago, one could evaluate and plan for influencers to reach out to on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Not anymore. Marketers have to evaluate new opportunities daily so they can make adjustments to get the most out of them.

Technology-enabled services are a viable solution for being more nimble at examining brand relevant content through various lenses. These types of solutions provide influencer insights, not just data, and weed through the growing list of influencer opportunities, capture the emerging influencers with the greatest potential for impact and shorten the runway for engaging them.

Our CMO has challenged us to have more insights on how influencers can help us move the needle, yet the CFO has challenged us to be more cost efficient while doing it.

I’m not saying the solution is to move influencer marketing to the digital team, invest in a reorg of your marketing function or embark on an agency search with months of planning, just so you can “outsource it”; I’m saying that influencer marketing naturally touches so many facets of the marketing function that it should be a conduit to bridging the gap between marketing silos which can create efficiencies as a result. And, whether you have the in-house analytics resources or not, a technology-enabled influencer marketing partner who can also provide training is one way to quickly and cost effectively secure the analytics, insights and action plan that many aspects of the marketing function will find value in utilizing, learning from and improving.

There are so many tools out there, I have no idea where to start.

What @ChiefMartec shared in last year's state of the martech industry rings even truer today: “marketing has unquestionably become a technology-powered discipline.” For this reason, it’s no surprise that marketing technology solutions are growing. While this may seem insignificant, it reveals a new phenomenon: Listening to, evaluating and acting upon conversations manually, platform by platform, content piece by content piece, brand by brand, just isn’t realistic anymore.

However, I really don’t believe more technology platforms are necessarily the best answer. The presence of more tools should be reminding us that we need more people interpreting the output of these tools. Analytics tools are great, but they do little to solve, highlight and extract nuances — after all we are talking about people (influencers), not bots. Whether or not your company has in-house analysts, a partner who specializes in influencer analytics and can train your team on effective methodologies will improve your success rate in the short- and long-term.

We’ve purchased several suites of tools and I’m overloaded with data.

Many of our larger size customers tell us that they regularly scour the Internet looking for “the tool” to help “find new influencers”. New tools usually equal more data and larger reports to present to the CMO. While these tools may increase the size and level of detail in your PowerPoint presentation, they cannot summarize and distill the information into actionable insights. The overload problem needs to be handled with instruction in methodology and tradecraft by an analytics partner who understands how to find, validate and engage influencers. After all, the market is shaping up to be more artistic than statistic, and gauges and dials usually won’t help you when you are called to defend marketing results at the next board meeting. 

Final Thought

The pace at which consumers today engage with brands and their content makes it challenging to play at a high level with influencer marketing; I hear the frustration everyday and it’s one reason why influencer marketing products and solutions are growing so fast. I urge you to be wary of a platform-only approach, as influencer marketing is still a new marketing discipline. Tools and data without specialized human insight and training is risky.

This is why our clients have brought us on-board as their technology-enabled services partner for influencer marketing. Yes, an analytics platform is part of it -- we have one -- but there’s more to it. Contact us here if you want to learn more about how VizSense is solving and simplifying the influencer marketing conundrum for today’s most visionary brands, corporations and agencies. We also urge you to download our free eBook, Making Sense of Influencer Engagement: The Essential Elements of a Successful Influencer Outreach Program.