Employee Advocacy and B2B Influencer Marketing Combined
Employee advocacy is a marketing campaign that aims to train, deploy, and support employees in engaging in industry-related dialogues, promoting and defending the brand, and developing personal thought leadership. Employee advocacy refers to employees who work in specific job functions, executives, and the sales team in this context.
We already know that B2B buyers spend a significant amount of time researching products and services online and participating in social media discussions. Throughout the buyer’s journey, they are constantly looking for third-party approval. They use social media extensively and place more trust in their peers and coworkers than in marketing.
Employee programs are being integrated with B2B influencer marketing by facilitating strategic technology dialogues on public social media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn or within branded communities, such as SAP’s Brandwatch Community, which was recently launched.
As a result, influencers, customers, and other members of the technology community may watch and engage in a beneficial conversation. These discussions are also indexed in Google and have an indefinite lifespan.
There is also a procedure known as executive and influencer mapping. It’s comparable to the above-mentioned real-time influencer interaction, except instead of coming from branded channels, the activation comes from the executive social media profile.
Content Strategy Informed by Influencer Analytics
The example below shows how to utilize influencer analytics to find the most important persons in the data science space. Kirk Borne’s influencer profile may be found below. He is one of the world’s most powerful data scientists. You’ll also see a number of data points reflecting various variables related to Kirk’s subjects.
As previously stated, reference is the most important data piece proving Kirk’s influencer position. A social listening panel of 10,000 self-identified IT decision makers cited him over 176K times in 2019. This signifies that his work has a high level of resonance with an influential ITDM audience.
Influencer mapping is more than just a pretty way to display data. It’s a crucial method for mapping a group of influencers’ connective tissue. It visualizes data relationships that aren’t visible in an Excel document. New B2B influencers, storylines, topics, and audiences can be discovered using this data type.
Depending on what you want to accomplish, you can map influencers in a variety of ways. Affinity, interests, and qualities – what brands they follow, what industries they work in, or where they live – can all play a role in the connection. It can also be discovered on topics, such as what themes, narratives, and issues they publicly discuss. It could be based on audience – which groups of individuals they impact and how each audience connects. Finally, it can be used to find new people and determine “who” is affecting your group of influencers.
It’s critical to devote time and effort to influencer analytics and research once you’ve identified the top influencers. It entails putting the influencers into a real-time listing panel and mining the talks to figure out what matters to them the most. Historical debates are important because they may help recognize past tendencies and predict future ones. Influencer intelligence can reveal a number of useful insights, including the following:
Conversational trends can reveal which topics of talk have been more or less significant to this group of influencers over time.
Real-time conversational trends (essential for organic influencer interaction) will reveal what subjects are hot among the group of influencers.
Conversation analysis will reveal hidden storylines and issues that matter to influencers (e.g., yes, artificial intelligence is a hot topic, what exactly is the context)
Sentiment research will reveal how influencers truly feel about products, businesses, technology news, and other culturally significant concerns.
Here’s an example of influencer trends analysis: over the course of a year, we tracked ten security influencers and their interactions. You’ll observe how particular themes fluctuate and how they increase and decrease over time.
This type of influencer marketing data will necessitate access to a B2B influencer marketing platform, but don’t buy in the first provider you come across. You’ll want to make sure you get the correct influencer marketing software to match your needs and assist you scale your program when the time comes.
Consider a real-time listening panel to be a personalized search engine. When you type a query into Google and press “Enter,” you’ll get the most appropriate results based on your search term. In the same way, a listening panel functions. When you type in a query in this situation, though, the results will be exactly what the influencers are saying about the keywords and phrases you’re looking for.
This is something that most social media monitoring programs can perform. So, once you’ve identified the top influencers, you’ll add their social handles to a dashboard (which some social networks refer to as a query) and mine the data using filtering. This approach works well for real-time content marketing and audience analysis.
