20 Apr S’Peaky Digital With Florence Bate

I’m continuing my series of blog posts covering the S’Peaky Digital Marketing meetup that was held earlier this month. The next talk that I want to share insights from is from Florence Bate Communications. Florence is a PR and communications specialist concentrating on B2B and B2C work with influencers.

What to look out for when working with influencers

Florence starts with the key question.

What is an influencer? She highlights the definition being. A key individual with an active network of followers. Who has an active role in shaping the opinions of others. Typically through their popularity, expertise and reputation.

PR is top of the marketing funnel. If you want to learn more about the different stages of using a marketing funnel you can read a previous blog post on my website.

Florence highlights. If you are doing PR or working with influencers then you must start with your Who, Where and What.

1. Who is your audience – consumer, customer, brand?
2. Where is your consumer – location, local, regional, national, international?
3. What your channel is – e-mail, social, blog, word of mouth?

What should we watch out for with influencer marketing.

1. Validity and relevance – Is the influencer who they say they are? Look at the kind of posts that they are tagged in. Are they forming the right type of opinions amongst engagers that align with your views.
2. Engagement rate vs followers –Florence recommends inzpire.me to check an influencers engagement rate on social posts. To make sure that they are gaining real engagement and that they aren’t inflating follower numbers with fake followers. The tool also gives rough costs on working with certain influencers.
3. Authenticity – Make sure conversations are real.

What does success look like when working with influencers?

1. Trackable engagement – Ask the influencer for stats before you start working together. Make sure you have access to before and after figures.
2. Credibility
3. Brand awareness – avoid going sales, sales, sales. Cement visibility of your brand without a hard sell.
4. Assets – Make sure you get access to assets. Agree at the beginning that you can use collateral on your channels too. If you want to buy them after the collaboration it might end up costing you a lot more.
5. Word of mouth – Although it’s not trackable, It’s invaluable. Just because someone doesn’t engage on a social post. It doesn’t mean that they haven’t seen it and been influenced by it.

Lastly. Make sure you have a contract! If you don’t cover expenses. State this. Or again you may well get a shock invoice coming your way. Ask for their stats on when their engagement is highest and make sure they are sharing your content at that time. You don’t want to pay to have your content shared when no one is online!

If you are looking to work with a PR and work with influencers I would recommend having a chat with Florence as she can really build the relationships your brand needs to get noticed by your customers.