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Influencers: From Mega to Nano. Is Advocacy At Scale Next?

Influencers: Mega, Micro, Nano. What Next?

From start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, influencer marketing has become a trendy marketing channel for brand building and raising awareness. The industry is growing at a very rapid pace, and experts are estimating it to hit 10 billion dollars by 2020. Besides, almost 60% of marketers have increased their 2019 influencer marketing spending. Many brands view influencer marketing as one of the best ways of reaching their respective target audiences, thus a boost in their sales. However a massive 96% of consumers in the UK do not trust influencer content. Is brand advocacy at scale by mass-consumers the answer?

Unfortunately, not all businesses take enough time to establish if influencer marketing is really the best approach for them. It’s not uncommon to find a paying an influential social media personality thousands of dollars for a single promotional message post with little return. That’s quite pricey and a risky investment, considering the difficulties with calculating ROI from such campaigns.

Types of influencers

Influencers are grouped into three major categories: mega, micro and nano, depending on their number of followers on social media.

Mega influencers

Mega influencers have the largest following globally. A mega influencer has a minimum of one million followers/subscribers on a social media platform. Therefore, they are are best when you are looking for global reach for your brand. World-known celebrities like Beyonce and Kyle Jenner are examples of mega influencers.

Although your promotional content through such influencers will reach a vast audience within a very short time, the approach might not be sufficiently effective for the establishment of a strong relationship with your customers. Such influencers attract less than 2% engagement from their audience. This is because the influencers don’t have real connections with their followers. Another downside is the cost involved. How much do you think you can pay Selena Gomez for a sponsored Instagram post? Be prepared to pay anything in the region of $800,000.

Micro-influencers

Micro-influencers form the largest group of social media influences. They are experts in specific topics and industries. Their mastery in their respective subjects enhances their credibility in the eyes of their audiences. As a result, the majority of their followers are very loyal to them. A micro influencer has anywhere between 5,000 to 100,000 followers. As a result he or she is able to maintain high audience engagement. Therefore, brands that want to promote their visibility in specific niches choose to work with such influencers.

Nano-influencers

Anyone with 3,000 to 5,000 followers has the option to identify herself as a Nano-influencer. Nano-influencers are the newest influencer type. Although they have minimal brand work experience and have the smallest number of followers compared to the other types, brands leverage on their high trust level to win the hearts of their followers. Nano influencers are the most trusted group of influencers by their followers because of their high engagement level with their audiences and their personal touch.

So what next?

As a marketer, it’s good to bear in mind that the most effective and effective word-of-mouth message is the one that comes from real experiences, and organic social media posts. But when money changes hands for someone to pass a message that’s intended to promote the funder, that seems like a business on its own. The authenticity and the trust then then rapidly falls for the creator.

It’s even more difficult for a mega influencer to convince her followers that what they are saying about a brand is true or just a marketing gimmick traded for money. But how can a brand encourage authentic advocacy at scale?

Advocacy at scale is the real deal

The main aim of your marketing efforts is not only to get people to know about your brand but to get them to know, trust and buy it. So, in as much as your influencer marketing is reaching a broad audience, there’s a lot more to be done to convince the audience that you’re the one to satisfy their needs. And the people who are best placed to convince your target customers are those well known to them. When it comes to trust, it’s mainly founded on real experiences that those expected to develop it can relate with. Such experiences come from the circles of friends and family. Crowdsourcing enough experience can therefore result in advocacy at scale.

Example

For instance, seeing a car promo on a celebrity’s social media platform might not arouse your interest as compared to when a friend who’s used the same car model recommends it to you. Why? Because you trust the friend more than the celebrity. Besides knowing her in person, your friend has an experience that you can confirm and get convinced that the recommendation is genuine and worth your money. That brings us to advocacy marketing and the importance of building a loyal community of advocates.

Besides, people don’t share their experiences to promote a brand or to serve them. They don’t want to be influencers as such. They feel comfortable while sharing information that will help people who are close to them, not really to promote a brand. As such, brands should appreciate their customers for sharing their experiences. This is because it’s through word of mouth that they’ll be able to demonstrate their trustworthiness easily, and as a result, earn more loyal customers.

Therefore, advocacy and community marketing are more effective techniques than influencer marketing. The reach of each individual customer is much less compared to an influencer, but the engagement rate is 10x higher. Your brand will be into a winner if you can build a strong community of advocates to crowdsource assets and experiences on social media. This technique involves using existing customers to spread the word about a brand and its products.

Brands should focus more on using advocates drawn from their existing community of customers to create lasting and trustworthy relationships with their customers. You can use Pukket’s automated advocacy and community management platform to attract and retain your brand advocates.

Photo credit to pch.vector on freepik

Here’s Why You Can’t Ignore Community Marketing

Just like the way you need friends and family in your social circle, a business also requires a community to interact with for support in business. Nearly every successful organization integrates community engagement initiatives in order to increase loyalty, advocacy and brand affinity. This brings about the concept of community marketing.

This form of marketing primarily involves creating a brand presence that interacts well and actively with the existing customers and employees. In this digital era, community marketing is supported by social media platforms where about 3.2 billion people hangout. If you haven’t embraced this form of marketing yet you have some catching up to do. Although it can be a bit time-consuming, you can’t afford to ignore it because:

It’s an effective way of knowing your customers

When you get close to your existing customers and encourage one-to-one conversations between you and them, they feel easy to give their honest opinions about your brand. Some of the comments you’ll get will be positive while others may be negative. It’s through such feedbacks that you’ll be able to identify more of their needs and what you can do to align your products/services according to their expectations. It’s one of the best ways of knowing your customers without having to use a third party. You will also have the chance to communicate with them if you have the time and the resouces to dedicate to this (Pukket offers an automatic chatbot to initiate the conversation).

Your reputation gets better

The internet is a great tool for the visibility of many businesses. However, it can also be your worst nightmare. Just a single customer complaint can see your business fall from grace to grass. Even if you avoid going online, you can’t hide from the wrath of an unsatisfied customer who’s determined to let the world know how disappointing your product/servic is. The best way to avoid such issues is by getting so close to your customers that you are able to respond to their concerns swiftly before they escalate to destructive experiences. That’s where community marketing comes in handy, by removing the distance between your brand and its customers. Even if the bad experience gets shared, you’ll have the chance to get in touch and win that customer back.

Improved brand loyalty and customer retention

When you are in constant touch with your customers, they feel valued and are happy to stick around you. That human touch in a brand is very important and is a key ingredient in customer loyalty. Unlike commercial ads that are one-sided communication, community marketing encourages two-way communication between your brand and its customers. Besides promotional content, you might decide to be sending goodnight and good morning messages to your customers. Such messages make your brand feel a bit human. And since consumers trust messages from real people more than those from artificial brands, giving your brand a human face will go a long way to making your customers develop trust in you.

You get valuable brand advocates

When your existing customers are convinced that you care about them and are committed to satisfying their needs, they become your die-hard fans. They are very willing to spread a word about your brand. Even without your request, they will find themselves telling other people about the awesomeness of your business and why they should as well choose you over your competitors.

When you’ve have such a soft spot in their hearts, you can easily turn them into your brand ambassadors. With just a little motivation, they can help you reach customers who you can’t access directly. Besides promoting your business, the brand ambassadors are likely to spend twice the amount an average customer spends on your products. It’s a double win for you.

Your cost of customer acquisition is likely to reduce significantly

Commercial ads and promotions have taken a toll on modern-day businesses. Recent research shows that the cost of customer acquisition has increased by over 50% from 2014 to date (2019). If you’ve been in business within the period, most likely, you can attest to that. Fortunately, one of the best remedies to the problem is something easy to do community marketing. Through the brand ambassadors drawn from your customer community, your promotional messages can go viral and get higher sale conversions without you having to spend a fortune.

For instance, instead of using Google ads which costs you about $1 to $2 per click to promote your product, you can request your customers to take and share photos of them using it (the product) on their social media channels through photo challenges and competitions. The latter strategy will cost you less and will result in more customers because consumers trust their friends and families five times more than brand content.

Your chances for valuable collaborations increases

When you have constant and close interaction with your customers, you’ll trigger regular conversations revolving about your brand among them and the people around them. As a result, your brand awareness scope increases as the conversations make you keep on connecting with new people. Other brands start getting curious to know more about you for possible partnerships. That gives you a great opportunity to work together with brands that you share common values with and support your vision. A great example of this is Wendy’s Twitter account.

You see? If you haven’t adopted community marketing, you are missing out on great opportunities. But all is not lost and it’s not too late to make a change. Set the ball rolling, and in case you need help, Pukket, the leading word-of-mouth marketing experts, are just a call away.

Top Advocacy Management Platforms of 2020

Have you decided to incorporate advocacy or community marketing into your marketing strategies? If so you are on the right track. In fact, word of mouth marketing could see the overall effectiveness of your overall marketing improve by 54%. But this won’t come on a silver platter. You have to come up with a well-informed plan on how to conduct your advocacy programs. Here are the top advocacy management platforms of 2020 in no particular order.

One of the components of your plan should be a top-notch advocacy management platform that corresponds to your objectives. Considering there are hundreds of such platforms, you might find it quite confusing to select one from the rest. But don’t worry. Following unbiased research, we’ve compiled for you a list of the best advocacy management platforms you can choose from for your 2020 marketing plan. Let’s have a look at it.

Hootsuite

Created in the year 2008 by Ryan Holmes, Hootsuite has become a coveted advocacy management platform with more than 18 million people across the world. Their app, which primarily focuses on social publishing, is reasonably priced and suitable for businesses with relatively simple needs. In case you need social listening features alongside social publishing, you’ll have to buy another app called Hootsuite Insights from the same platform.

With Hootsuite’s Employee Advocacy Toolkit, you can easily create an effective employee advocacy program through the Hootsuite app. Besides, the app helps you to maintain a close eye on the customer reviews concerning your brand across various social media channels.

InviteReferrals

InviteReferrals has advocacy marketing software which they claim to have over 20,000 users. Available in more than 20 languages, InviteReferrals app can be used by lots of different people globally. If you have a referral campaign that you’d like to launch promote, you can use InviteReferrals referral program to reach a larger audience through your existing customers. Besides, the apps help you to keep track of the results of your campaign.

After setting up a referral campaign through the app, the next step is to integrate and promote it through your website and/or social media channels. Customers who like your product and would like to get the referral program’s reward will enroll into the program. Upon the enrollment, the customers can refer friends on various social channels to your products/campaign.

The InviteRefferals app will track every invite, website visit through the campaign and each referral conversion. It then sends a reward email to a referrer for every successful referral conversion. Besides, it allows you to track individual customer’s data, thus the ability to identify the referrers who are the most influential. Besides, you can export such data anytime.

Pukket

Pukket recognizes the fact that many consumers are willing to share their own experiences with various brands on social media for free. As such, the platform has an application that’s designed to encourage the over 1 billion active Instagram users to talk about their favorite brands. Brands can use Pukket’s web app, mobile app or the API service to manage and reward their advocates on social media. Pukket automatically detects, moderates and rewards these advocates for each and every relevant posts shared. The social loyalty credits can then be redeemed for various vouchers.

Pukket advocacy management platform is fully automated using computer vision and NLP techniques to help you streamline your advocacy marketing processes. The automation comes in handy for the scalability of your marketing efforts besides saving your time. Brand community managers will then have access to their web and mobile dashboard to track their progress and analytics.

Influitive

Influitive is another platform designed to help you build sturdier relationships with your customers and brand advocates at scale. With a simple design and intuitive user interface, the Influitive is easy to use for the creation and management of your advocacy programs. Whether your objective is to increase your conversion through social shares, online user reviews/testimonials, and product feedback or peer support, among other advocacy marketing strategies, Influitive app got you covered.

When it comes to advocates, they are awarded points that they can redeem for different professional perks and privileges. Another key feature of the platform is flexibility. You have a range of advocacy service packages to choose from, depending on your specific needs.

MobileAction!

MobileAction! is an innovative advocacy software developed by DNL OmniMedia. The app supports efficiency in your advocacy efforts by allowing you to send targeted action notifications to your advocates easily. Additionally, it displays your upcoming events for your brand advocate’s awareness.

If you want customized features that correspond to your brand for your mobile advocacy, you can talk to the DNL OmniMedia and they’ll make it happen. From the functionality of the app to the fonts and colors, the app will be configured to fit your needs and brand’s uniqueness.

All these platforms are run by technology and marketing experts with a wealth of experience in advocacy marketing. Any of them could be the real deal for your 2020 advocacy campaigns. However, you need to consider your specific needs and preferences before you settle on any them. Here was the list of top advocacy management platforms of 2020 for you.

What to Consider When Selecting an Advocacy Management Platform

Internet advent has remarkably changed the way consumers make their purchase decisions. It’s no longer easy for brands to convince their target consumers that they are the best ones to solve their needs. And because research shows that consumers trust their friends more than brands, businesses are starting to incorporate advocacy management platforms in their marketing strategies to overcome that problem.

Why to go for an advocacy management platform?

Besides being cost-effective, word of mouth marketing has always been the most effective way of promoting a product of service. In fact, according to McKinsey Quarterly, April 2010, the sales generated through this form of marketing are more than twice of the paid advertising’s. Besides a report by Deloitte shows that customer advocacy results in a high customer retention rate of 37%. However up until now only 20% of all brands have incorporated advocated programs in their marketing activities.

In case you’d intend to create an advocacy program, it’s important to note that there’s a wide range of management platforms to choose from. Also, identifying the best for your business may be a daunting task. However, the decision will be easier to make if you consider the following:

1. Your audience

First and foremost, you need to have in-depth knowledge about your target audience/ customers. Some of the essential information you should seek to find out include what they love and care about, where they tend to hang out online, and the type of content they prefer (videos, blog posts, short posts…). As for the preferred content, you can perform an analysis of your social media posts and website content. Identify the content forms that attract the most traffic and user engagement. The information will help you to identify the management platform that’s most compatible with their favorite content.

2. Success parameters

Once you’ve established the go-to online platforms for your audience and their preferred content, you should now define your advocacy program’s KPIs and the metrics you’ll use to measure it. You can choose to measure the success using the number of video views, click-throughs, conversions, reach level, or engagement level, among other commonly used metrics. All in all, ensure that the metrics that you choose is in line with your goals for the program.

Also, it’s crucial that you identify the people who you expect to make the program most successful. Are they a couple of influencers or tens or hundreds of employees or customers? The information will go a long way to helping you figure out the platform that will provide the success-drivers with the tools they need to spread the word about your business.

3. Your budget

When you are exploring an advocacy management platform, you’ll realize that different platforms have different price tags for various products and services. However, some are free. But if you want more personalized and unique features/tools, you might decide to pay a few bucks for the premium benefits. Essentially, advocacy marketing should help you cut down on your cost of customer acquisition and improve your retention rate.

It’s advisable to have a reasonable estimate of the amount of money that you intend to spend on the platform from the very word go. Then, confirm if the expenses you are likely to incur on the platform are within the budget. If they are not, consider another platform with the tools that you need and a cost that you can afford without interfering with your other business financial obligations.

4. Ease-of-Use

Many small and medium-sized businesses can’t afford to employ a person whose work is exclusively is advocacy management. If your organization is one of them, then you need an advocacy management platform that’s easy to use but with the tools that will support your program. Pukket currently offer free media, marketing and set up assistance for this purpose.

A complicated program will take you and your staff a long time to understand its functionality. Consequently, other activities in your business might suffer because you’ve diverted the attention they deserve to learn the platform. You don’t want a platform that will require you to undergo serious training now and then. The hassle of contacting the support nearly every time you want to use their software is quite hectic. You don’t have to go through all such hassle. Choose a new-technology platform with an intuitive design for easy and smart advocacy management.

5. Scalability

The technology is changing and so do the marketing trends. The tactics that work today might be outdated a couple of years down the line. As such, the platform that you choose should be on toes to keep abreast of the changes. Check out its commitment to providing a better user experience through regular system updates that are in line with emerging technological changes and users’ needs. Pukket is scalable to any region or language you choose to. It can additionally integrate with the social media platform of your choice.

Choosing the right advocacy management system is crucial for your marketing efforts. Therefore, it is an exercise that you should perform diligently, considering the above factors, among others. To find out more about Pukket’s social advocacy management and rewards platform please visit www.pukket.com/business

Your Guide to Growing Your Series A Startup Organically

Starting a business is among the boldest steps that people make in their lives. Overcoming the fear of being part of the 20% of small enterprises that fail in their first year or 30% second-year small business failures is quite a big deal. This rate can be considerably higher among tech startups. Congrats if you have a Series A startup. You are now past those early days and are now concerned how you can best grow your business. For that purpose, the Lean Analytics model offers a solid framework in which virality is one of the key pillars of a healthy growing startup.

Your Series A startup is now in a position to invest money into business development and paid acquisition. One of the most important things you need to do is to focus on the organic growth of the business. This requires you to lay a firm foundation on through lean analytics model.

Lean analytics for Series A startups

Through the lean analytics model, you’ll be able to measure how your product/service performs and learn from the performance results. Here are the lean analytics model stages that you should follow to ensure that you gather as much information as possible regarding your market and the performance of your business. If your startup has raised Series A, you should now be past Empathy and Stickiness, and be focusing on virality, revenue and growth.

1. Empathy

This is where you try to put yourself in the shoes of your target consumers and identify a problem that bothers them so much that they won’t mind paying you to get a solution. There might be other products that seem to address the same but leaving gaps that the consumers would want to see filled. It’s now upon you to establish an ideal product for addressing the need. Once you find this, move to the next stage-stickiness.

2. Stickiness

At this stage, you develop an MVP product considering the analysis information that you gathered in the first step. Then, release the product to the market while focusing on communicating its benefits rather than the features. The benefits are more meaningful to consumers than features. Once they know about the benefits, they can then try to find out the features behind the benefits.

After some time (depending on your scheduled timeline), you should be able to establish if you have provided the desired value for the users or not. You now that your product delivers value that’s consistent with the need of the target users if they use it regularly.

Otherwise, even if you made remarkable sales at the beginning and all of a sudden nobody bothers to buy again, you need to recheck your user analysis and adjust your product to offer the value your target customers expect.

It’ll be extremely difficult, or rather impossible, for your product to achieve the desired traction if it doesn’t offer the intended users what they need. Unfortunately, unless your product has traction, your business has minimal chances of achieving sustained long-term growth.

3. Virality

You have confirmed that your customers are happy with your product and are willing to buy it regularly. It’s now time to scale up their acquisition in a cost-efficient way. One of the most cost-efficient customer acquisition strategies is word of mouth. And the form of marketing not only pocket-friendly but also effective, with 74% of consumers identifying it as their major purchasing decision influencer.

Despite the efficiency it brings, the internet era has seen many brands struggle to win consumer’s trust. The majority of consumers feel that the information given by most brands is meant to overrate their offerings. That’s why, according to HubSpot show, 75% of people don’t trust business ads and branded-content. On the other hand, 90% of them trust suggestions given by their family and friends while 70% find consumer reviews to be trustworthy.

Therefore, if you want your product or brand to go viral while maintaining your customer acquisition cost at sustainable levels, word-of-mouth advertising is the way to go. There are various ways of encouraging virality and they include:

Creating and sharing unique and share-worthy content

You can use social media to trigger conversations about your brand, product or brands. One way of doing that is developing user-need-tailored, unique and share-worthy content. As long as the content is memorable, relates to their needs and is rare to find elsewhere, your target users will find themselves sharing with the people around them regardless of your request for them to do so.

Triggering user-generated content

This strategy involves encouraging consumers to create and share content regarding your brand. You can then incorporate the user-generated content in your website or social media channels to build more trust with your target customers.

Employee advocacy

You can motivate your employees to promote your Series A startup through their personal social media channels, among other word-of-mouth avenues. According to recent research by Edelman Trust Barometer, employees are twice more trusted than a company’s CEO.

4. Expected revenue versus CAC

This stage is about comparing the revenue you expect from a customer and the customer acquisition cost (CAC). Ideally, the expected revenue should be three times the CAC for a healthy and scalable business. If your margins are healthy and have achieved the ideal ratio, you can then focus on growing your business. Organic word-of-mouth is a great way driving down your CAC. Pukket’s fully automated advocacy management platform provides you with the tool to achieve that.

Lean Analytics Model: How to Encourage Virality

When running a business startup, there’s no better way of measuring your progress and getting clear answers to your important marketing questions than using lead analytics model. By knowing what, how and why to measure in your marketing strategies, you’ll be able to establish where you are in terms of virality and how to improve it. The Lean Analytics model was introduced to help build a better startup faster. The model consists of 6 sequential stages starting with Empathy all the way to Scaling by achieving stickiness, virality and revenue. With accurate lean analytics measurements, you can make smarter decisions and encourage virality of your product by:

1. Identifying the sharing triggers

Even if you’ve been in business for a short time, it’s important to identify what so far makes users to share your content. Remember that the content is intended to benefit the target users. In as much as you’d want to think that what you are delivering is the best for the consumers, unless you confirm that from their end, you’ll just be lying to yourself. The virality of content determines the value of the piece of the information being shared in the eyes of the intended users. The higher the sharing frequency, the higher the perceived value.

Once you identify the content that’s widely shared, seek to establish why the users like it that much. The answer to the question ought to inform you how to create the next piece of content for the improved virality of your business. This can be the key to unlocking virality within your lean analytics measurements.

2. Proper audience-content matching

The suitability of content isn’t one-size-fits all. Not every content will resonate with your entire market segment. As such, you need to study your target audience keenly and identify the kind of promotional content that each of the sub-segments is likely to share most. You can get such insights from the content you’ve shared so far. You can supplement that with relevant market research. Once you establish that, you can go ahead to create content that factors its suitability to the intended user segment.

Alawys remember that you can’t gain much with hit-and-run approaches. Gimmicks, tricks and sleight-of-hand might work for a short time. However, in the long-run, such clickbait will do more harm than good as far as your reputation is concerned. Just get off on the right foot by knowing what your target users need and create content that offers them a solution.

3. Identifying and working with the right influencers

You’ll miss lots of opportunities if you restrict yourself to your own social media channels. One of the best ways to want to reach a larger audience is by using influential people. But not any influencer can be as effective as you’d expect. You need to be a bit choosy. Perform brief research to identify people with loyal following within your target audience and request them to help you in the promotion of your business.

If possible, ask the influence to share their audience data such as gender, location and interest to see if the audience aligns with your target audience. The right influencer will spur word-of-mouth conversations regarding your brand/business/product/service among their audience, resulting in lots of quality leads. Their strong validation about your business will go a long way to growing your user base and making you go viral. Otherwise, engaging just a random influencer won’t yield satisfactory results.

4. Motivating users to share

Virality is all about getting the information shared as many times as possible in the online world. Unfortunately, unless you give your influencers, customer advocates and brand ambassadors a reason to share, the chances of you going viral remain minimal. Therefore, first, you need to develop content that’s engaging, captivating and addresses the user’s needs.

Then, motivate your brand ambassadors to share and encourage their fans to share with the people around them. You can offer them perks as a way of encouraging them to share the content. Nonetheless, since rewarding a perk for every sharing may not make economic sense, you can set the number of people an influencer/ ambassador is supposed to recruit to qualify for an incentive. Don’t forget to communicate such information to your ambassadors or influencers from the very word go for transparency and trust’s sake.

5. Keeping your video content short

According to various scientific studies, the attention span of an average person ranges from 8 seconds to 1 minute. Therefore, if you want your intended users to get your entire video message right on the spot, you need to keep it short. The length of the majority of viral videos ranges from 30 seconds to one minute. If yours is longer than that, it might not go as viral as expected.

6. Long and scannable blogs

For many years, there has been a rampant misconception about the ideal length of a viral blog post. Some people believe that only a few people will read long content. But this is not always the truth. If you make good use of bullets, subheadings and images, and the message is unique and corresponds to the needs of the audience, rest assured that your content has high chances of going viral.

Research by OrkDork suggests that a 3,000 to 10,000-word blog article generates the highest number of shares. Therefore, even if you can’t make to hit the word count, make your blog article at least 200-word long for improved virality.

7. Offering the right tools

Virality needs not only great content and motivated promoters but also effective sharing tools and platforms. On that note, you can’t go wrong with Pukket. We know where your target customers are and what your existing customers need to reach and direct them to you. We’ll provide your promoters and users with ultra-effective tools to make you go viral and get to the growth stage within the lean analytics model.

Having implemented these tips, your business stands to gain more online visibility, increased sales leads and a significantly higher lead conversion rate.

5 Reasons Why Influencer Marketing Is NOT For You

Marketing trends are quickly evolving. A strategy that used to work superbly for marketers ten years ago is highly likely to be outdated. Influencer marketing is among the most commonly used marketing techniques at the moment. Nearly any brand is looking for someone influencial to pay them handsomely for access to their network. According to a recent survey, about two-thirds of companies worldwide increased their budgets for influencer marketing in 2019. Perhaps you’ve considered joining the bandwagon too. But before you get into the waters, it’s important to know that this form of marketing is not always a breeze and effective as you’d hope. In fact, it might not be for you and this is why:

1. It is costly to sustain

Influencer marketing is a highly competitive industry, with a recent report by Business Insider projecting its worth to hit $15 billion by the year 2022. The growth is attributed to the increased influencer demand. As such, hiring a top-notch influencer will require you to dig deeper into your pockets.

Unlike in customer advocacy, where some customers promote your brand or products without necessarily expecting to be paid, an influencer monetises his or her audience. The influencer’s payment is primarily dependent on the total number of followers within their social reach. On the other hand, as for customer advocates, even if you decide to reward them, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Some simple perks like coupon codes, exclusive access and modest branded giveaways will be just fine and still get energized team of followers.

2. It is risky to run influencer marketing

Influencer marketing and advocacy marketing are at opposing ends. In the customer advocacy people share the content in the form of their everyday experiences (highly engaging for friends and family). However in the case of influencer marketing, influencers create and share their own content regarding a brand or its products/services. So, in an unfortunate case where an influencer cannot create exciting content that resonates with the target audience, you won’t get much from their promotional efforts. In fact, their information might work against your brand. Consequently, your investment in them might end up being futile. Well, this is quite a tricky and risky marketing route to take.

3. ROI not guaranteed

The number of likes, comments, shares and followers can’t be used to measure a person’s influence in the online world effectively. As such, you can’t really tell if an influencer will influence every person who follows them on their social channels. So, there’s no rationale for determining that this amount of user engagement on an influencer’s channel will bring you a certain amount of sales. In other words, you can’t quantify the commercial value of an influencer. The only way you can establish that is if he/she actually brings in some sales first before asking for payment. Again, nearly no influencer will agree to work under such arrangements. They want to be paid first. From there, it’s upon you to see if the return on investment you get makes sense or not.

Even if they have thousands of loyal followers, many influencers can’t really tell exactly how your ROI will be from your engagement with them. In as much as they can seem to be good entertainers or wise, the majority of internet personalities don’t have much influence on the money spending decisions of their followers.

4. Consumers find influencers ‘fake’

The majority of internet users know that there are people who are paid crazy amounts of money to promote products. So, they see them (influencers) not as people who are genuinely praising a brand or product because of the benefit they’ve gotten from it but as money-chasers.

Many consumers perceive influencer’s messages as disingenuous and misleading. As such, the consumers have minimal trust in influence marketers, just like the brand they represent. That’s why some influencers tend to conceal any information that might make their audiences know that they’ve been paid to promote certain brands or products. Again, the trickery might not end so well with some consumers if they know the truth.

5. It’s not easy to engage with the right influencer

Approach any brand that uses or has at one point used influencer marketing and you’ll realize that getting the right influencer for your campaigns is not an easy task. A recent study shows that 61% of marketers take a lot of time and effort to get to the right influencers. If you aren’t patient with the recruitment process, you’ll end up taking anyone who seems to have a big following and this will mark the genesis of the flopping of your marketing strategy.

On the contrary, in customer advocacy, it’s easy to develop a team of loyal customers to spread the word for you. And since such customers are already engaged with your products, you won’t struggle to show them how to put the right message out there.

Considering the above five reasons, influencer marketing is not as effective as customer advocacy. Besides, it’s a more costly marketing approach with no guaranteed ROI. That’s why Pukket advocates for customer advocacy. Talk to Pukket today for any help you need with customer advocacy programme development.

Key Factors In Running a Successful Brand Ambassador Programme

A well managed brand ambassador programme can be your answer to the following problems: Do you feel like your business is facing overwhelming competition? Are your advertisement costs heading to unsustainable levels? Are you striving to generate more quality leads and gain more loyal customers? If your answer is yes to any, if not all of these questions, know that you aren’t alone. Many business owners and operators have been there but did something that took their business to greater levels. One of the most effective strategies is choosing brand ambassadors help you increase awareness about your business.

Why A Brand Ambassador Programme?

The benefits of a brand ambassador programme include:

Business reputation protection

When some people out there decide to tarnish the reputation of your company, your brand ambassadors will be your shield. They can calm the situation by sharing their positive experiences with your staff, product, services or any other factual information.

Resource-efficient

A robust ambassador programme can reduce the workload of your marketing team. Ambassadors can take over tasks such as content creation or distributing them on social media at cost-effective levels.

Improved brand-customer communication

Customers trust brand ambassadors more than the brands they represent. As such, they are more likely to tell them how they actually feel about the brands. The ambassadors will then communicate such information to their brands for action.

Which Are The Major Factors In Running A Successful Brand Ambassador Programme?

1. Choosing the right people

Traditionally, companies choose celebrities to become their brand ambassadors. However, with time, marketing departments have come to appreciate the fact that celebrities aren’t the exclusive brand ambassadorship candidates. Anyone who has some level of following can be a brand ambassador.

In fact, when a person with just a few hundreds of followers posts about your product or service, their audience will find it more authentic as compared to a similar post by an influencer with thousands of followers. As for the latter, people feel like their promotional messages are inspired by the money they receive to post the advertisement.

As you look into that while recruiting your brand ambassadors, also ensure that the qualified candidates embody your brand’s ideals. Such ambassadors won’t feel pressured to conform to your standards when communicating information relating to your brand.

2. Agreeing on the rewards from the beginning

Whether you use a reward system or recruit volunteers to take part in your brand ambassador programmer, it’s good to give them something for appreciation. Also, to avoid unnecessary conflicts and overexpectation, you should agree on what they stand to get if they participate in the programme from the very word go.

Besides, you need to settle on the prerequisites of getting the agreed-upon reward. When such things are clearly outlined, the participants will be able to make informed decisions and work objectively.

As you explore your reward options, it’s important to note that free products can be a good choice. In fact, 38% of the 200 companies used in a recent Kite study say that they offer free products to their ambassadors as a way of appreciating them for promoting their brands on social media.

However, as you consider free samples as rewards for the promoters of your brand, you should be a bit cautious. If you operate in the U.S, ensure that your decision is in line with the Federal Trade Commission. For a U.K business, confirm if the reward program conforms with the Competition and Markets Authority regulations. To avoid these issues, on Pukket you would only reward your ambassadors only after they have posted their experience with your product/service on loyalty point basis, avoiding the problem of incentivisation before the post is made.

3. A realistic and simple plan

Having agreed on the rewards that your ambassadors will get, it’s imperative to create a plan and have them incorporated into it. Make the plan as simple as you can to help future ambassadors understand the components easily. The simplicity of the plan is important for your quick reference or by the current ambassadors.

4. Trust and transparency

Trust and openess are the key components of an effective brand ambassador programme that stands the test of time. However, trust comes from the point of understanding the potential and personality traits of every ambassador. As such, you should collect as much information as you can regarding the abilities of your brand ambassadors before engaging them.

Once you confirm that the promoters have the abilities you desire, show them that you trust them with your company’s representation. Also, it’s imperative to make them develop a sense of belonging to your organization. You can achieve that by keeping them updated about the progress of the company. If you have an incoming launch or release, keep them in the loop. This will go a long way to strengthening the relationship between you and the brand evangelists.

5. Honest and seamless communication

Use your ambassadors to elicit feedback from your existing and prospective customers. Encourage them to stimulate and communicate outstanding positive and negative consumer comments about your business, products or services. Such information can help you and your marketing department to devise more effective strategies for improving on various areas regarding your business. Also, let your brand ambassadors know that you are fully okay with them conversing about your brand without bias. Don’t forget to respond to them when they give such feedbacks.

Having put the above factors into consideration, you should have a brand ambassador programme that helps move forward to your organization’s goals. Do you need help in creating or running a successful brand ambassador program? Do you need help identifying and recruiting ambassadors from your community of loyal customers? If you do, let Pukket guide you through that as we have a fully automated ambassador management platform for your needs.

Your Guide To Employee Advocacy

With the current internet era, there are tons of opportunities that businesses can exploit online. However, any marketer will tell you that beating the online competition isn’t always a walk in the park for organizations. To stay ahead of the competition and maintain reasonable customer acquisition costs, marketers have adopted new trends, including employee advocacy. Consumers have minimal trust with brands. However, when companies use their employees to promote their messages, their chances of winning customers’ hearts increases.

Benefits of Employee Advocacy

Wider Reach

Employees have roughly 10 times more connections compared to brand communication channels and their reach. Besides, your brand messages are likely to be shared 24 times more when they are distributed by your employees.

Reduced cost of customer acquisition

The total cost of an employee advocacy program is roughly 10% of paid advertising. Therefore, a robust employee engagement program can see your advertisement costs reduce significantly.

Improved trust

Edelman Trust Barometer’s research shows that employees are twice more trusted than CEOs of companies. Because of this, their promotional messages are likely to create more customer trust.

Increased sales revenue

Employee social marketing leads are likely to convert seven times more compared leads generated through direct branded messages.

Improved overall company growth

PostBeyond and Golfdale Consulting carried out a survey which emphasized the importance of employee advocacy. According to the survey, companies that embrace employee advocacy perform 202% better compared to those with unengaged workers. This is due to the improved brand recognition, increased referral traffic, enhanced customer trust and increased new lead generation as a result of the trusted employee voice.

How to Get the Best from Your Employee Advocacy Program

There are several things you need to do to see your business benefit greatly from employee advocacy. They include:

1. Trusting and motivating your employees

Trust and motivation are the key pillars of a successful employee advocacy program. Your employees have to feel trusted to deliver the right message to the right people. This makes them feel confident and proud to the ambassadors of their employer. Trusted employees are ready to open up for genuine conversations that could accelerate the effectiveness of a company’s marketing approaches.

Although trust triggers internal motivation in employees, a company can do more to encourage them to spread the work on its behalf. It can choose to offer them perks in the form of virtual badges, bonuses, reward points, internal recognition or an exclusive getaway, among other options. However, you need to take your time to understand the best motivational perk for your workforce.

2. Give them the freedom to decide

One thing that you need to appreciate about this form of marketing is that your employees might be doing you a favor by going the extra mile to use their online networks to promote your business. Their social media accounts are part of their private life, and you have no influence over them.

As such, when approaching the workers to be your ambassadors, it shouldn’t look like you are coercing them to do so. Just treat them well and make them develop a sense of ownership of your business. Let them see how their extra efforts could bring positive changes at individual and corporate levels. Once you do that, they won’t have any problem sharing your promotional messages out of their own will.

3. Set clear guidelines

You need to set clear guideline and best practices regarding the information your employees can share regarding your business. The guideline and best practices should aim at protecting the image of your enterprise. They should also help to prevent legal litigations that might arise from irresponsible content sharing.

With the guidelines in place, the workers will know the company-related information to or not to share. This helps them more confident to share the right information in a manner that matches their personality and without fear that it might backfire on them.

4. Training

Nowadays nearly everyone is a social media user. However, you should not assume that each of your employees is savvy with social media platforms. From different departmental backgrounds to varying age groups, your employees are diverse. Therefore, their social media skill levels differ and you need to try to harmonize that through relevant training.

In the training, it is important to educate your workers on the best social media platforms for specific content. By posting the right content on the right platform, your messages will reach more of the intended consumers.

5. Provide the best tools

You need to support your employees with the right tools to see that they bring the best from their private channels to your business. Among the primary tools you should provide them with is high-quality content.

Remember the employees are occupied with other major activities and so, they may not have sufficient time to create fresh promotional content for your enterprise. Make their work easier by creating top-notch content that promotes your brand or product for them to share. Or simply let them share their day to day experiences working at your company. The content could be a promotional case study, blog post or a video. Most importantly, ensure that the content is easy to digest and share on social media.

Also, it’s important to direct your staff to the right social media management tools, such as Pukket, for promotional content sharing.

If your business has not joined the employee advocacy bandwagon, know that you are missing out on great opportunities. It is high time for you to act and tap into the unexplored marketing potential of your workers. In case you need help in this, feel free to contact Pukket for exceptional professional guidance and ultra-effective services.

Turn Your Customers into a Killer Marketing Force

Marketing is a very crucial aspect of any business, whether established or start-ups. The rule of thumb is that as a B2C business you should spend between 5% to 10% of your revenues on marketing (2% to 5% for B2B businesses). However some businesses find themselves spending more than the upper limit of their respective category. This, and the fact that digital marketing cost is increasing at a rate that’s five times higher than that of inflation is something you as a savvy marketer can’t afford to overlook. But what if you could use your existing community of customers and turn them into a killer marketing force?

One thing that we must admit is that with the coming of the information age, consumers are growing weary of the too much noise from brands trying to win their hearts by all means. They are put in a situation where they experience business ads right, left and centre. Salespeople are almost everywhere. A person logs in to his social media accounts and a significant part of the information he sees is about businesses. What next? He opts for ad blockers. Finally, the nuisance is done away with but for you as a marketer, it’s an unfortunate move. A recent survey shows that approximately 30% of all people who use internet use ad blockers. Another consumer survey shows that 82% of consumers look for referrals from their friends and family members before purchasing something. As such, peer-to-peer marketing has been found to account for 20-50% of a person’s entire buying decisions.

It’s Getting Tough For Marketers

Consequently, as a marketer, it becomes more difficult for you to make your message reach your target customers. They rarely trust you. But you can win their trust, although indirectly-through your existing customers. It’s quite easier to gain high-quality sales leads and high lead conversion when a sale process is initiated by a customer who has used your products or services than when using other conventional marketing strategies. In fact, 92% of people trust recommendations resulting from word of mouth while all the survey respondents reported that they pay more attention to posts and recommendations made by their friends than they do from the information presented by brands. Interestingly, 37% of the customers referred to a business by other customers have 37% higher retention rate than those who are persuaded through other marketing strategies.

The statistics clearly shows that your customers could form a killer marketing force through word-of-mouth marketing. How do you then convert your customers to ultra-effective marketers of your products or services? Let’s look into that now.

How to turn your customers into a killer marketing force

1. Focus on Customer Satisfaction

If you are truly determined to leverage your existing customers to help you reach more of your target market, you need to ensure that they are happy with what you provide them. Having done that, it’ll be easy for you to win their loyalty and influence them to spread the word about your business.

2. Know Your Customers

Having a deep understanding of your customers, including their location, what they like or don’t like about your business and what influences their buying decisions (especially those related to your business). With the information, you’ll be able to find the best customers who could become your great marketers and how to motivate them to tell the people around them about your business and products/services.

3. Offer Value

Although you can’t put a price on customer loyalty, a customer will feel more appreciated if you provide something more than just what you normally offer them for helping you in your marketing. Ideally, it’s a give-take relationship. Although it might just a simple token of appreciation, for instance, a shout out, small give away or exclusive information access, it goes a long way to making a customer feel more motivated to give you continued support.

4. Request Testimonials

Once you identify your best customers, you can go ahead and ask them to write personal stories showing how your product or service changed their lives. You can then incorporate the testimonials in your website content and ask the customers to share them on their social media profiles. When posting the testimonials on the media, you can request them to include your website’s link so that those who see the posts can reach you easily. Customer testimonials are super-effective sales tools not only because they are from verifiable and trusted sources, but also for the reason that stories have a tendency of sticking in people’s minds.

5. Incorporate Customers in Your Support Forum

Do you have a forum where customers can ask questions and get answers publicly? If you don’t have, you need to create it and incorporate your existing customers into it. Although your sales or support team can answer the questions asked on this forum, especially by prospective customers, the answers that your customers will provide will seem more genuine, thus highly likely to influence your lead conversion rate positively.

6. Involve Business Virality Experts

Creating and implementing a successful customer advocacy plan might not be a walk in the park for you. While analyzing and putting analytics into proper use in the marketing strategy is a hard nut to crack for someone with minimal experience, involving a business virality expert like Pukket improves accuracy and yields better results.

Feel free to contact Pukket in case you want help in creating a killer marketing force from your existing customers.

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