Influence Marketing Classwork

1.     Definition of Influence Marketing :

Influence Marketing is the practice of identifying and building relationships with individuals who have influence over a target audience of buyer.

Influencers are likely to be buyers themselves, as well as recommenders of products or services to their own audiences, both online and off.

Influencers may also be trusted third parties, such as bloggers, journalists, industry analysts, academics, or public figures.

 

Characteristic of Influencer Marketing:

Appinions defines an influencer as a person, brand or company who expresses a contextually relevant opinion that is meaningful enough to elicit action from others.

There are 3 criteria used to identify influencers:

• Opinions: Appinions focuses on expressions of subjectivity, indicating a personal point-of-view, rather than mere distribution of fact
• Context: The opinions are relevant to a user-defined topic, which is developed for a specific business need
• Action: The opinion is meaningful enough to the opinion holder’s audience that they take action around it

How to recognize them ?

In brief :

-          Identify the topics which are relevant to your brand, industry or target audience

-          Listen to what people are saying around this topic across the web and in traditional media

-          Identify the individuals who seem credible on that topic, and who appear to have a following or audience for their opinions.

Difference between Influence Marketing and Traditional Marketing :

First of all, Influence Marketing is designed to reached an audience “online” (like twitter, blogs, Linekdin, Facebook…) and Traditional Marketing is designed to reach an audience “offline” (like brochures, newspaper, trade show booth, tv, radio…)

What is traditional Marketing ?

Most everyone thinks of marketing as the business of promoting and selling products or services. Marketers commonly refer to a “funnel” to describe the way they attract new prospects and convert them into customers.

What Do We Mean By Funnel?
Traditionally, we've prioritized our limited resources and time on trying to find and convert new prospects (the top of the funnel). Keeping those hard-earned customers (the bottom of the funnel) has often been an afterthought. That’s because, until recently, there was little we could do to keep existing customers that was drastically different from the tactics used to attract new ones. Historically, the best you could do after turning a prospect into a customer was to provide a great customer experience and just hope they come back to buy more—and bring their friends with them. But technology, namely social media and email, has changed the game…

How Influence Marketing is different ?

ð  Social Media Marketing is about recognizing that your existing customers are your best assets.

And technology now enables us to influence consumer behavior both before and after the sale. With low-cost and easy-to-use tools like social media and email, you no longer have to hope that customers come back and bring their friends with them. Now you can reach out to your existing customers to remind them to come back, and make word-of-mouth as easy as clicking the share, like, or tweet buttons. Bottom line: successful businesses understand that marketing does not end with the sale, but rather it begins after the first sale (the bottom of the traditional sales funnel).

2.     Review Content Strategy

Marriott’s Campaign #sayhitowifi

 

“ Beginning January 15, 2015, members who book directly on Marriott.com or any of our other direct reservation channels will receive free in-room Wi-Fi! Direct reservation channels include: Marriott.com, Mobile, Voice or On-property.

We’d like to spread the word as quickly as possible, so I ask you to share, tweet and post away using the hashtag #SayHiToWiFi. Of course all you Gold and Platinum Elites (I know there are a lot of you out there!) will continue to enjoy your free enhanced Wi-Fi where available. “

Examples of paid-earned-owned content :

• Owned: JW Mariott D.C
• Earned: Ali Zengin
• Paid:  Travel Agent Mag

=> Ali Zengin is a pretty bad example of influencers because he only has 196 followers on Twitter.

3.       Instagram Hotel

An influencer needs 10,000 followers to get a complimentary night
The hotel uses Instagram to get people to know them. They encourage people to have more and more followers to have a bigger impact in terms of marketing.
The content is earned because people who check-in are regular consumers.

 

Sources :

Influence Marketing & Traditional Marketing click here, here and here.

Marriott Campaign click here.

Instagram click here.