There’s a time and place for every campaign, and your company’s influencers are key to unlocking this insight. Why is this, and how do you find these magical beings? We’ll examine the who, why and how of influencer identification below!
Why Is Influencer Identification Critical?
Influencer identification is critical for a bunch of reasons. It hinges on choosing the right influencers, as this ensures your brand reaches an audience that’s relevant to, and interested in, your niche. We’ll speak more about this later in the post.
Influencers boost brand engagement and interest by lending an air of authenticity and expertise that builds trust with your audience. This makes promotions more impactful to their large and engaged following.
Partnering with influencers is attractive because it supports the creation of tailored marketing to specific demographics and’s incredibly cost-effective. When compared to traditional advertising, the ROI of working with an influencer wins hands down. Someone who has built trust with an audience will always trump an online advertisement. And influencer-generated content feels genuine, so it appeals to audiences that are tired of traditional ads.
And finally, influencers’ endorsements provide social proof, influencing potential customers positively while amplifying brand awareness. It’s really a win-win all around, regardless of industry, and we’re using healthcare as an example to demonstrate this below!
Influencers Help Companies Understand Patient Conversations
Healthcare companies struggle to tailor messaging to resonate with potential patients, and this is where influencers come in.
As we discuss in our recent ebook, Leveraging Online Patient Conversations to Develop Patient-Centric Strategies, collecting and analyzing online patient dialogue is one thing, but integrating that insight in a strategic communications plan is something else entirely.
Online patient narratives are pivotal to capture and engage with in a meaningful way. They provide deep insights into patient needs, concerns, and what impacts certain decisions. And influencers rank high on the list of impactful engagements for the reasons mentioned above. Influencers are typically people affected by the same healthcare challenges as their audiences and have developed a reputation as trusted voices in the community supporting a specific condition.
But how do you identify the right influencers? And once you do, what happens next? You’ll need to:
- Evaluate influencer credibility and build authentic partnerships
- Track and measure influencer campaigns on specific channels
Evaluating Influencer Credibility and Building Authentic Partnerships
Who is your audience talking to, and does it make sense for your brand or service to talk to them as well? If not, you’re wasting budget and time while also alienating a potential client base. Every type of consumer, including patients, are harsh brand judges and will associate your brand with an annoying or awkward connection attempt attached to your brand in any way. So be sure to choose potential influencers wisely.
Searching for healthcare influencers, we can see a breakdown by category below. This is just a sampling of the wide variety of categories available, but we see Executives and Professionals; Health, Sports, and Outdoors; Food and Travel; and Artists and Designers. Some folks are found on multiple lists, showing a mass appeal that defies simple categorization:
It’s great to have this kind of variety, as not every influencer will meet a healthcare brand’s needs. It’s essential to click into each and understand conversations they’re having online or who they are just in general and to extract whatever emotions they’re eliciting when they’re active online.
Their patient-centric healthcare conversations are incredibly important, but you’ll want to have a handle on their other conversations as well. The overall vibe the influencer emits matters here, as it impacts how they’re perceived and how your brand will ultimately be perceived as well.
If you hope to understand patient perception, tracking and measuring influencer campaigns needs to be a part of this process—and it must take you beyond likes and comments, as we’ll see next!
Tracking And Measuring Influencer Campaigns
Once you know who your influencers are, you need to match them up to the appropriate channels to act as ambassadors.
Some influencers will have popular blogs or YouTube channels or be active in forums. You’ll be able to see their individual channel metrics and how their engagement is on each channel in the backend of your analytics tool by created a “Partnered” dashboard that reveals detailed intel.
For example, in the Cross Channel Summary section, regularly review these metrics: Followers, Brand Posts, Engagements per Post, and Shares per Post:
You can also use the Total Channel Conversation section to track post count and sentiment score by domain.
And you’ll want to have a handle on your own as well. Knowing how your re-engagement numbers look is important, but there’s something that’s even more important: Ensuring you’re interacting on the right channels! Are your consumers/patients engaging on social? If so, where/ Or maybe they’re more active on blogs, forums, and news sites?
And we can see the specific blogs, forums, and news sites they’re engaging on, so we understand where we can direct our efforts—and our influencer partnerships.
When you have channel and influencer alignment, you’ll be privy to conversations about your industry that will inform messaging in ways that really move the needle.
Over time, you can see the shift in conversation, with an uplift in sentiment and even the messaging points you carefully crafted, gaining momentum and shaping the narrative. Influencer identification is time well spent for companies in any industry. Reach out for a demo, and we can show you how it applies to yours!