The Technology Landscape for Influencer Marketing: What Does It Look Like? — Neal Schaffer // PDCA Social

Quotes

• “I start with blogger outreach tools. Those were the initial beginning of giving you the ability to search and find people that blog about certain things, that have certain rankings, grab their email addresses, and be able to reach out to them very easily. A lot of these tools have extended into this next generation of what we call now as influencer discovery tools.” -Neal“You are only as good as the data that you can get on your platform. But what we have seen now are platforms whose primary focus is on Instagram. We’ve seen this through the years where the influencer marketing budget of about 80% has been on Instagram.” -Neal“The blogger-focused and Instagram-focused are just two among the multitudes. You can also have what I call influencer marketplaces. This is where influencers opt-in and say basically at this price, per post, per social network, you can work with me.” -Neal“Companies have been doing influencer marketing, the opposite way. They are getting their binoculars on and looking at who has influence out there, realizing that because digital influence is so democratized today and they say, someone with a thousand followers is considered a nano-influencer and brands are approaching these people.” -Neal “What I preach is, to begin with, those who already have a brand affinity for you. Because someonemight have a lot of influence but it might not be for what you’re looking for and there might not be a cultural fit and be just transactional and they are not really your customer.” -Neal“There is no tool for doing what I’m talking about. It actually requires you to piece tools together using analog skills together with digital skills to find your influencers and map something out.” -Neal“More and more companies are starting to create what we could call these brand ambassador type of influencer programs and train and educate them and employees are part of them. I call it, employee as an influencer program. We now see a very different landscape emerging.” -Neal“Now we have platforms that emerge where you hire influencers just to create content for you. Basically, influencers become your in-house content agency.” -Neal“So the idea of working with influencers is not specifically to get access to their audience but also an understanding that they have specific skills that are valuable to your organization and you can hire them to learn what they’ve used in mastering specific channels to help bolster your in-house efforts to marketing as well.” -Ben“Influencer marketing to me, is almost like sales. It comes down to relationships. It comes down to prospecting. So there are tools that can help you prospect. You can buy lists, you can buy leads but they may not be relevant.” -Neal“You can’t hundred percent rely on tools without you doing a little bit of fact-checking and actually going into their feed and making sure that there is organic alignment with your own brand and these are the things that no tool will ever be able to do.” -Neal