by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
Before we start, I should point out that this blog is about Business to Business (B2B) Influencer Marketing and not Business to Consumer (B2C) Influencer Marketing.
Many articles have been written about Influencer Marketing, here at Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) www.DLAignite.com we have written a fair few over the last few years.
But one issue that keeps coming up is, how to measure influencer marketing?
Let me give you an example. One brand came to us and asked to take part in a conference, which we did and then they said they couldn’t measure if the influencers had an impact.
I suspect that they didn’t really understand what influencer marketing was about. They had all the symptoms of needing it. They ran a conference that the same old, same old where invited, but really the “issue” for sales and marketing was to find new names, new companies and to try and get in front of people they were not talking to. Real top of the funnel (ToFu) stuff. Which is classic use of Influencer Marketing.
The way they wanted to measure it was for us influencers to take a download of our LinkedIn connections and send them to them. This was to see if we actually had a network and to see if they were just “connections”. Putting aside the moral implications of downloading our LinkedIn connections and sending them to a third party (is this legal?) and the compliance with GDPR. This search for a measure of Influencer Marketing has been a holy grail, until now.
(By the way, we refused to send our connections.)
At the time of writing DLA has now been in business for two and half years and in that time we have completed a ton of sales transformations, which means we now know what good looks like. We have of course, measured this. It provides us with a benchmark (a measure) of what it means to be digital.
We are therefore able to measure the digital profile, of any salesperson, in fact anybody. Your people, your leadership team, your competitors and benchmark them. We can plot them and show you comparisons. This is really useful to see which people to retain, which people to recruit and which people will be part of your organisations going forward. You can also benchmark your competition and see how you compare.
We are also able to benchmark influence.
Take any influencer, we can run them through our algorithm and then plot them and let you know how influential they are. It’s as simple as that.
Apologies, but we are pretty proud of being able to take the unmeasurable and measure it.
(We use this to accredit our employees, our students and our global capability network. Which allows us to deliver a (measured) consistent and high quality service to our clients.)
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/our-dream-is-to-change-the-world/
https://dlaignite.com/taking-action-often-equals-success/
https://dlaignite.com/modern-selling-trust-inside-and-out/
