The more customers turn to ad-blocking software, skip over ads on their DVR or simply ignore advertising messages, the greater the importance of effectively utilizing influencers becomes in marketing campaigns. Fortunately, CRM platforms are making it easier than ever to effectively identify and utilize the influencers who best fit your brand. Here are eight ways you can use your CRM platform to boost your influencer marketing.
1.Build Stronger Relationships
Rather than focusing on sales-oriented messages, you should focus on building communities based around all of the ways your products can help your target market reach their goals or add value to their lives.
Influencers play a key role in driving conversations in these communities. One of the benefits of CRM is that you can use it to identify which influencers are driving the conversations you most want to be a part of and figure out ways to influence those influencers to promote your brand and help you build stronger relationships with the members of that community.
2. Conducting Influencer Research
To effectively utilize influencers, you need to not just go after the influencers with the largest following. It is important to identify the influencers who are the best fits for your brand. You can create custom fields in your CRM to help you track the qualities you are looking for in an ideal influencer and target the influencers whose style, content and audience best fit your brand.
3. Coordinating Influencer Communication
Most companies have multiple teams working on different marketing projects. Your CRM can help you avoid having your different teams bombard the same influencers with contacts. Contacting influencers too frequently can turn them against your brand, rather than encourage them to promote your products.
An activity panel in your CRM can be used to display which team members are assigned to which influencers and record a history of their contacts with those influencers. Other features in the CRM, such as automated reminders, can help make sure your team does not miss key contacts and deadlines.
4. Scale Up Your Outreach
There will be times when you may want to send the same message to large groups of influencers, but not every single one on your e-mail list. Your CRM can help you create and track targeted groups for large-scale communication.
You can also use your CRM to track the data gathered through these outreach campaigns and effectively respond to any messages you receive in return. You can then use this data to evaluate how effective your campaign was and improve future outreach efforts.
5. Track Social Media Handles
Consumers are increasingly choosing social media over more traditional forms of communication, such as e-mail. To effectively communicate with customers and influencers on social media, you need to be able to keep track of who they are and what handles they go by on different social media platforms. Your CRM can help you keep track of this information. Additionally, your CRM can help you determine which social media platforms are performing the best for your brand.
6. Sentiment Insights
You probably do not have time to read every social media post your chosen influencers put out there. Fortunately, your CRM can do that work for you and provide you with a summary of the sentiments expressed towards your products, brand and competitors. The software can use keywords, emojis and other information to gauge whether customers and influencers are feeling positively or negatively about your brand and products.
7. Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
User-generated content accounts for about 25% of search engine results. Effectively utilizing influencers is one of the best ways to get users to generate content that will push your brand higher in the search engine rankings.
To take full advantage of this phenomenon, you need to make sure you are effectively responding to questions and engaging with customers and influencers on social media. You can use the social insights in your CRM to gain an understanding of who is having the conversations you most want to be part of and help you generate follow-up conversations that will drive interest in your brand.
8. Improve Collaboration
Your CRM has many features that can make it easier for your different marketing teams to collaborate on projects. Centralized notes, tasks and influencer information can help eliminate duplication of efforts among your teams. Shared calendars can help make sure everyone is hitting their deadlines.
Additionally, you can create customized, automated workflows to help your teams efficiently organize, prioritize and delegate tasks. Features, such as automated to-do lists, can be generated quickly and automatically assigned to the appropriate team members.
Effectively utilizing influencers can tremendously boost your marketing efforts. Your CRM platform can help you more effectively and efficiently utilize influencers to drive brand awareness, spark conversations and build communities of loyal customers.
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