This article explores the most sought-after skills in digital marketing and what they mean for marketing professionals and the industry.

Top skills marketing leaders look for when hiring

Up to 57% of marketing leaders prioritize analytics experience when hiring new talent, according to the State of Marketing 2023 report. As brands grow and become more data-driven, marketers who can effectively navigate and interpret data are highly valued.

Other skills that marketing leaders are hiring for and prioritizing are:

• Social media management (12%)
• Copywriting (9%)
• Video production (7%)
• Graphic design (6%)
• Search engine optimization (6%)
• Google Ads (2%) 

Although marketing analytics is specified, the ability to use data when managing social media communities, producing content and managing paid search marketing is also critical.

This shift towards prioritizing analytics experience reflects a growing recognition of data’s vital role in marketing strategy and decision-making. This makes sense for a few reasons. 

The need to demonstrate business value

Companies are tightening budgets to weather the current economic storm. At the same time, CMOs have been demanding that their marketing and PR teams demonstrate ROI from their programs. This is a trend that I’ve seen over the last 5 to 7 years.

Marketers were asked about their KPIs and how they plan to measure their programs’ performance in the same report, and 26% said that cost per acquisition/sale was the number one KPI, followed by:

• Social engagement (19%)
• Customer lifetime value (17%)
• Cost per impression (9%)
• Customer retention rate (9%)
• Cost per click (8%)
• Cost per lead (8%) 

These data points clarify that marketing leaders prioritize metrics that prove value. Outside of social engagement, these KPIs are all aligned with financial metrics.

Third-party cookie deprecation

Google plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by 2024. Aside from rethinking audience targeting and focusing on first-party data, marketers must up their analytics skills to use the data effectively and draw meaningful insights.

Consumer privacy is also a significant consideration. Legislation, like the GDPR and CCPA, require companies to obtain explicit customer consent before collecting and using their data. Still today, 75% of marketers rely on third-party cookies.

Dig deeper: Why we care about compliance in marketing

Marketing budgets are on the rise

This year, over 50% of marketing leaders plan to increase budgets, but just 14% will make substantial investments, according to the same report. This is likely due to the uncertain financial times that have characterized the last 12 months.

However, despite these budget constraints, marketing leaders are still investing in data-driven strategies, such as:

• Investing in analytics tools.
• Hiring talent with analytics experience.
• Other initiatives to help them better understand their customers and engage them on a deeper level.

The demand for analytics skills will likely remain strong as marketing teams continue leveraging data to improve customer experience, drive sales and maximize ROI.

Per Gartner, almost 30% of the digital marketing budgets are being allocated to analytics across three functions: 

• Marketing data and analytics (9%)
• Customer analytics (8.8%)
• Marketing insights (8.3%)

While each function serves different purposes, all require an in-depth knowledge of data and analytics.

Marketing data and analytics is about performance

Hiring marketers with an analytics background is necessary to measure marketing performance better. Marketers should be able to analyze data from various channels such as paid search, email, display ads and social media to identify opportunities for improvement and provide actionable insights.

Knowledge of conversion rates, budget optimization, clickthrough rates and other performance metrics are critical. One mistake in reporting can result in millions of dollars of loss for brands.

Typically, someone working within this function would review the data and provide actionable insights after the campaign has ended.

Always-on customer analytics

Customer analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data about customers to better understand their behavior, preferences and needs. This involves using data sources such as customer transactions, demographics, web and social media metrics and customer feedback to identify patterns that inform business decisions.

In most cases, initiatives that require in-depth customer analysis using survey data happen quarterly or bi-annually. In large companies, this is usually outsourced to a research firm managed by an internal staff member with expertise in analytics.

Bringing the outside in with marketing insights

Marketing insights refer to the actionable knowledge gained from analyzing third-party marketing research from firms like Gartner, Forrester, Global Web Index, Kantar and Nielsen. These insights can help marketers and PR pros understand the current macro trends, consumer behavior and competitor activity in their industry.

This might be similar to customer analytics, but it’s more focused on industry trends and macro-level insights. Again, this helps marketers plan their strategies and understand the broader industry landscape.

Cultural trends and insights can also come in other ways. In the report, 31% of the marketers surveyed have designated cultural insights teams in-house. This approach is more expensive, given the cost of salaries and the current economic climate. But having an internal team can be beneficial in speed to insight and data ownership. 

Invest in the right resources to drive marketing ROI

Data and analytics are essential tools for modern marketers. Investing in the right talent, tools and processes helps you keep up with the competition. Building a team with different functions specializing in customer analytics, marketing insights and data and analytics is key to success. With the right talent and resources, brands can tap into valuable insights, drive revenue and maximize ROI.

The post What are the top skills you need for digital marketing? appeared first on MarTech.

53% of marketers expect TikTok to deliver the biggest growth in 2023, according to Reuters’ State of Marketing 2023 report. Trailing behind were the Metaverse and LinkedIn (15%), other platforms (9%), Instagram (6%) and Facebook (2%). Interestingly, despite having 368 million monthly active users globally and under new management, the report did not mention Twitter.

TikTok is well-known for viral videos (remember the longboarder sipping cranberry juice and lip-synching “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac?), ad campaigns and creator marketing activations. They also release new functionality for their users and advertisers every other week.

Let’s explore why B2B marketers may want to rethink TikTok as a viable option.

1. TikTok is a storytelling engine

Video content has been the number one consumed media globally for several years. TikTok has tapped into this trend, allowing marketers and brands to tell their stories and capture consumer attention.

Creating video content isn’t a novel concept. We have been doing this for years. But data suggests marketers invested more in video content creation in 2022. What this tells me is that video production quality will be a focus.

Video content humanizes brands and stimulates several senses at once, which helps buyers retain information. Creating videos that effectively tell a story keeps consumers engaged and entertained while providing valuable brand messaging.

TikTok is a video-first platform built for mobile, giving it huge advantages over other networks. Legacy platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter struggle with attracting younger audiences who crave video.

2. TikTok makes content discoverability easy

For years, “Google” has been virtually synonymous with discoverability for consumers and ad buyers. It’s become a verb in our vocabulary. And while many still use Google as their gateway into the web, young people are turning to TikTok.

Google knows this. Just last year, a Google exec cited an internal report that 40% of young people use TikTok when looking for a place for lunch. Curious, I asked my daughter the same question about her TikTok usage; she agreed.

TikTok recognizes this and is building additional functionality to make content discovery easier. Last summer, they expanded the video descriptions from 300 to 2,200 characters.

It’s now common to see TikTok videos appear in Google results. As competition between these two companies grows, it will be interesting to see how long Google will index TikTok videos.

Dig deeper: TikTok is setting the ground rules for social media

3. TikTok isn’t just for young people

A common misconception among B2B marketers is that TikTok is just for young people. That may have been true a few years ago, but as TikTok users have aged with the platform.

About 60% of TikTok users in the U.S. are under 30, accounting for Gen Z and younger millennials. The other 40% are older: 16% between 30-39 years old, 13.9% are between 40-49 years old, and 7.1% are 50 and up.

As older millennials are in their mid-30s and almost 40, they have also been promoted to managers and directors, and are leading teams. Many are responsible for buying decisions at large companies. A 2015 Google report (yes, eight years ago) showed that nearly half of all B2B buyers are millennials. That number has undoubtedly gone up.

4. TikTok is ripe for B2B

The first thing you see when you log into TikTok is the For You page (FYP). You might see a funny video, dance routine, makeup tutorial, cleaning hack or recipe.

But TikTok adapts as you use it. The feed will change and become more relevant by optimizing your profile with relevant keywords and engaging with B2B creators and other technology brands.

Technology and B2B content already exist in the platform. For example, a quick search for the #DigitalTransformation hashtag yielded 14.5 million views, #InfoSec with 138,000 views and #WomenInTech with 572,000 views. And B2B brands like Adobe, Sage and Shopify are succeeding on the platform.

The time is now for B2B and technology brands to integrate TikTok into their long-term marketing and digital strategy.

5. Brands have creative freedom

At the outset, social media was just a community. There was no advertising or it was primitive. There were no influencers or creators. Instead, people with common interests talked to each other about what mattered.

While the concept of a community still exists today, most apps like TikTok and Instagram are now media platforms. As a result, brands have the creative freedom to launch campaigns, activate creators and buy ads throughout the network as they see fit.

One of the best things about brand marketing on TikTok is its creative freedom. Unlike other social media platforms, there aren’t strict rules or guidelines about creating ads or launching campaigns. 

You can be as creative as you want when creating videos or running ads on the platform, giving you plenty of creative expression to experiment and find what works best for your business. There’s no 20% rule of text on images. If you buy media on Facebook, you know exactly what I mean.

TikTok hasn’t ignored measuring campaign performance and tracking ROI. It’s analytics provide insights into user engagement, ad performance and more. It’s become increasingly easy for marketers to measure and optimize campaigns in real time.

Also, TikTok has doubled down on innovation by consistently releasing new features for advertisers. They recently added four new options to their Promote advertising tool. This lets advertisers syndicate content quickly and easily to:

• Drive more visits to your TikTok page.
• Get more messages from potential customers.
• Boost other creators’ content.
• Target audience by location.

Don’t overlook TikTok

24% of marketers said that strengthening brand identity was a top priority for 2023, followed by increasing brand awareness (19%) and brand interaction in social media (6%).

Many might take this as an opportunity to invest more money in creative advertising within the platforms where they feel comfortable. If you’re a B2B company, perhaps it’s LinkedIn. If you’re a consumer brand, maybe you’re still finding value on Facebook and Instagram.

I would challenge you to think outside the box and consider using TikTok to reach new audiences, strengthen your brand identity and increase awareness. You might be surprised at the results. 

TikTok’s influence on buying behavior is significantly higher than other social media channels, with 15% of users willing to take action after viewing an ad on TikTok. Also, 49% of users say they use TikTok as a source for discovering something new.

So, what are you waiting for?

The post 5 reasons why marketers should consider TikTok for B2B appeared first on MarTech.

Reaching buyers today is difficult. With the many platforms and apps, it can take time to understand where your audience spends time online. Additionally, customer attention is at an all-time low, so campaign messages must be as concise and relevant as possible. 

To address these challenges, three key elements should be at the forefront of any successful digital strategy this year:

• Using data to inform your strategy.
• Integrating creators into your programming.
• Operationalizing a brand advocacy program.

So, let’s dive deeper into what this will mean for your brand to achieve success in 2023.

1. Data-informed insights

Data and insights are often used interchangeably, but there is an important distinction between the two. 

Data is raw, factual information that can be measured. It reflects an occurrence. For example, data in a Google Analytics dashboard might show that a paid advertisement resulted in 15K clicks to a landing page.

On the other hand, insights draw actionable conclusions from data. They explain why something “is the way it is” and offer advice to optimize future events. For example, an insight from the above data point might show that there were 15K clicks to the landing page after copy changes were made to the ad.

Data and insights are essential for any business looking to take its digital strategy to the next level. Therefore, companies must collect and analyze data from all sources — digital, social media and audience analytics. These data points provide more detailed context to understand the buyer’s journey and create targeted campaigns more likely to produce the expected results.

Digital analytics provides performance-based metrics based on a campaign in the market. It gives real-time insights into your campaign’s performance across digital media, search and other paid media activations. Let’s say clicks or conversions are trending down, a closer look at the data will help you identify and address the issue quickly, enabling you to adjust your campaigns accordingly.

Website analytics do the same but provide insights into how users find, interact and take action on a company’s website. If web traffic is down or you have a high bounce rate, a deep dive into the data should tell you why. Maybe it’s load time or the web copy is confusing. Either way, you can use this data to improve the user experience. 

Social media metrics for paid and organic content are just as important when measuring performance. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as likes, shares, comments, reach, sales and leads across all platforms to get an idea of what types of content resonate best with your audience. These insights can inform future campaigns. You can create content tailored specifically for each platform based on what has been successful in the past.

Audience analytics is more research-based versus performance-based and happens before a campaign launches. It starts with building an audience of existing customers, prospects or a desired audience. Then, the data can provide actionable insights such as top media affinities, social channel preferences, attitudes and behaviors and conversational trends. The insights can inform media buying and campaign messaging throughout the buyer’s journey.

This enables you to develop integrated, cross-channel campaigns that stretch across public relations, social media, email campaigns, events and digital media, ensuring a consistent buyer experience. 

Collecting data from multiple sources and making it actionable allows you to make informed decisions about your digital strategy, giving you an advantage over competitors who rely solely on intuition.

Technology companies like Audiense and Infegy provide solutions and capabilities to deliver these insights. 

Dig deeper: Marketing analytics: What it is and why marketers should care

2. B2B creator marketing

The creator economy is now a part of every industry, reshaping how brands think about their digital campaigns. Even B2B and technology brands are prioritizing influencer partnerships. As a result, the creator economy will continue to grow and is expected to reach $47.2 billion over the next 10 years. 

Collaborating with B2B creators effectively reaches new audiences and builds relationships with existing ones. By working with influencers, enterprises can tap into their networks and gain access to a wider audience that may not have been exposed to the brand’s messaging before. 

Additionally, collaborating with creators allows for more authentic content creation and thought leadership, which resonates better with buyers who crave authenticity in their journey. 

An enterprise tech company launching a new AI product might want to partner with an influencer to collaborate in creating a video series or a white paper. The influencer would lend credibility to the campaign by providing their insights into why the AI product is best-in-class. In turn, the company can leverage the influencer’s network while co-creating content that speaks directly to buyers, which traditional advertising methods often struggle to do effectively.

Another benefit of working with creators is increased engagement from existing audiences and potential buyers. They are more likely to act when they see a third party advocating for a product or service. This helps create stronger connections between customers and brands and drives long-term business growth. 

Technology companies like Tagger and Onalytica can help marketers identify, engage and manage creators and influencers. 

3. Operationalizing brand advocacy

In the early days of the web, brand advocacy was an important topic of conversation among the marketing community. Brands used technology to listen to customers and engage with them directly on social media channels. Likewise, community managers were on the front lines of customer interactions, creating content and advocating for the community. 

That passion withered over the years and has been replaced with alternative ways like influencer marketing to reach audiences online. This is partly because social is more of a media channel than a community. 

Influencer marketing still needs to be a priority, but not at the expense of brand advocacy, which is an invaluable asset for every business. 

Brand advocacy happens whether you know about it or not. Customers may comment positively about your company, software, services or executives without being asked. When they see value in your products, they won’t be shy about sharing their experiences. Their feedback on your products and services can also help you innovate and improve.

Brand advocates help reach new audiences with minimal effort since existing customers already have direct experience with your products and want others to experience it too. 

Additionally, having satisfied customers speaking positively about your technology will create trust among potential buyers who might not have heard of you before but now feel more confident in giving you a try due to positive reviews from other users. 

Finally, brand advocates can boost sales by providing valuable insights into how your technology helps them solve their business problems and share them with the community. 

Technology platforms like Influitive and Birdeye provide marketers with tools and solutions to help operationalize brand advocacy programs.

Dig deeper: Building a brand strategy: Essentials for long-term success

What’s ahead for digital marketing beyond 2023

The future of digital marketing will continue to focus on “smarter” personalization. Consumers expect brands to know their needs, preferences and interests before asking for them. As a result, companies must leverage AI, machine learning and predictive analytics to provide personalized experiences across the buyer’s journey. 

Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok will continue to grow for B2B and technology companies as younger generations are moving into the workforce, being promoted and making purchase decisions. 

As we look ahead, it’s clear that digital marketing will continue to be an important part of any successful business strategy. By focusing on data-informed insights, creator marketing and building brand advocates, businesses can ensure they are well-positioned for long-term success. 

The post Top 3 priorities for your 2023 B2B marketing strategy appeared first on MarTech.

Implementing a successful B2B influencer marketing program requires a strategy — identifying the right influencers, researching their conversational behaviors and activating them.

In my first article of this series, I emphasized the 1:9:90 Model of Influence and how B2B brands can use the model as the foundation to architect a program, which includes setting criteria for identifying the right influencers.

In the second article, I showed how researching B2B influencers can deliver actionable intelligence. I highlighted a real analysis and identified 600+ influencers who have written and/or talked about cybersecurity within the context of blockchain over the last three months. The research showed several data points that could be actionable — vertical preference, unbranded versus branded conversation and what topics were trending among the influencers at the time the data was pulled.

Similarly to researching media coverage, understanding what’s top of mind from a select group of influencers can inform a data-driven activation strategy.

Here are four ways you can activate influencers across all of your media channels, ordered by level of sophistication:

Earned media is more than just pitching

Within the context of influencer marketing, leveraging earned media is a tad different. Of course, you and/or your PR team may treat certain influencers like journalists. and in fact, many of your influencers will most likely fall into this category.

This approach is most likely the easiest and it’s really the “entry-level” way to kick off your influencer marketing program. It works like this:

1. Identify the right influencers. Typically, 50 to 100 is a good number to start with.
2. Add them to a Twitter list.
3. Subscribe to their individual article/blog feeds.
4. Follow all of them, adding around 20 to 25 to your list per week.
5. Monitor and then share/retweet/like their content.

I know, it sounds basic. It is. But this approach takes time and patience. What I typically do is categorize all the influencers and track them over time:

• Unaware: The influencer does not follow the brand or hasn’t mentioned the brand in the last 12 months. You can get this data from platforms that allow you to pull historical data.
• Aware: The influencer either follows the brand on social or has mentioned the brand in the last 12 months.
• Engaged: The influencer has either shared, retweeted or liked the brand’s content or mentioned the brand in an article.
• Advocate: The influencer consistently engages with the brand publicly.

Setting influencer acquisition goals, reporting and tracking the influencers along this funnel is necessary to monitor your progress and show value to the higher-ups.

Paid media always delivers

Even if paid media isn’t part of your remit, you still need to think about using it to reach all of your audiences, including influencers. Why? Organic reach in social media is dead. Here’s how to use paid media to reach B2B influencers:

1. Identify the right influencers. Typically, 500 to 1,000 is a good number.
2. Upload influencers to Twitter’s Tailored Audiences.
3. Create a piece of content that “adds value” to the conversation. It can’t be self-serving or link back to a product page. In some cases, you may create content that links to one of the influencer’s articles or posts.
4. Promote the content.

It’s important to note that Twitter’s minimum count for creating a tailored audience is between 500 and 600. In some cases, you may have to add additional handles in order for the audience size to reach the minimum.

The shelf life of owned media content is… forever

Collaborating with influencers in the creation of branded content is an industry standard. I see it all the time and have even participated in similar programs. The great news about owned media is that it lives forever, in Google.

The process of doing this is simple. The production is where it can get complicated and expensive, unless all you’re asking for is a contributed blog post from the influencer. Here’s how it works:

• Select five to eight influencers who are in the “advocate” category as outlined above. You most likely know them by first name.
• Invite them to participate in the creation of an e-book or white paper.
• Give them full editorial control to write whatever they want about the topic you decide.
• Have someone from your executive team write the introduction.

At this point, you can do one or all of the following:

• Gate the content, drive paid media and get leads.
• Add the content to SlideShare, gate it there or not.
• Write a blog post talking about the key insights and link to it.
• Create a series of social “creative” content driving traffic to one or all of the assets.
• Provide influencers with SlideShare embed code or other digital assets.
• Use $500-$1,000 of paid media driving traffic to each of the influencer’s content pieces, assuming they write/blog about it.

The advantage of creating long-form content is that you can leverage smaller pieces of the asset for social media amplification. I call these “digital breadcrumbs,” since you can bring your audience back to your owned media channels over time and in small increments.

Shared media = real-time engagement

Using influencer research and data can help B2B brands win the war of brand relevance, if done right. It works like this:

1. Again, identify the right influencers.
2. Add them all to a social listening panel.
3. Monitor their conversations and sharing patterns in real time.
4. Create content that matches what they are talking about, sharing, writing or reading.
5. Target the influencers with paid media — see above.
6. Shift all branded and social content to imitate how influencers talk about technology, buzzwords and jargon (web content, social media, bylines and contributed articles, blog posts and news releases).
7. Pair up executives with influencers. In other words, if you have an executive thought-leadership program, all of these tactics will prove to be effective for that as well.

The days of creating an overwhelming amount of planned social content are over. B2B marketers must evolve the way they think about social media and content marketing.

Of course, there will always be a need for lead-gen activities, planning for events, announcements and product launches. But real-time, organic (sometimes paid), influencer-driven content is the future of B2B content.

Influencer marketing for B2B companies isn’t just something you can turn on and off overnight. It requires strategy development, planning, research and a long-term investment of time and budget before you can start to see results.

The brands that make influencer marketing a priority are the ones that will experience an increase in brand awareness, relevance in the marketplace, word of mouth, sales/leads and will ultimately enjoy a strong competitive advantage.

The post Activating B2B influencers across earned, owned, shared & paid media appeared first on MarTech.

In my last article, I talked about the opportunity that B2B brands have with influencer marketing, leveraging the 1:9:90 Model of Influence.

The next step in this approach is to research and analyze the influencers’ behaviors, media consumption and conversational trends — what are they saying, what are they reading? Doing so will help you forecast and predict what’s top of mind for them today, tomorrow and in the future; and then build a content strategy and engagement plan that will produce results.

What you should be looking for in your research

Rather than analyzing hypotheticals, I wanted to highlight a real example that illustrates the types of data you can extract from researching influencers. We did a quick and accelerated analysis to find influencers on the topic of blockchain and cybersecurity.

Using proprietary methodology and technology, we identified close to 600 influencers who have written and/or talked about cybersecurity within the context of blockchain over the last three months. The influencer audience consists of the following:

• Journalists from the business media: Fortune, Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, NY Times and the Wall Street Journal.
• Journalists from security tech media: Dark Reading, CIO Online, Hacker News, Bleeping Computer and ZDNet.
• Analysts: Gartner, Forrester, IDG, Constellation Research, Enterprise Strategy Group, HFS Research and Futurum.
• Bloggers, columnists and contributors to several media outlets.

We collected the data, built their profiles and added the influencers to a real-time, searchable listening panel (we use Crimson Hexagon) and tracked their conversations, media consumption and keyword usage over a period of 12 months.

Here’s an example of one influencer, Daniel Newman, an industry speaker, analyst, published author and Forbes contributor:

In looking at Daniel’s conversational patterns since January 2018, you can see that artificial intelligence (noted in the darkest shade of green) and blockchain (the lightest shade of green) are two topics that are becoming increasingly more important to Daniel, based purely on volume of conversation and the content he is publishing and sharing online. Security and Digital Transformation as standalone topics appear to be declining.

This data is critical for many reasons. It will allow you to track what’s “top of mind” for Daniel and inform how and when you might pitch him a story about your product or technology. It’ll also help you understand how to engage with him on social media channels if that’s his preference. And it’ll help you get ahead of any new and emerging trends on the horizon.

Tracking one influencer is insightful, but it’s also critical to look at the data through the lens of a larger influencer audience to get a more holistic view of what topics might be declining in popularity, which new ones are gaining traction and the overall pulse of the marketplace.

For example, over the last 12 months, we wanted to understand what business verticals were top of mind for the 600 influencers, specifically related to security and blockchain. Here’s what we found:

You can see that banking (finance included) is the top vertical being discussed, which certainly makes sense given the topic, followed by technology (startups, software and so on), healthcare and government. Understanding the context of these vertical conversations is important before jumping to any conclusions.

The data doesn’t necessarily mean that the influencers are more interested in one vertical than another. There are other factors to consider: market demand for coverage, government laws, innovation, and even security breaches within each of these verticals may increase the quantity of conversation.

The data only becomes actionable once you drill down to understand the conversational, media and business drivers of each topic.

Examining the branded and unbranded conversation

Outside of the vertical conversation, we also wanted some perspective on the topics that were driving engagement among our group of influencers. In looking at the data, we noticed that some of our influencers were mentioning certain security companies, so we drilled down further.

We started off by isolating all of their security conversations, articles and commentary to ensure we were capturing only the relevant conversations. The clustered data, filtering and human analysis gave us a clear view of what security topics were resonating and trending among our influencer group.

From there, we referenced the BVP Cyber Index list of 29 public companies whose principal business is IT security and have a market cap of $1 billion (USD) to filter out brand mentions. Here’s what we found:

Of the 87,000 security-specific mentions, conversations, articles and overall discussions, 95 percent did not mention any of the security companies we analyzed. This tells us that there is a huge opportunity for one of these companies to capitalize on the lack of engagement.

The branded conversations (5 percent) didn’t really have any surprises, with Microsoft, IBM and Symantec leading the way. This doesn’t mean that our influencers favor one company over another. Many times, it’s simply because they are sharing trending news or writing articles themselves.

For example, just this month there was a large discussion about Microsoft’s acquisition of Github, and Microsoft also garnered a lot of coverage when it announced “Threat Tracker” in their Office 365 Security Service. This was very relevant to our influencer group.

It’s clear that product development, innovation and brand storytelling can drive relevant coverage and drive additional reach, which will naturally result in influencers sharing and discussing the news.

The unbranded conversations give us a clear view as to what’s top of mind for our group of influencers. It’s no surprise that artificial intelligence and blockchain are the number one drivers, considering that our algorithm initially surfaced influencers who talk specifically about and cover both of these topics.

What surprised me was how little Threat Intelligence, Security Analytics and Cloud Security were discussed.

A quick drill-down of the blockchain conversation revealed how important this topic has become over the last 12 months. The spike in December 2017 was due to Bitcoin trading at over $11,000. Bitcoin and blockchain are not the same thing, but they are closely related, and people often inadvertently use “Bitcoin” to mean blockchain and vice versa.

Lastly, we wanted to highlight the “top shared” articles within each of the categories we analyzed. It’s important to note that most of the authors below are a part of our larger influencer group.

This data tells you how these influencers are writing their headlines, where they are contributors and what’s resonating with the larger community.

There’s a lot of data here. Now what?

This data only scratches the surface. The reality is that you may never actually engage with any of these influencers outside of pitching stories, and that’s OK. As stated in my last article, influencers drive the conversation and have the ability to impact markets strictly by their words. They influence language, vernacular and the way people talk about certain technologies. And lastly, they can influence search behavior and the actual keywords that users type into Google when looking for more information about a product or service.

If you can get ahead of the curve and begin to understand how influencers are talking, and what jargon and buzzwords they’re using, you can predict and/or begin to adopt the same language in all of your content forms: web pages, blog posts, contributed articles, press releases, social content and ad copy.

The result would be twofold: an increase in brand relevance among the targeted influencers and core audiences and visibility in Google’s organic search results, which we know is the home page for all B2B buyers.

As next steps, consider the following:

• Prioritize your media strategy and build narratives and shareable content about each of the topics that influencers care about through laser-focused pitching, media relations and content marketing.
• Align social and editorial strategy with the trending conversations happening among the influencer audience.
• Tell strategic brand stories across owned media channels and feed the content engine with stories that are top of mind of the influencers.
• Participate in more industry conversations and create shareable content that resonates with the influencers.

In my next article, I will highlight several ways to build an influencer program with a corresponding engagement plan that delivers business outcomes, not just business outputs.

The post How researching B2B influencers can deliver actionable intelligence appeared first on MarTech.

It’s not stated how much of that investment will come from consumer or B2B brands, but it’s clear that influencer marketing has become an integral piece of marketing programs today.

For consumer companies, if you have a product or service with mass consumer appeal, there are thousands of influential consumers (called creators) that you can “hire” and activate through paid campaigns. Companies like OpenInfluence and Clever have access to thousands of influencers as a part of their opt-in influencer network. All you need is an idea or campaign and a sizeable budget. And the great thing is, you can start tracking your program instantly.

How B2B is different

For B2B brands, it’s not that easy. Technology and business influencers can’t take a video of your SaaS (software as a service) platform or snap a photo of your data center and drive sales any time soon. It just doesn’t happen that way. Also, an influencer with a large following on Snapchat or Instagram doesn’t have much credibility with B2B buyers, unless they happen to work in IT themselves — which isn’t a typical scenario.

Also, B2B buyers don’t typically click on a link from an Instagram post, go to a corporate website and purchase software. They usually start the purchase process reading reviews, verifying specs and Googling everything under the sun. This behavior is usually the result of a conversation they had with a peer or co-worker. They spend hours, days and sometimes months researching the technology, asking questions and bouncing ideas off their network.

The minimum average sales cycle for enterprise software is six months. Even though social media has accelerated this cycle, it’s still much longer than the cycle for consumer products. It’s said that B2B buyers get as far as two-thirds through the purchase journey before they contact a vendor, and that’s only if the vendor’s capability meets the basic technical requirements.

How influence works in B2B

Sadly, reaching B2B decision-makers isn’t easy. They are sophisticated, well-educated and skeptical about sales and marketing. That means that — even if it’s more difficult than for consumer brands — the most effective way to overcome this skepticism is by influencing their decisions through trusted third parties — influencers. Consider the following data points:

• Content shared from and created by influencers provided 11x higher ROI than the average display ad after 12 months, according to a case study conducted by Nielsen Catalina Solutions for TapInfluence.
• 92 percent of marketers that used it in 2017 said that influencer marketing is effective at reaching audiences, a Linqia survey found.
• 71 percent of marketers believe that ongoing ambassadorships are the most effective form of influencer marketing, a 2016 Altimeter Research study for TapInfluence discovered.

So, it’s clear that influencer marketing is reputable, but how is it implemented for B2B brands? It starts with understanding the 1:9:90 model.

The first reference to the 1:9:90 model was in 2006 by The Guardian’s Charles Arthur, who said that “if you get a group of 100 people online, then one will create content, 10 will ‘interact’ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”

Since then, the 1:9:90 model has been adapted into various methods to find, segment and activate groups of people online. I have been testing and refining influencer marketing programs for large B2B brands and have altered the definitions:

• The 1% Influencers: These are the opinion leaders and content creators. In the consumer world, they’d be known as ‘trendsetters.” They can reach the majority of their market when they write, Snap, tweet or publish just about anything online. They can create new markets, buzzwords (e.g., “Digital Transformation” or “Enterprise 2.0”) and new product categories. Five years ago, this group consisted only of traditional media and the large analyst firms. Today, influencers can be anyone — media, authors, consultants, second- or third-tier analysts and anyone else with a specific point of view, has some degree of intelligence and has a large audience.
• The 9% Promoters: People in this group are extremely active in social media. They are also very active participants in forums like Reddit. They recommend products and services, coffee shops, consumer products, sneakers — you name it. They have a point of view about everything and will share it freely with just about anyone willing to listen. At times, they will over-share their brand experiences within their communities, whether good or bad. They sign up for newsletters, leave Amazon and Yelp reviews, download content, comment on it and share it — any action that lets their peers know exactly what they think. This 9 percent is the audience that can potentially make or break the conversation.
• The 90% Market: This is everyone else. It’s easy to reach this audience with a $3 million-dollar Super Bowl ad if you have the budget. They are experts at consuming content. They read, learn and absorb everything online. They Google everything — discovering new products, reading reviews and consuming news content. They do not publish anything, nor do they contribute much to the conversation. But don’t neglect them, as their strength lies in numbers. It’s this portion of the 1:9:90 model that decides how compelling the other groups are at telling your brand’s story — and it’s all based on their purchase power and behavior.

The 1:9:90 model of influence can apply to any brand, large or small. The distinction between the groups is important, though. You can’t engage with or communicate with an influencer the same way you would with general consumers. But, whatever the differences between these three audience groups, each one plays a significant role in the content engine. If you can positively engage with an influencer or group of influencers and get them to talk about your company or product, you have the potential to reach the entire market.

Things to look for in an influencer

The process starts with identifying the right influencers. Sadly, many marketers use just one data point to determine which group of influencers to engage with, and it’s usually “reach.” While reach is a good metric, it’s not the only one. Consider the following:

• Reach: How large is their social community across all digital channels — blogs, RSS subscribers, contributed posts, social? Reach is important because you’ll want to know that influencers can actually get content in their followers’ feeds.
• Relevance: How often are they referencing topics and keywords that align with your business or describe your industry? Relevance will confirm that the influencer is “on topic” frequently and didn’t just share an article six months ago and then leave the conversation.
• Resonance: When they create content, how far does it travel on the internet? Are others engaging with it? This metric helps separate real influencers from the ones that have large communities but no engagement. Or, in some cases, the ones that resort to shady tactics that make them appear to be more influential than they actually are.
• Reference: Are they referenced by other influencers? In other words, are the other influencers in your program sharing, commenting on, liking or retweeting content?

One tool I use to help identify influencers is Onalytica. They have a unique platform that allows for both bio and content search. So, if you are looking for an influencer, say an editor, journalist or engineer, who is discussing “artificial intelligence,” you can find them quite easily and preview the content in real time.

Once you understand your specific market and realize what your marketing goals are for influencers, you’ll want to spend a considerable amount of time researching which ones can drive impact for your brand.

In my next article, I will show you how to profile influencers and research their conversational trends and media consumption habits in order to drive actionable intelligence.

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