Brands’ relationships with influencers are becoming more important, especially on social media.
- Dell is winning fans by building real hand picked relationships to capitalize on social’s most sought-after leaders
- Creating longstanding, deep, and mutually-beneficial relationships with social influencers which they manage.
Influencers need to clearly see what kind of relationship it is, and the value they get out of it.
- “It’s very important to us that these influencers relationships are not founded on a financial basis with Dell.
- They want to retain the independent and credible voice these influencers have with their audiences.”
- Dell’s approach is to repay knowledge with knowledge.
- “Once they established these relationships, they invite influencers to certain events, to briefings with Dell executives, to speaking engagements, or to think tank thought leadership discussions.
Dell even reaches out to these individuals, they do their own due diligence to find out who’s best-suited for specific topics.
- The main criteria is subject matter expertise, as well as connectivity on social channels.
- Influencers can be bloggers, or just people who are very active on Twitter or other platforms.
The vetting process is quite stringent
-
- don’t rely on platforms that promise to spit out lists by creating profiles based on social analytics algorithms.
Ask: ‘What are you trying to accomplish?’
-
- Then we can see if there’s a match, and I can handle the communication and relationship with this influencer for them.
Does it work?
This model has worked fabulously for DELL.
You hear these horror stories of agencies handling company’s influencer relationships: they switch, and suddenly the relationship and all this knowledge about an influencer’s capabilities is all lost. It’s impossible to quickly build trust like that.”
And with that success, there’s a number of real, tangible benefits.
- “The outcome is third-party engagement and endorsement. Not by feeding our influencers messaging we want them to repeat, but by helping them understand what Dell is doing, and how Dell is well-positioned for our customers’ needs.”
- Making better use of influencers isn’t just for tech companies. It’s becoming imperative across industries.
- “In marketing, we’re undergoing a digital transformation. So many things are changing. Online resources are establishing credibility. Look at the gravitas of Wikipedia. There’s a growing trust in specific sources, and a growing ability to discern between fluff and real, important knowledge.”
“Now, influencers are the mega-curators of this good content.”
Tools like Amplified Content Marketing can help put value into the relationships
Influencers in your niche are important for increasing the reach of your content.
- As guest bloggers to partner-with, link-building from like-minded people,
- Influencers bring endorsement and trust to your marketing
This is convincing to those in marketing and social channels, but how do you convince executives it needs to be a priority?
- show that these things are being picked up by the press,
- positive conversations are being driven online by these influencers,
- being invited to new industry conferences to keynote case studies
- is how to show stakeholders that the influencer relations program is working.
This long-term, personal approach to working with influencers has enormous benefits. Once you’re able to show its value, the program is sure to pick up steam, both programmatically as well as organically.
Check out this info-graphic for more highlights on Influencer Marketing
Source: incite-group.com/brand-management/dell-winning-fans-its-long-term-approach-social-influencers