CHAPTER 9

Get Your Customer Involved

The Internet democratized the selling process, and today people are more interested and tuned in to what their peers and experts say about a product than the spin from a company's paid copywriters. Today's content is shared and consumed as a group, and much of what we like we is based on what others like—which leaves a big role to fill for “influencers” of any kind. The influencers can be your readers who comment, or the people who write the content.

There's now a two-way channel running twenty-four seven, and it's where your potential customers spend more and more time chatting with others and comparing notes about different products and experiences. There was a time when a consumer would hear about a brand or product through a tightly controlled media epicenter (i.e., TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines). Now there are dozens of channels, most of which are digital.

When was the last time you tried a new restaurant without reading about it on a blog, or reviewing it on Yelp or OpenTable? When was the last time you booked a vacation without reviewing where to go on TripAdvisor or an equivalent travel blog? You might have started with having seen something in an ad, but most likely you went further. And chances are, you read content posted from an “influencer”—either an authority on local cuisine and/or travel, or simply a friend, a friend of a friend, or a friend's friend of a friend on Facebook or Twitter.

Perhaps the influencer was a celebrity. As a society, we love doing activities famous people do—eating at the same restaurants, seeing the same movies, wearing the same styles. It's validating that we're a part of pop culture. Because famous names endorse products all the time in traditional advertising, it shouldn't be a shock that they might be getting paid to endorse products in the form of content through modern conversation channels, should it? Even if they're not being paid, sometimes all it takes is a celebrity being spotted at a restaurant where your friend snapped a photo and shared it on Snapchat or Twitter. When Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones visited Chicago recently, the web flashed with photo after photo of Jagger dining and drinking at various establishments. It's logical to bet that many of those restaurants and bars got a bump in business in the following days.

Your company might not be selling cars or fine food, and Mick Jagger might never use your product, but it doesn't matter. In today's marketing environment, you'll need to tap into what others are saying and help make sure your potential customers see it to create a buzz. Seventy percent of consumers place peer recommendations and reviews above professionally written content.¹

The two-way channel that's always playing means curating the conversation, involving your customer, and learning the art of finding and using influencers, whether they're customers, celebrities, or super fans who love your product. You've already spent a lot of time listening to potential customers and letting them speak. Now it's time to get your customers and respected industry influencers involved in telling your story.

How Much “Influence” Do You Have?

First, let's talk about the types of influencers you might want to tap into to talk about your company and product. Then we'll explore ways to get influencers to tell your story in more potent and creative ways. Identifying and getting in touch with influencers is just the start. Many companies are actively seeking out influencers to move their products and raise brand awareness.

Using influencers—or influencer marketing, as it's called—isn't a completely new concept or even something unique to content marketing. Arguably, it was influencer marketing back in 1910 when tobacco companies put cards with pictures of Major League Baseball players into their cigarette packages. (Sidenote: This offended non-smoking Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Honus Wagner so much that his card was pulled, and most copies destroyed. Today, the remaining handful now often fetch $1 million or more at auction! Oh, the irony.)

Why did this work? After all, Wagner wasn't telling anyone how great the tobacco was that came along with his card. He just stared at you out of the package. The chance of getting his picture drew people in, kind of like customers who bought Willie Wonka's candy bars in hopes of getting a “golden ticket.” Today, marketers have access to a host of influential people who can actually advocate for your brand, rather than just look cool in a photo, and companies are tapping into this concept—except it's not photos of themselves, but rather, their opinions.

Whether you use a celebrity or an industry expert, a 2017 survey by eMarketer.com found that nearly 90 percent of U.S. agency and brand marketers believe socalled “influence marketing” can positively impact how people feel about a brand.²

In the same survey, 70 percent of marketers said they “agree” or “strongly agree” that influencer marketing budgets will increase in 2018, which means only one thing: Even if you're not engaging in this tactic, your competitors probably are.³

Influencers are the people your potential customers may already be listening to simply because they're involved in the conversation, and you can harness their knowledge and reputation to help your brand. Sometimes they'll work for free, and other times they'll need to be paid (which, understandably, is met with greater skepticism). Often, just a little attention is all they're seeking. Ultimately, it comes down to who is curating the conversation—finding people with the right nuggets of knowledge that can be presented in places where the conversation is taking place and where potential customers are likely to see them.

Who Are the Influencers?

Let's explore a few of the key types of influencers that brands—both large and small—use today. There are three common varieties: external, internal, and paid.

External Influencers

An external influencer can be a blogger with a following, or an expert in the field, who is not getting paid to speak on behalf of your brand. Often, this type of influencer has something to say and is looking for exposure, and because they're also part of the twenty-four seven conversation already, so the people you want to influence are likely to “know” them.

The relationship with external influencers is symbiotic— a “you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours.” The scenario in which said backscratching is the tradeoff. Your influencer fills a content gap for you, and you provide them with exposure and more links to help their SEO, exposure, what have you. They get exposure to people interested in your mutual brands, and you get free content from respected subject-matter experts (SMEs). How does this work?

In my industry (content marketing, that is), there are a number of us who are all part of an early-to-market group who pioneered new ideas in content marketing before mobile proliferation and are often asked as influencers for content. We get invited to write blogs, speak at engagements, and get quoted frequently in various trade publications that focused on marketing.

Early on, Joe Pulizzi, shortly after creating the Content Marketing Institute, smartly realized giving his content away would be a great way to spread his (and CMI's) influence—thereby increasing brand awareness for his firm. After building a large following at content marketinginstitute.com, he created a video saying (I'm paraphrasing here), “Go ahead and take my content without asking. Just give CMI attribution!”

Though you're probably not trying to write a book or blog about content marketing, you do have a brand and a product, and there are well-known and respected names in your industry as well. Maybe you're already familiar with some of them. They're often people with recognized blogs or small companies of their own whom interested consumers seek out for advice. For instance, if your company sells musical instruments, it's likely that a number of recognized musicians have websites where people go for the latest advice on technique and gear. Observe which sites seem to get the most traffic, and which experts are quoted or referred to online and in hobby magazines. These are the people you should consider reaching out to as influencers.

Also, using an external expert to get your point across helps bring credibility. In effect, you're saying, “We're not afraid to admit we don't have all the answers, but we can reach out to someone else who might, even if they're not in our organization.” It goes back in some ways to an earlier chapter when we talked about the importance of being humble. In essence, you're not just saying, “Take my word for it.” You're bringing in a credible industry voice without a conflict of interest.

Internal Subject Matter Experts

Not everyone is going to have someone inside their organization who's already a big name in the industry, but if you do, it can be a huge advantage in getting noticed and becoming part of the conversation. An internal subject-matter expert is a free source of respect, which you should tap into as often as possible. There's really no limit.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple—literally in a garage—the home computer industry barely existed. However, small computer clubs and magazines were out there, and both Jobs and especially Wozniak—who did most of the actual inventing—began attending club meetings and visiting computer fairs around the West Coast. Wozniak became a respected name among computer fans, and his reputation turned out to be a major advantage for Apple in getting its name out. In fact, it was Wozniak's demonstration of Apple's technology at a presentation to the Homebrew Computer Club in 1976, which helped lead to the company's first major order. According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, the order came from a person who attended the meeting and went away impressed with Wozniak's circuit boards and microprocessor.⁴

Obviously, there was no such thing as “social media” the way we know it back in those days, but hobbyist clubs served a similar purpose, bringing people with the same interests together so they could interact and learn more. Wozniak and Jobs recognized this, and they also understood that trade media could help get the word out. A July 1976 article in Interface, a hobbyist magazine, explained that Jobs “communicates with many of the computer clubs to keep his finger on the heartbeat of this young industry.” It quoted Jobs saying, “If we can rap about their needs, feelings, and motivations we can respond appropriately by giving them what they want.”⁵

Today's hobbyist clubs and trade magazines are where your customers and potential customers hang out on the Internet, and now that you've found them, you can use your internal experts like Wozniak to help direct conversation.

When my firm, T3 Custom, launched an online monthly newsletter for one of our large financial service clients several years ago, we had built up a following of about 25,000 regular readers. One of the “market strategists” in the firm was a quasi-celebrity, who had appeared on financial networks regularly, including CNBC. Because he had built a media presence and a recognizable face, he had grown a healthy base of fans. Anytime he was featured in a company email and mentioned one of the articles linking back to our newsletter, our readership doubled that month. Every time.

When people perceive of an internal subject matter expert as a public authority, take advantage of it by getting them to contribute content or augment your existing content by linking to articles in which they're mentioned or quoted.

Paid Influencers

This one has a couple of caveats, first because it requires you to spend money, and second because it has a mixed reputation. In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began cracking down on influencer marketing in an effort to curb the practice of celebrities being paid to endorse products on social media without disclosing that they're being paid.⁶

But a paid influencer—like many YouTube stars who are asked to make appearances to give credibility and traffic—can have a big impact. If you write a left-wing political blog, for example, and you were lucky enough to have Barack Obama make an exclusive blog contribution and then tweet about it, you'd get a lot of interest. (At the time of this writing, Obama has 101 million followers.) Though I can't speak for Mr. Obama, big influencers know they're big, and they're not writing for altruistic reasons. They're doing it because they get paid.

KFC, a division of Yum! Brands, which admittedly has deeper pockets than most of us, enjoyed success creating YouTube videos featuring different celebrities dressing up as the famous Colonel Sanders of fried chicken fame. It's a creative campaign that's using social media channels to spark new interest in an old product— and revive an old icon.

Micro-Influencers

Micro-influencers are “everyday people with smaller but highly engaged social media fan bases,” says NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam. They give brands “an opportunity to connect with the most passionate members of their audiences. More ‘regular’ consumers, especially younger ones, will share their product experiences across their networks in ways which inspire trust. This user-generated content will continue to augment brand-generated content.”⁷

The micro-influencer is also known as a “superfan” of your product and can wield a lot of influence. Typically, they aren't getting paid, but they have highly engaged social media fan bases and are more than happy to shamelessly boast about how great you or your product are, while giving you exposure to their base.

The super fan is a brand ambassador for you. For instance, consider someone who says, “I love McDonald's cheeseburgers.” Probably a lot of people do. However, if this person had hundreds of thousands of social media followers, they might start writing about McDonald's cheeseburgers on their site. This could end up drawing people to the brand.

If you're lucky, you already have a couple of people you know about who are plugging your service or brand in the twenty-four seven conversation. And you don't have to be McDonald's to attract such “super fans.” You might be surprised to know that even a company making one of the most mundane products you can imagine—butcher paper—found out it had a core audience of fans in an influential industry and took action to promote that fact.

Employee Influencers

Don't confuse this category with internal SME influencers. It's not the same. But if you have a group of dedicated employees, you can ask them to help spread the word about your brand as part of a content marketing strategy.

A few years ago, newspapers found themselves struggling to stay relevant as the electronic world stole much of their thunder. Some newspapers came up with the idea of using their own reporters to generate attention online. The Wall Street Journal was an early exemplar. Starting soon after Facebook gained popularity about a decade ago, the Wall Street Journal had its reporters begin posting their own articles along with other articles from the newspaper on their personal Facebook pages. The articles were free, even for non-subscribers, and the idea was to bring a wider group of people to the paper's website. Their idea caught on quickly, and soon a number of reporters at many papers not only posted to Facebook, but also tweeted.

And today, they don't just tweet their articles. If you follow someone like Washington Post political columnist Jennifer Rubin or New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman on Twitter, you'll see they tweet multiple times a day about the latest Washington developments. Sometimes they provide direct links to their articles, but other times their tweets simply help get the word out about what they're seeing on their beats at that moment, without directly promoting their companies. Nevertheless, anyone who checks it out further will quickly learn whom they represent, resulting in extended publicity.

Generating Content from Fans and Customers

Getting an external influencer, internal SME influencer, or paid influencer to promote your product is relatively simple and can be as easy as reaching out and asking them for a short quote or an email interview, but the real creative flow comes when you tap into super-fans, employees, and customers to launch your brand into the twenty-four seven conversation. A lot of companies do this, and they continually come up with new ways to do so effectively.

As I said at the beginning of the chapter, this sort of two-way communication with customers and fans directing the flow and driving brand awareness is really what separates today's marketing from the bullhorn advertising of the past. These conversations may already be going on, and your job is to tap into them and direct them in ways that serve your goals.

Getting Customers Involved

What you want to consider doing is starting a “feedback loop,” using social media to get the conversation going. A feedback loop means customers and others with interest in your brand start the conversation, and that spreads virally to other people and into other conversations. What are some ways to get a feedback loop going?

Monitor What Customers Say Online and Respond

One way to jump into the conversation is to see what your customers are saying and immediately respond. Take the story of a twenty-three-year-old fan of Shake Shack, whose adoration for Shake Shack prompted her to tweet her beloved hamburger fav with “And God said, ‘Let there be Shake Shack. And He saw that it was good.’” The company responded, “Amen.”

This type of conversation also falls under the category of molecular level relevancy. (See Chapter 5.) And yes, real-time customer service on Twitter definitely falls under the conversation category.

Millennial customers tend to spend a lot of time on social media and can get a real sense of connection when they're acknowledged on social media by a favorite brand. This sort of communication isn't too time consuming and can pay big dividends. Think, for instance, of how many other potential customers this person likely alerted to Shake Shack's retweet of her post.

The point is, brands need to engage, engage, engage in conversation. Any conversation qualifies as content today because everyone is watching. Always respond to what is being said by your customers. Don't risk looking lazy or uninterested and lose an opportunity to capitalize on free content. Have a person monitor social media posts and respond positively and graciously. Always.

Monitor Sales Trends: There Might Be a Social Media Opportunity

Finding customers, listening to what they say, and responding is a reactive process. You're hearing them, learning what they care about and what they might want to change, and then acknowledging them in the same channels. A proactive step is to find out if there are any trends involving your brand and then taking advantage of the content marketing opportunities they might offer. This often means taking a deeper dive into your sales results, like Oren International did.

Take Advantage of User-Generated Content (UGC)

When your customers and experts praise your product on social media channels, you've already succeeded at directing the twenty-four seven conversation where you want it to go without showing too much of your own hand or risking a top-down approach. The next phase, and one that's growing in popularity across many industries, is having your customers actually generate your social media content— in other words, “user-generated content,” or UGC.

Millions of words are written about millennials and their nearly constant presence on social media, but generation Z, born just after the millennials, might be even more tuned in to what's trending. This generation is arguably at the heart of a growing trend in which companies ask people to contribute their own marketing ideas—often in video form—and post them on social media sites such as YouTube.

Too often, today's youth gets chided for their focus on getting online recognition, something that might frustrate their parents. On the other hand, it's a natural human emotion, and user-generated content taps into people's inherent desire to be recognized and appreciated. When your brand shares something a customer or fan created, the external recognition not only strengthens the customer or fan's affinity with the brand, it encourages the person to share the content further with his or her friends (and your brand benefits vicariously).

Consider the example of sixteen-year-old Carter Wilkerson, who tweeted while at Wendy's asking how many retweets it would take to get a year of free chicken nuggets. Wendy's reply: 18 million. And while he hasn't hit the 18 million milestone just yet, the 3.62 million retweets of the Nevada high schooler's original tweet was good enough for Wendy's to give him twelve months of free nuggets.¹²

On April 1, 2017, Wilkerson had 138 followers. As of April 2018, it's more than 100,000, and #NuggsForCarter has a custom emoji featuring a box of Wendy's nuggets. He got some help along the way with retweets from other brands and celebrities getting in on the fun. And in addition to the year-long nuggfest, Wendy's also donated $100,000 in Wilkerson's name to the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.

But you don't have to be a restaurant to take advantage of user-generated content. For instance, yoga clothier Lululemon's #TheSweatLife campaign, in which the company asked people to share images of them “getting their sweat on,” resulted in 250,000 uses of the hashtag, more than 7,000 photo submissions through Twitter and Instagram, more than 40,000 unique visitors to the microsite created for the campaign, and a massive boost in conversions.¹³

UGC can get a bad rap because it's sometimes used as a shortcut to simply throw content up and check off the box. But when used thoughtfully and strategically, UGC can be extremely effective for generating traffic, engagement, and sales.

Encourage Sharing

When you look at the results of some of these efforts, it shows the power lying latent in your customer base. Remember at the end of the day, you're trying to make an emotional connection to an audience. They want to be educated, entertained, and delighted. If you can make an emotional connection, the audience members become your brand ambassadors and spreads your word for you—exactly what happened for the companies in the examples in this chapter.

You'll also notice the companies participating in this sort of user-generated content marketing encouraged people to spread the word. Lululemon, for example, asked its users to share their images on Twitter, not simply to send them to the company. It was the social media sharing that ultimately spelled success, and therein lies the lesson for content marketers. Encourage sharing. If the content isn't shared in social media, it won't go anywhere in social media.

How Do You Get Started?

There are some online communities where people already exert their influence, have a solid following, and can potentially spread the word about your brand. How can you get started on a path toward getting your customers involved? Some of the traditional sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can be helpful, but there are some newer ones you may not be familiar with include:

• Klout (klout.com). This site measures multiple pieces of data from several social networks, and also real-world data from places like Bing and Wikipedia. It compiles a “Klout Score,” a number between one and 100 representing a user's influence. The more influential the user, the higher his or her Klout score.
• Mavrck (mavrck.co). Mavrck allows users to identify and recruit validated, authentic influencers, advocates, referrers, and loyalists, while it tracks and analyzes posts and engagements. Basically, the site helps you find and tap into online influencers.
• Revfluence (revfluence.com). This platform has some of the same goals as Mavrck, helping people grow their brand's social media presence by harnessing online influencers and generating original content.
• SheSpeaks. (shespeaks.com). The goal of this online community is to help elevate and amplify women's voices. SheSpeaks members have the opportunity to voice their opinions on everything from how they live their lives to what products they choose and why. Members test and review products, weigh in on topics via surveys, discussion forums and polls, attend VIP events, and even get to star in the SheSpeaksTV videos.

Each of these platforms are worth exploring if you have questions about how to get an influencer marketing campaign off the ground. They do the heavy lifting and help you put all the right pieces in place for an influencer program if your resources are thin.

How Can You Measure Success?

If you build a strategy and get customers and influencers talking about your product, how then do you measure success? Return on investment is probably what your company's management and its investors (if you have them) want to see. Content marketing is tricky. Traditional marketers want instant results, meaning quantitative results, such as how many people read your content and how many purchased the product based on that content.

The goal is to get CMOs and marketing partners to buy into the process and ecosystem of a long-term content marketing plan—which means you have to be involved in a conversation that moves people over time. A content marketing campaign isn't a billboard on the highway, so engagement is critical. The goal is not to make a million dollars (though that would be nice). The goal should be a more realistic and engagement based, such as building an audience of 25,000 people.

At T3 Custom, we faced a situation where we were under pressure to prove the value of the print magazine we published for a brokerage client of our new company (another larger online brokerage firm) that was buying it. We were worried the newcomer wouldn't see the value of a printed magazine and would look to save money by scrapping it.

We embarked on a strategy to prove our worth, starting with a survey that every reader received. Because the magazine cleverly personified a beloved mascot of an irreverent monkey with a sophomoric sense of humor, we strategically placed a call to action in a widely read section of the magazine with the words “Save the monkey! If you don't respond, the monkey will get it!”

Fearing the magazine would get swallowed up and go away, the response from our loyal fans was amazing. More than 1,000 of the 30,000 readers responded, some with quips like “I would trade my spouse for a lifetime subscription.”

The survey questions were designed to demonstrate the magazine's value. It asked readers if they'd ever made a trade as a result of our publication. (Seventy percent said yes.) The numbers spoke for themselves, and the suitor kept us and our magazine, because we helped them see the value.

Icebreaker

Put on your R&D hat and go find three blogs from main influencers in your industry. Spend some time on each one, skimming their content to get a sense of what makes them resonate with their audiences. What are they talking about and what is their unique angle? What do their headlines look like? How long are their articles? How often do they publish?

Try to get a sense for why they have a following and why they are considered subject matter experts. Would your audience benefit from their content? What would be a benefit to them if they plugged their content into your strategy?