What is Influencer Mapping and How D2C Brands Can Leverage It

Every business needs a marketing strategy to spread awareness, generate leads and get conversions. Although there are several different ways to market a business, influencer marketing is catching steam right now.

Influencer marketing uses the power of influencers to market products and services for brands. Influencers are individuals who create knowledgeable content on a specific topic to connect with a particular audience in a selected niche over social media. These individuals have followers who they can influence to make a buying decision.

As marketers, choosing the right influencers for the brands you work with is crucial. You need to find influencers on who the brands can depend upon. And, to discover the right influencers, you need to undertake influencer mapping.

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What is Influencer Mapping?

Influencer mapping is the process of measuring how much "influence" an influencer's opinions and content have on their followers in the digital world. It helps you:

• Find the right influencers to market a brand's products or services
• Find the best ways to reach them
• Get an idea of the kind of impact the influencer can have
• Figure out which influencers are already talking about a brand or their competitors
• Find out which platforms these influencers use and how often they talk about a brand

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Importance of Influencer Mapping

This process considers the audience size and ranking of the influencers and makes a head-to-head comparison of these influencers. The benefits of influencer mapping include:

1. Identify key influencers: Your influencer marketing campaigns can only be successful if they are targeted to the right audience. Influencer mapping identifies the key influencers for a brand based on their network. It helps you decide which influencers you should approach for collaboration to reach the right target audience for a brand.
2. Put the influence to test: It allows you to compare the influence of all the key influencers by putting it to the test. Creating different influencer marketing campaigns with different influencers and then A/B testing can help you compare which campaign had a better impact on your audience. This data can help you decide which influencers are the best for a business.
3. Find hidden audiences: Influencer mapping also allows you to identify who exactly is the audience that an influencer can influence. By knowing the influencers' audiences, you may encounter hidden audiences you've not targeted before. This opens up new opportunities for you to expand reach, generate new leads/conversions, and drive more revenue.

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Who is a Good Influencer?

A good influencer is determined through six factors based on content relevancy, topic expertise, and number and type of followers. These six factors are:

• Authority
• Audience
• Influence
• Focus
• Frequency
• Engagement Opportunity

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Areas to Explore and Engage with Influencers

Using online key influencers in your marketing campaigns effectively builds trust amongst the target audiences and establishes a brand as a thought leader in its domain. Here are the areas where you can engage influencers to deliver a brand message and amplify its online presence.

• Recruitment: Influencers can help build your employer brand that can help attract qualified job applications for your open roles.
• Advisory boards: Influencers can be on the advisory board on projects, initiatives, or content, providing feedback on concepts and programs.
• Content creation: Influencers can create social media content around key events of a company. They can be brand ambassadors or even host company activities.
• Co-creation activities: Influencers can participate in multidisciplinary co-creation activities around specific challenges and share the findings with their audiences.
• Editorial outreach: You can partner with influencers to share press releases and other approved content to provide routine updates to your target audience.

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Influencer Mapping: Step-by-Step Process

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From defining to measuring – discover the 7 steps to influencer mapping:

1. Define - Whether generating more leads/sales, achieving higher engagement, or expanding your reach - whatever goal a brand wants to accomplish through an influencer marketing campaign, it should be the center of your influencer map. If you don't have a goal, you'll be clueless about which direction you should take your campaign ahead.
2. Identify - Now that you know what a brand wants to achieve from the campaign, the next step is to identify the industry's most influential and prolific influencers.
3. Shortlist - Once you have a list of all the key influencers, shortlist and then rank them based on the business objectives.
4. Analyze - Look at the kind of content the shortlisted influencers publish and find out their areas of interest. Deeply analyze their social media networks, common characteristics of their followers, and audience segmentation to understand who can be an excellent fit for the brand's campaigns.
5. Profile - Once you are done with the analysis, start building their detailed profiles, including engagement behavior, market, and background. For example, what kind of content do they prefer to share to engage with their followers, and so on.
6. Map - Net, group the influencers based on certain characteristics, such as their authority, influence level, focus areas, and overall social presence and footprint. This will create a map.
7. Measure - Once you decide on the influencers and a campaign begins, you must measure the results. By measuring the engagement level and participation effectiveness, you can determine the potential business impact of engaging them in marketing campaigns.

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Affable.ai – an easier way of influencer mapping!

Going through the above seven steps can be an overwhelming and time-consuming task, especially when working with multiple brands. Even more arduous is the task of managing multiple relationships with all the key influencers for several brands. In such a situation, Affable.ai can help! From handling the pre-campaign phase to finding relevant influencers, from managing the campaign to measuring its impact – Affable.ai can automate these steps to make the entire process easy for you. Here's how:

• Manage influencers efficiently: Add a list of influencers for each brand to the software and build customized profiles. This makes it easy for you to manage relationships with all influencers.
• Track every interaction: Affable tracks every single interaction you've had with the influencers at one go.
• Kickstart and manage influencer marketing campaigns: Affable.ai is an all-in-one influencer mapping platform where you can share a brand's products with the influencers, track revenue, and pay their commissions.
• Communicate with influencers: Communication can be a hassle when you have multiple influencers. Affable.ai automates the communication process to allow seamless communication with influencers through its built-in email sequences and templates.
• Measure the success of your influencer marketing campaign: Finally, Affable.ai helps you compare influencers based on the campaign's performance. When you carry out A/B testing through influencer mapping, the insights and influencer analytics can be used to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of each influencer. Also, you can track which content of the influencers brought in the most significant number of conversions. In a nutshell, Affable.ai gives you complete control over influencer marketing campaigns for the brands you work with.

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Influencers are here to stay, and influencer marketing strategies will evolve over time. From finding the right influencer, approaching them, managing multiple influencer relationships, and measuring their performance – Affable.ai can help you run effective influencer marketing campaigns. Request a FREE demo today!

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