A consumer downloading an app is the ultimate symbol of someone accepting your brand, a mobile is the most personal item people can have, they have it with them 24 hours a day checking it 150 times a day (Ashford, 2016). In downloading your app that means that they have a constant reminder of your brand. In order to maintain that relationship brands need to have an app worth downloading and has an offering that positively reinforces the brand. This is perhaps why companies such as Under Armour have invested millions in creating an app. Both Nike and Under Armour saw positive results due to their apps stating that it is one of the reasons sales increased 70% for women (Lobosco, 2014), because apps that provide useful information for consumers can increase consumer trust and preference for a brand, which increases sales (Urban & Sultan, 2015).

When viewing the most popular health and fitness apps there were various recurring features. (Cohen, 2015).

Features

• Step-by-step workouts by leading personal trainers of varying difficulty and length (Cohen, 2015)
• Tracking system to track your fitness through monitoring movement done during the day – including a calorie counter. This feature is even more useful when it presents tracking information in an easy to read format (Cohen, 2015).
  

• Meal plans, healthy recipes and healthy meal options even when eating out
• Ability to type in or scan the barcode of what is being consumed and add that onto the tracking device of how much exercise you have done manually (Alpe, 2016)

• However, the most valued apps have in-built personal trainers suggesting workouts and meal plans giving validation to them through your personal targets and workouts (Rodio, 2016), it is these personalised features that are key to continued use (Tang et al., 2015).

• Gamification features – things to encourage you to complete a workout, this makes people want to become more involved in fitness, return to your app – reinforcing your brand – and helps people overcome prior barriers such as a lack of time (Urban & Sultan, 2015; Gowin et al. 2015)
• Music to motivate you throughout your workout according to your heart rate or connected to the fitness tracker tracking your movements & personalised to your favourite music taste (Rodio, 2016).

• Share and complete workouts by following new & old friends as well as commenting on each others progress & experiences (Alpe, 2016). This ability to create virality increases engagement (Larizadeh, 2013).

• Allow users to track their fitness progress through activity logs (Cohen, 2015).
  

Something most health and fitness brands do not include in their apps is giving reasoning to peoples behavior – such as less movement at work than usual is why you did not complete your workout goal for the day, users also find this beneficial and it increases customer retention (NewsRx Health & Science, 2014). Many companies leave this important factor out and could be the differentiator between you succeeding and your competitor not so much.

Although it is unlikely that your business will have the app budget to contain all of these elements, ultimately it is up to what your customer would want. Choose an objective for your customer and pick out the items from the above list that fit your objective that you know your customer would find important. Once you have decided on elements you wish to incorporate into your app, test them regularly to ensure your customer is using it. It is better you do these well than do lots of things half-heartedly with an extensive & unwieldy design (Youens, 2011).

Technical

For a brand health and fitness app, people are more likely to download it if it is free (Tang et al., 2015), however you can incorporate in-app purchases to mitigate the cost.

An app must have an easy to use interface, (you can use fluid to help with this), as people will not be bothered to use it if they find an app hard to use, they will use another (Rodio, 2016; Fierce Developer, 2011; Gowin et al. 2015; Tang et al., 2015). Additionally, people are more likely to meet their fitness and activity goals when their data is presented in an easy to understand visual way (NewsRx, 2014).

Continually update your app (Cohen, 2013). Although giving it the latest features are important, do so in a way that maintains your brand image as customers my become dissatisfied if there are regularly large overhauls of the app they have come to rely on. With this in mind it is also important to listen to your customer and update according to their feedback on the app (Cygnis Media, 2013).

Measure

Number of downloads; time spent using app; money spent on/in app (Youens, 2011). Track the number of people using each page and how long they are on each page, as well as viewing where traffic to your app is driven from & where your best users are driven from (Larizadeh, 2013). However many apps are free, especially if it is made to market your brand therefore it would be more beneficial to see if there has been an increase in sales since the release of your app and if there is a correlation between the number of people who have downloaded your app that month and increased number of sales that month.

Benefits

If you get an app right you improve your brand image (Urban & Sultan, 2015), you can help people lose weight – with greater brand recognition and various outlets publishing your app for even more brand recognition. You will develop and improve your relationship with customers through giving them useful information.

Furthermore, effective apps can be a reason for an increase sales (Urban & Sultan, 2015), with Nike & Under Armour saying their app contributed to their 70% sales increase. However this was just two apps who have a lot of money being pumped into their app – alongside this was mainly women so further studies would be have to undertaken to reveal the extent of impact on men.

Limitations

Interestingly, Gowin et al. (2015) found that people strongly opposed linking their social media with their apps, and did not use those features which is why it is important to track page usage, if your customers are using all features – this may only be in young people as it was based on a college study.

Fitness apps can be incredibly expensive to make and very few get recognition therefore more money will be need to be pumped into advertising the app. However, if you are serious about becoming a health and fitness brand, customers expect more from you than just clothes and shoes (Bradshaw, 2015) so must give more to your customer. If you are an established brand with a vast social media following, that can help you to get the word out there to combat this limitation.

If you found this blog post interesting, find out more by reading these articles:

• Case for Benevolent Mobile Apps
• 7 Tips to Create Awesome Mobile App Designs

References

• Alpe, L. (2016) The best health and fitness apps to make life easier The Telegraph, 9^th March 2016 [Online] < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/03/09/the-best-health-and-fitness-apps-to-make-life-easier/> [Accessed 23^rd April, 2016]
• Bradshaw, T. (2015) Under Armour Snaps up Fitness Apps Financial Times, 5^th February 2015 [Online] < http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2eed0aac-acc7-11e4-beeb-00144feab7de.html#axzz46kT2k5Dd> [Accessed 24^th April 2016]
• Cohen, H. (2013) 3 Steps to Creating and Effective Mobile App Strategy [Online] < http://heidicohen.com/mobile-website-versus-mobile-app-which-should-you-use-charts/> [Accessed 23^rd April, 2016]
• Cohen, J. (2015) 11 Health And Fitness Apps That Achieve Top Results Forbes, 7^th January 2015 [Online] < http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifercohen/2015/01/07/the-11-top-health-fitness-apps-that-achieve-the-best-results/#143d72e61aca> [Accessed 23^rd April 2016]
• Cygnis Media (2013) Considerations for Designing an Effective Mobile App [Online] < http://www.cygnismedia.com/blog/how-to-design-mobile-app/> [Accessed 23^rd April 2016]
• Fierce Developer (2011) 6 steps to making a more effective mobile app [Online] < http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/special-reports/6-steps-making-more-effective-mobile-app> [Accessed 23^rd April 2016]
• Gowin, M., Cheney, M., Gwin, S. and Franklin Wann, T., 2015. Health and fitness app use in college students: a qualitative study. American Journal of Health Education, 46(4), pp.223-230.
• Larizadeh, A. (2013) Eight Tips For A Successful App Forbes, 19^th July 2013 [Online] < http://www.forbes.com/sites/avidlarizadeh/2013/07/19/eight-tips-for-a-successful-app/#21923b7765cc> [Accessd 23^rd April, 2016]
• Lobosco, K. (2014) Nike online sales jump 70%, stock surges [Online] < http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/25/investing/nike-online-sales/> [Accessed 7^th February 2016]
• NewsRx (2014) “Better visualizing of fitness-app data helps discover trends, reach goals”, NewsRx Health & Science, , pp. 28.
• Rodio, M (2016) 12 of the best fitness and health apps for 2016 Mens Fitness [Online] < http://www.mensfitness.com/life/gearandtech/12-best-fitness-and-health-apps-2016> [Accessed 23^rd April 2016]
• Tang, J., Abraham, C., Stamp, E. and Greaves, C., (2015). How can weight‐loss app designers’ best engage and support users? A qualitative investigation. British journal of health psychology, 20(1), pp.151-171.
• Urban, G.L. & Sultan, F. 2015, “The case for “benevolent” mobile apps”, MIT Sloan Management Review, 56, no. 2, pp. 31.
• Youens, R. (2011) 7 Habits of Highly Effective Apps Gigaom, 16^th July 2011 [Online] < https://gigaom.com/2011/07/16/7-habits-of-highly-effective-apps/> [Accessed 23^rd April 2016]

Fitness blogging has vastly increased over the past decade. Have you ever wondered how you could get in on the action & how your brand can take advantage of the blogosphere – even potentially influencing peoples taste and choices to buy your products? Follow these steps to do so…

It is important the blog is written in a personal tone, the reader must feel as if a friend is writing something to them (All Business, 2016). Much like when writing to a friend, there should be room in the conversation for a question, either by leaving it open ended or asking a question for people to respond to. Like when speaking to a friend, you must develop a consistent tone with the audience so they know to come to the blog to be cheered up, or given advice, or to get motivated – especially with a health and fitness blog (Warner, 2016). For health and fitness blogs it is useful to include elements of humour to empower female fitness (Andreasson & Johansson, 2013).

Much like consistency is key in tone, it is also crucial in terms of blog postings – friendship doesn’t work if you dip in and out of contact as you please, it must be worked at, let your customer know when a blog will be out. Frequent postings once a week or once a month is necessary for a blog to work and a relationship to be built with your readers – they also allow your blog to appear higher in the search rankings as search engines give greater visibility to fresh and frequently updated content (Sanusi, 2014). Make your blog shareable – have icons allowing your audience to share your blog with their friends via Facebook, Twitter or just a URL to share via their phones to extend the relationship built to a wider audience and build a community (Antunovic, 2013).

A blog post should be between 300-500 words, allowing them to be little ‘snackbites’, which a reader can quickly read whilst on the go, but also left wanting to come back to the blog for another post. To aid reading further, ensure the text is scannable with clear headings and bullet points (All Business, 2016). Although this is stated, interestingly the most successful blogs viewed did not contain paragraph headings. This suggests perhaps this is not such a crucial element provided the text is kept short and in text bites, allowing it to be scannable without large headers.

It can be seen that not only are there only 300-500 words, but the words are also broken up, making each paragraph or sentence more digestible and making the text less overwhelming (All Business, 2016). To break up the text, photographs are used to reinforce the point being made, or show what is being spoken about (In the Frow, 2016; Wilkins, 2016).

Ensure you know your audience. Translate how much you know by choosing a theme and content which not only represents yourself but also them (Millburn, 2015). For the vast majority of blogs, using technical terms will not translate. Write content that they will want to read and find not only useful, but valuable (Millburn, 2015). Give them tips to solve a problem, information they haven’t heard before or a new idea on how to do something, even giving them inspiration to try something new. This will again encourage readers to come back and get more inspiration/advice. It seems important that content for health and fitness blogs includes food/nutrition, inspiration to get fit, lifestyle and exercises (Andreasson & Johansson, 2013).

Bloggers are so popular because they are so relatable. Although fitness blogs should be motivational, with inspirational pictures to encourage people to get in shape, it may be difficult to find ways to be relatable, however, perhaps for younger readers discuss going out with friends at the weekend, or for an older audience talk about fitting fitness around motherhood (Andreasson & Johansson, 2013). However, Antunovic & Hardin (2013) argue that people do not necessarily want to lose weight so have the bikini body nor simply post pictures of ‘the perfect woman’ stereotype, therefore it may be wise to post pictures of a more average, healthy woman working out than a size 4 bikini model, as most females are not athletes, they just want to keep fit. Blogs that do these appear higher in search rankings when typing ‘Fitness blog’ into Google, perhaps proving this point.

Plan your content to make it easier to ensure you have a frequent blog posting and titles to ensure it gets posted and attracts the right viewers. A good tip is to use Google Adwords to find keyword people use to find your services/products. Once keywords are identified put these in your blog title into a phrase that accurately describes your blog and will entice people to read it, as not only does it allow people to find your blog post, but it also drives traffic to your blog (Wainwright, 2016).

Benefits of Blogs

Blogging allow fitness brands to develop a relationship with their customer – if information posted on the blog proves useful, people will come back to your blog, and keep your brand on the customers mind. The more useful the content the stronger the customer-brand relationship leading to increased retention.

Also if people find content useful, readers may share the blog with their friends, increasing traffic to your brand and brand recognition. Furthermore, if an influencer writes a guest post, they will publicise this, and who knows – they may have an influencer friend who may publicise this post too, gaining your brand further recognition.

Blogging also allows you to know your customer & audience better from how they react to your posts. This may allow you to adapt your product range accordingly, in turn increasing sales.

Limitations

For brands who are fitness blogging, readers are aware that you have a product to sell ultimately, so will be reading the blog with this in mind. This is why it is important the blog consists of information that they will find useful so that they are not put off by your ultimate call to action. It is important that the focus of the blog is information that is useful to the customer rather than the product you are trying to sell – this will also make your blog more likely to appear in search results was people are more likely to type into google ‘Fitness workout’ than ‘[Insert your brand’s name] blog’. Furthermore, if you give your customers useful information, people are more likely to return to your blog.

People can easily post negative comments, which can impact others’ views of your blog. If you delete these comments, it looks as if your brand has something to hide, however, if you respond positively to the complaint and offer a useful solution, people are more likely to speak positively about your brand and drive further traffic to your blog.

Measure Your Blogs Performance

The obvious way to measure your blog’s performance is to measure page & post views. Google Analytics can also be used to measure sentiment surrounding your blog, be it positive or negative comments on each blog post. However perhaps the most beneficial measure would be to see what content drives the most traffic to your blog using Google Analytics (Millburn, 2015). You can then utilize this when writing future content to maintain consistently high traffic to your blogs (Sanusia, 2014).

If you want to find out more about how to write an effective health and fitness blog you may be interested in these links:

• Fitness On Toast
• 50 Bloggers Making a Difference in Fitness, Health and Happiness
• How to Optimise Your Fitness Blog for Human & Robot Consumption
• The Nine Ingredients That Make Great Content

References

• All Business (2016) 5 Tips for Writing an Effective Business Blog [Online] <http://www.allbusiness.com/slideshow/5-tips-for-writing-an-effective-business-blog-16799694-1.html> [Accessed 21^st March 2016]
• Andreasson, J., Johansson, T., (2013), “Female Fitness in the Blogosphere: Gender, Health, and the Body”, SAGE Open, vol. 3, no. July-September, pp. 1.
• Antunovic, D. & Hardin, M. (2013), “Women bloggers: Identity and the conceptualization of sports”, New Media & Society, vol. 15, no. 8, pp. 1374-1392.
• In the Frow (2016) Why it’s okay to Alternate your Style [Online] <http://www.inthefrow.com/2016/03/okay-alternate-style.html> [Accessed 21^st March 2016]
• Millburn, J. F., (2015) How to Start a Successful Blog Today The Minimalists, 10^th November 2015 [Online] < http://www.theminimalists.com/blog/> [Accessed 21^st March 2016]
• Sanusia, A (2014) How to Write a Successful Blog that also Promotes your Business The Guardian, 24^th June 2014 [Online] <http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2013/apr/30/how-to-write-a-business-blog> [Accessed 21^st March 2016]
• Wainwright, C (2016) How to Write Catchy Headlines and Blog Titles Your Readers Can’t Resist Hubspot, 23^rd February 2016 [Online] < http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/a-simple-formula-for-writing-kick-ass-titles-ht> [Accessed 21^st March 2016]
• Warner, J (2015) Writing a Good Blog Creating Family Web Sites for Dummies [Online] < http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/writing-a-good-blog.html> [Accessed 21^st March 2016]
• Wilkins, S. (2016) Paris: Exploring the Ile de la Cité. Sainte Chapelle, the Conciergerie & Notre Dame Liberty London Girl, 8^th March 2016 [Online] <http://www.libertylondongirl.com/2016/03/08/ile-de-la-cite-sainte-chapelle-conciergerie-notre-dame/#more-26962> [Accessed 21^st March 2016]

Companies are increasingly using influencers as a source of promotion online – 75% of marketers say they use influencers with 47% thinking they are very effective (eClincher, 2016). The Washington Post found that influencers constitute only 10% of the population but shape attitudes and behavior of the other 90% (cited in Charlesworth, 2015). They are particularly useful as they are one person that has a significant following – the largest influencers are currently celebrities with those such as Taylor Swift having 75.2 million twitter followers  and Selena Gomez having 74.7 million Instagram followers that are at their fingers and can promote a message instantaneously with a reach that most meticulously planned out multi-million £ ad campaigns do not have. The chart below demonstrates the situations whereby marketers typically enlist influencers:

With this rise in influencers, and being a vital part of any social media campaign (Booth & Matic, 2011) companies knowing how best to gain and utilise influencers within your marketing campaign to get the most ‘bang for your buck’, is crucial.

What Makes a Good Influencer?

Although dependent on what needs to be promoted, influencers typically have at least one characteristic out of the following: a lot of followers or quality followers –including your strategic customer; Celebrity, an aspiration that people want to relate to and purchase products to be like their idol; Expertise, therefore knowledge that others do no possess so believe this influencer to know best and essentially good quality taste (Elderkin, 2015). Furthermore, a good influencer maybe up & coming in their field, identifying them has the upside of building a relationship in their early stages which will make them more loyal.

In the case of blogging in particular, McQuarrie et al (2013) state that successful bloggers gain an audience by blogging in a particular way so as to gain an ever-increasing audience. The Academy of Marketing (2016) found that good bloggers have four key characteristics, trustworthiness, expertise, authenticity and personal relevance. Furthermore, bloggers are so successful because they influence people to purchase a product or service in a non-obtrusive, personal manner (Halvorsen et al, 2013).

Identifying Your Influencer

Ultimately you need to find the right influencer (eClincher, 2016).

(Traackr, 2016 – click the picture to enlarge the image)

Practitioners must develop an influencer marketing strategy and align it with communications objectives: the goal is to stimulate an engaging conversation that allows us to change perception if needed, diagnose expectations and bring clarity to the dialogue (Booth & Matic, 2011). To do so, marketers need to clearly define your target customer, the narrower you can define your customer the more personalised your content can become and the more sure that the influencer you pick will be a successful match (eClincher, 2016).

Once you have identified your target customer, understand what they want. Perhaps by identifying your largest customer group and see what characterises this group’s purchasing behavior – what people do with your product as soon as they get it. It is also important to see who your audience are listening to and influenced by, then follow them, and look at content they have created, also see if they have contributed to content, see how much they talk about topics relevant to your brand (Fields, 2016a). In taking time to listen to your customer and see what they and their influencers say, the identification of an appropriate blogger is made easier (Newquist, 2016).

When establishing new influencers of customers who you want to reach through an influencer, their reach must be assessed. Typically the greater the reach the less: impact they have on an individual; relevance to your goals and customer; and resonance – your product has to be important to them, this can be seen by viewing if your potential influencer has talked about topics similar to your products (eClincher, 2016). Bearing this in mind, it may be beneficial to collaborate with smaller influencers who have more impact on their smaller following. Optimal influence strategies will target individuals with low or high connections, depending on the content and level of interaction (Galeotti & Goyal, 2009).

Various Influencer Followings (Booth & Matic, 2011)

• Tier A blogs have a large readership and their writing tends to be more news oriented. They are often less social than Tiers B and C blogs and do not provide the advantages of a specifically targeted reach. Frequently, Tier A blogs have a team of contributors, accept advertisements, treat their topics in a broad context and provide the opportunity for expanded content. Many online news outlets fit this description.
• Tier B blogs draw fewer readers than Tier A blogs, but tend to be more focused on a particular topic, providing insight and information occasionally found nowhere else. These writers are considered passionate authorities by their readers. Tier B blogs are often on the verge of massive recognition, often searching for ways to monetise their popularity.
• Tier C blogs often draw the smallest amount of traffic, but can be the most influential outlets due to their extremely targeted subject matter. Authors of Tier C blogs are the grassroots enthusiasts searching for the story, topic, link or scoop to propel them out of obscurity into the public eye, and because of that desire, they write as passionate experts – not as objective, or trained journalists. Frequently, Tier C outlets provide frank, candid, detailed product reviews, and serve as springboards for op-eds and forums for thoughtful discussion.

To find influencers to assess their suitability use online tools such as Buzzsumo (free) to find large influencers who talk about topics relevant to your brand or other tools such as Little Bird (paid) to identify niche audiences if necessary (eClincher, 2016). A Customizable Social Media Valuation Algorithm may also be used to discover an influencer. A valuation algorithm or influencer index seeks to measure these connections to determine blogger influence. The influencer index identifies key influencers; helps brand managers understand how they influence other, more traditional, target audiences; and aids in establishing new strategies to reach these key influencers. Using the following measures, the algorithm determines the numeric rank of bloggers influence & identifies conversation points that guide engagement with each individual blogger (Booth & Matic, 2011):

• Viewers per month
• Linkages (popularity of blog post links inbound & outbound)
• Post frequency
• Media citation score (how much media cites blogger)
• Industry score (Number of industry guru points based on industry events such as key notes, bylines and panel participation)
• Social aggregator rate (level of participator in social web – twitter, other blogs, Facebook, Linkedin etc)
• Engagement index (reader response, number of comments)
• Subject/topic related posts
• Qualitative subject/topic-related posts (Review of related posts)
• Index score (identification & rank of influencer according to above variables).

It is important to remember that each influencer must be relevant to YOUR particular brand as, for example, even within the sports world a variety of influencers are needed, it is seeing who your brand best aligns with. For a sports brand such as Nike who want people to purchase their clothing to improve performance a sports person at the peak of fitness and their sport, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, would be the best person to be an influencer, however for Charlotte Crosby who has fitness DVDs encouraging people to lose weight with a primarily young following, Zoella – a young YouTube sensation – would be more appropriate and for Kanye West’s fashion sneakers enlisting celebrities is the best way to reach this audience as it is an aspirational product so has enlisted the likes of the Beckhams, Taylor Swift as well as his Kardashian family as influencers of his lines.

Who said I like a yeezy ????!

A photo posted by BB (@brooklynbeckham) on Nov 3, 2015 at 3:23pm PST

How To Create The Best Influencer Relationship

Once a marketer has decided the influencer they want to use, for a successful influencer campaign a relationship must be built.

To build this relationship marketers should ensure the influencer knows who you are, comment, share, and like their posts whilst tagging their name in your posts. This way your influencer can engage with you (Fields, 2016a).

Then ensure the relationship is mutually beneficial and you are a perfect fit for each other, highlighting the benefits for them, with the aim of a long term relationship being formed. Perhaps suggest ideas about what they could post and what you could post about them to prove that they could fit your product into their content – see what their most successful and popular posts are about, and ensure that your content can be made into one of their more popular posts to do so (eClincher, 2016).

Give incentives to your influencer, give them free samples to talk about, or pay them to talk about your content – although your reader must be aware of this – for instance Holly Hagan always uses #ad to signify a promotion. Additionally get them to feature on your social channels which has the mutual bonus of them reaching your audience which they may not otherwise and you reach their audience (Fields, 2016a). Whilst doing so, marketers must bear in mind that influencers have set expectations of brands:

And remember, even with those you haven’t specifically targeted, keep in contact with influencers who have spoken about you, perhaps send them an outfit even if you haven’t got a new collection out, send them one from your current season which they may then share with their fan base (Keast, 2015).

Once an Influencer is Engaged with Your Brand, how can they Best Engage their Audience with Your Brand?

Once you’ve built a relationship with an influencer get them to share your product. Influencer marketing is currently in a period of transition, successful campaigns are subtle, embrace creative freedom, pay attention to social trends, and are agile in changing with the world of digital marketing (Elderkin, 2015).

Ideally send an influencer your products first and get them to share it with their audiences (Fields, 2016a). Allow them to have creative freedom with their postings about your product – often they know who their followers will engage with (Elderkin, 2015).

However, it may be best practice to discuss a hashtag to be used when publicising your product for the audience to engage with. Furthermore give influencers audience discounts and offers (Armoo, 2015). For instance Scott Disick regularly publicises a taxi firm because his followers get a discount using his specific follower code.

Just wanted everyone to know that my friends at Lyft car service is providing all my Instagram friends with $50 in Lyft ride credit this weekend.  Download the Lyft app anytime within the next 5 days and use the code “SCOTT” for your free $50 in Lyft ride credits!

A photo posted by Scott Disick (@letthelordbewithyou) on Mar 19, 2016 at 3:37pm PDT

It may also be useful to create buzz around an event, get influencers to talk about your new collection being released, or if you have a cool advert or for a sports brand, when there is an event such as the Olympics encourage them to get into the spirit by wearing your brand of athleisurewear (Keast, 2015). If you want to create a buzz it is crucial the timing is right, avoid times where there is a lot of competition such as sporting and music events (Armoo, 2015) – although this may be apt for some sporting brands – again it is always about YOUR audience.

Advantages

In enlisting an influencer you grow your community of brand advocates, who not only talk positively about your product online but also offline (Keast, 2015).

Young & Hinesly (2012) found that understanding the key influencers of a generation means that businesses can anticipate cohorts’ consumer preferences before the cohort “ages into” a market segment. Identification of early childhood influencers can be used by businesses for their current marketing strategies with Millennials and other generational cohorts or for product development/updates in anticipation of cohorts “aging into” target markets.

Influencers are particularly important if a brands reputation needs to be restored as their positive word encourages others to re-think their opinions (Booth & Matic, 2011).

Increasing your reach of customer, particularly when a long-lasting relationship with this influencer can be built (Fields, 2016a). This will also ultimately help build your SEO, and who knows your key influencer may have a link to another key influencer who will also share your product or their following about your product for even more views and greater SEO (Fields, 2016b). Although Fields is writing for Onalytica who does have a bias in that they produce an influencer identification tool, therefore want to point out the benefits, because of this they will have done a lot of research into what makes for an effective influencer, and how to engage with influencers, making this information very beneficial.

Are Influencers Really So Influential?

Influencers have the ability to make a brand, or break a brand (Owen & Humphrey, 2009), this is because eWOM can reach so many people, which has enabled them to garner information which was previously only accessible to those within the industry (Kent, 2008). Charlesworth states that although many say influencers are hugely beneficial, people have argued that their success is not down to the influencer themselves, but how susceptible society is to be persuaded on such a topic, because if an influencer was so persuasive, how come they don’t persuade as many people every time they attempt to influence people (Fields, 2016a). For instance, the Kardashians had a Kardashian Kollection clothing line with Dorothy Perkins however this flopped, despite having major success with other deals such as the Kim Kardashian Hollywood life app – perhaps this is because they identified a wrong audience with Dorothy Perkins or that people who liked the Kardashians would want to recreate their life virtually but not be like them in reality.

Additionally Charlesworth highlighted topics influencers had the most beneficial effect on, with influencers having the biggest effect on conversation about mobile phones.

Perhaps this is why firms such as  Samsung engaged with the England rugby team as a source of influence for their latest campaigns.

Whereas there are a lot less celebrities being used to endorse fast foods (although this may also be because there is a rising trend in health and fitness). Therefore it is important to ensure the product you are enlisting an influencer for will influence your intended audience.

A brand must identify the correct influencer as engaging the wrong one can be hugely costly – as can be seen from the chart above outlining what influencers expect and through the ability to damage a brand’s reputation.

Measures of Success

To ensure your influencer relationship is value for money you must establish a way to measure it. To do so, identify your goals and key performance indicators such as brand awareness which you may measure against traffic to your site or your website appearing higher in the search rankings (eClincher, 2016). Additionally you may want to improve sentiment about your brand which you may measure by whether what is said about your brand on social media becomes more positive through algorithms which can measure positive word associations with your brand.

Booth & Matic suggest the following strategy to measure the success of an influencer campaign (2011):

• 1) Set objectives & Strategies
  Establish measurable goals that relate clearly to the initiative; Pinpoint target audience leveraging the influencer index results: professional bloggers, emerging bloggers, general interest bloggers, academics, developers, consultants, media and analysts; define parameters of the activity; determine strategic approach including reviews, contests, giveaways, causal, informational, sneak peak, invitations to key events.
• 2) Search & analyse
  Keyword searched – brand, product, services, competitors, industry experts; search engines; existing blog list (blog rolls & network affiliation)
• 3) Engage & Socialise
  Engagement – clearly identify intent; introduce topic before client; explain relevance; ask, do not tell; say thank you
  Socialise – comment on relevant postings; follow on twitter & social aggregators; connect on social networking sites
• 4) Report & Refine
  Agree on format &/or service; link to objectives; refine strategies

References

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• Charlesworth, A (2015) An Introduction to Social Media Marketing, Routledge.
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• Newquist, E (2016) Three lessons marketers can learn from fandoms Econsultancy, 21^st Januray 2016 [Online] <https://econsultancy.com/blog/67429-three-lessons-marketers-can-learn-from-fandoms/?utm_source=Econsultancy&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6690497_2111-daily-pulse-uk-2016-01-22&dm_i=LQI,3ZEF5,LRRZKK,EDPPW,1> [Accessed 21^st February 2016]
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