SOCIAL those are always the relationships to prioritize. Social while they might be extremely up-to-date for your target audience in some aspects of your business or sales pipeline, they could be different elsewhere (on social media for example). Be as detailed as you are able to with the resources your team has available. You also want to be sure this information is accessible to everyone it could be helpful to, from marketing and sales to developers building out products and UX. Truly understanding your audience means keeping them in mind through every step of not only the sales cycle, but also their customer lifecycle. How does what they need change over time? Who is influential to them will also change over time and might be different in different places. Later in the cycle might be a good time to tap internal brand advocates as influencers, for example. Step 2: Map out the influencers You can do this manually, of course, or you can engage the right technology and/or partners to make this easier. (We are biased, but we suggest ourselves if youre looking for a place to start.) If youre putting in the work to get to know your audience, chances are youll have a good idea of who they find to be influential. The key is to map out their influence more than simply create a list of influencers who might be good to tap for your campaign or partnership. Where are they most influential? Is it just on one platform, or across several? Does their audience differ between platforms? Do they have strong relationships with other influencers, and if so, how do their respective audiences overlap? How much does your target audience overlap with those audiences? Its important to do this work to understand the true potential of working with an influencer. A lot of overlap between their audience and your target audience means its a good idea to move forward with a campaign or partnership with a particular influencer. If not, dont engage them simply because they have a big following. Youll be wasting the potential your campaign or partnership could find in a better matched influencer. Social which content is your target audience consuming from these influencers? Which content is getting the highest level of engagement from your target audience? This approach gives you a game plan when you approach an influencer about working with them. It lets you know which metrics you should focus on for success during a campaign. It lets the influencer better refine their content for any campaigns or partnerships youre working on. All of these factors will mean youre set up for maximum possible success in your working relationship with the influencer or influencers you want to tap for your campaign or partnership. Why is this important? Why should your team bother to put in this level of work for a marketing trend? Influencer marketing isnt just a trendy tactic to tap into; when you approach it this way, youre strengthening the base of your entire marketing strategy by focusing on the most important base element: the right audience. When you know your audience, that means youre creating better, more targeted content that will drive better results. It means youre creating and leveraging more targeted pitches to influencers, driving better results across your strategy. What you should measure with influencer marketing Before starting any kind of project or partnership with an influencer, you want to be sure youve set the right expectations on both sides of the endeavor. Everyone needs to be clear on what theyre expected to deliver, when, and how everything will be measured. What does success mean? For example, if you want to increase your share of voice in the industry, choose some metrics to concentrate on that reflect this goal. First youll have to decide which of your competitors youll compare yourself to- pick two to 10 to get started- and get metrics around the entire conversation in the industry. This means youll want to have some baseline metrics before you start working with an influencer, to be able to definitively say that they had an impact on your brands share of voice. Twitter is the best place to measure this, because of the robust conversation and available data there. To truly understand share of voice, youll want to compare across several different metrics. One competitor youre tracking might have a high reach, while another could have a lot of tweets. By comparing several different metrics, you can see where the patterns are and what metrics make most sense in your industry or category. One of our favorite metrics to start with is simple tweet volume. Tweet counts are useful in understanding the size of the conversation about a brand or competitor. Youll also want to look at tweet volume compared to overall tweet total. Reach is an excellent metric for share of voice too, because it tells you about the size of the potential audience for a brand. The bigger the reach, the larger the variety of people who are spreading the message. A high reach indicates a diversity in contributors