Influencer Marketing: An In-Depth Look at Marketing’s Next Big Thing 

Influencer marketing is 80% insight and 20% product or solution-focused speech. Influencer marketing has an impact, but isn’t that what all marketing does? The simple answer is that markets and marketing methods are changing.

Understanding the customer’s buying journey is crucial to achieving a competitive advantage. 

Today, there are so many marketing tools available that it’s easy to get overwhelmed! Modern marketing tools allow you to manage various marketing activities and processes, from mobile advertising to customer analytics.

The constant and rapid evolution of marketing techniques has driven companies to the point where they no longer have a clear picture of their customer data. To gain a solid competitive advantage, you need to know your customers’ buying paths. 

If you don’t know your customers’ buying paths, i.e., the different stages of the customer journey, you are much more likely to send the wrong message to your customers at the wrong time and in the wrong channel.

Data quality is the cornerstone of influencer marketing.

Did you know that up to 5% of customer data expires every month? Life can be very different: one customer moves from New York to Florida, another changes her surname from Anna to Maria, and a third spends her last days in old age. 

With such a large ocean of data available to you, it can be hard to sort through it all and separate new information from outdated information - especially when life circumstances change and you cannot guarantee accuracy. Anna, for example, is less likely to inform a company that his surname has changed to Maria.

Like all forms of marketing, influencer marketing needs quality, accurate, and up-to-date data to be what it should be: relevant, personalized, and impactful.

It is, therefore, reasonable to think that most companies will need even more data than they have today. Despite consumers’ belief that all the information they need is being collected, even this wealth of information does not go very far.

Influencer marketing benefits from third-party data

Let’s talk about Customer Data Platforms, now abbreviated as CDP. CDP platforms are an essential part of marketing - but often require the use of 3rd party data. Third-party data consists of information about customer behaviour, interests, and demographics. 

While 3rd party data has a poor reputation for data quality and relevance, we must accept that effective and efficient marketing requires a complete understanding of the customer. This is where third-party data can help with a large amount of data at an affordable price.

Unreliable data sources are a problem for influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is based on data, and good effective marketing is based on reliable data sources. No marketing professional wants to measure the wrong things.

It is indeed easy to gather so-called easy customer data, which is easily accessible and easy to collect. Social media, for example, makes it easy to identify potential customers who are actively interacting. 

However, identifying the potential customer is not enough; you must also identify the tone of the interaction. This is called sentiment analysis. If the tone of the content of the interaction is misunderstood, it is possible to emphasize content that actually irritates the potential customer.

Did you know that a consumer meets a brand several times before making a final purchase decision? When it comes to buying, it is rare to initiate the willingness to buy from nothing. Although generating interest in a brand the first time is desirable and possible, it takes several more exposures to complete the decision. This fact is easily overlooked.

Take web analytics, for example, which tells a company how a customer who is ready to buy has found the company’s product or service. 

Web analytics can help you understand customer behavior online: what are they doing on your website, and what are they not doing? This information is helpful but can lead to unnecessary investment in keyword advertising if data from web analytics is not integrated with data collected from other channels.

Hence, it is crucial to understand that influencer marketing can only benefit from quality data because it lives and breathes off of it.

Web analytics for influencer marketing

Do you find it challenging to understand, process, and use data to support your marketing? With Kubla, you can access actionable data about who your customers are and what they need. Come and talk to a digital marketing professional about the possibilities of web analytics!

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