Page 97 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

advocates and accurately know where they are on their customer journey,
allowing Dell to tailor their content, messages, and responses to each influencer.

“Essentially we’re scaling human connection,” he said. “It’s how we create a
company-wide strategy of customer centricity and direct feedback. Since the
software is constantly updating in real-time, we can accelerate customer
feedback and our response times. Once you’ve started to engage with your
influencers you can’t abruptly stop that communication. It’s crucial to have the
infrastructure in place to be able to keep those relationships moving forward.”

Dandekar said another advantage of this approach is that feedback from
influencers can be shared with all appropriate departments, including product
development, quality assurance, customer care, corporate communications, and
influencer relations.

Out-source influencer relations

In research I spearheaded for a client, we found that 85 percent of all U.S.
advertising and PR agencies now offer some sort of influencer outreach program
for their customers. Of that number, only a very small group—generally the
largest agencies—have developed their own proprietary methods to identify
influencers. Most agencies are using common software programs and
measurement practices that are available to anyone.

One danger in using an agency is that in a very real sense you’re outsourcing
a critical business relationship. If you count on an outside company to develop
these relationships for you, you risk losing those connections if the agency
decides not to renew your contract. In fact, they could take your hard-earned
influencers to a competitor.

On the other hand, the benefit of outsourcing is that many agencies now have
skilled staff members who can help you get up and running effectively and
quickly so you can avoid a lengthy learning curve. Outsourcing can be
particularly effective in a company that is resource-constrained, or as a bridge to
building an internal competency.

Hybrid/subscription approach

A hybrid approach is to subscribe to a sophisticated influence software service
like Appinions. Appinions has patented technology that scans the web to assess
millions of online publishing platforms and find your most relevant online