Tracking, measuring, monetising brand ambassadors

Brand ambassadors show brand affinity or endorsement through their personal networks to get a message out there. They influence what is being said (so it is no surprise we call them influencers) and they play an integral part in any marketing strategy. Remember, people trust people more than they do brands. So how can you accurately track their influence? Better yet, how can you visualise, react and intelligently respond to it?

One tracking tool to rule them all

© Cathy Yeulet via 123RF

With an effective tracking tool, you can measure what an influencer is talking about and people’s behavioural responses. These insights ensure you get the best out of this relationship and have the facts to make smart business decisions on the fly. It also means tapping into conversations that may have otherwise flown under the radar and measuring the success of different types of activity such as retweets, post frequency, responses and interactions to ensure you are getting the most from your influencer spend.

Make sure that posts are easy to track. If they are easy to track, they are more likely to be seen by your audience and add value. To make content ‘measurable’ on each platform, influencers should stick to these simple guidelines:

• Appropriate hashtags: make sure all posts about a campaign can be tracked and measured by using a unique hashtag. This is especially important on Instagram.
  
• Local brand handle: influencers should always tag the local brand for maximum exposure and make it easier to find relevant mentions to analyse.
  
• Do not rely on tagged images: many social media sites allow users to tag profiles in a picture. However, tags often are not available in search – so make sure influencers also tag your brand in the text of the post.
  
• Share content on ‘pages’, not personal profiles: influencers need to post content on ‘pages’ if you are going to measure their posts and engagement. @Brand-page posts must be on a public page or shared onto the brand page itself.

Benefits of accurate tracking

An effective analysis tool will equip you to discover themes and sentiment trends you can rely on, without manual intervention. Social media engagement may be tricky to measure in terms of absolute ROI, but analysing conversation metrics can go a long way to understanding whether your influencer relationship actually benefits your brand.

Here are some ways you can use this data:

• Analyse engagement to see how many new authors engaged because of influencer content.
  
• Benchmark influencers to understand who is driving the most conversation and engaging the most influential people.
  
• Look at themes in conversation to see what else is being discussed, to drive future content strategy.
  
• Measure changes in sentiment to see whether ambassador content is creating a positive splash.

We rely on our crowd: multiple, trained and vetted contributors. They refine, contextualise and add insights based on local knowledge and have the ability to analyse sentiment, sarcasm and other emotional nuances that the bots just cannot. That means you are left with an insightful map of data, which can help you proactively manage influencer relationships. Laying the foundation for effective brand ambassador relationships and setting in place simple ‘rules of engagement’, means more powerful, proactive and rewarding results for your marketing efforts.