Working with opinion leaders

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     Working with the target audience of the brand requires a deep dive into the peculiarities of the business and conditions in which it can successfully develop. Generation of content, its promotion, despite the multitude of tools and channels is a rather complicated and time-consuming process.

     One of the popular directions for product or brand promotion is work with opinion leaders.

     Opinion leaders are people whose behavior or opinion can influence the opinion of the audience. There are many synonyms for opinion leader: brand advocate, brand ambassador, brand ambassador, trendsetter, it-girl or socialite, influencer, etc. It all depends on the market segment in which you work and the audience you want to influence.

Opinion leaders can include:

• actors
• singers
• bloggers
• politicians
• industry experts
• athletes
• and even mums.

     The demand to work with an Influencer generates a corresponding offer. People who have achieved some success in their business know their worth, and often working with a blogger weighs down the marketing budget of even large companies.

How to choose a brand advocate and work with him or her effectively:

     1) Prepare a list of potential brand advocates. The key requirement at this stage is to match your target audience with the audience of Influencer fans. If your topic is EAL, you shouldn’t look for a brand advocate among stars with the image of a shirt-boy and a fan of binge eating.

     2) Analysis of opinion leader accounts. The first thing to look at is quantity, but the number of subscribers doesn’t always speak to their quality. Ask the blogger or his representative for statistics on earlier posts. Compare the data with the statistics of services that allow you to analyze the account.

     Pay attention to audience engagement. This indicator most clearly reflects the quality of the blogger’s interaction with his audience. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers, but your publications get only hundreds of likes or reposts, it raises a reasonable question, is it worth using this costly way of interaction with your audience at all? The answer is yours;)

     3) Contractual terms of cooperation. Pay attention to:

• Format and payment schedule. It is not always necessary to emphasize the money, barter theme is fuzzy, but profitable and effective. Blogger may be happy to post a publication about your product in exchange for samples of the product itself.
• Publication requirements. It all depends on the network in which you plan to advertise. Be precise and define your publication requirements. It is not easy, with a high probability you will meet resistance and a lot of objections, but remember money, you pay and you want to get results. Always try to negotiate and stand your ground. If you do not care where to spend the money, then help those who really need it — become a philanthropist, rather than pouring advertising budgets into the void.
• Think about content. Ideal is the interaction between the blogger and the customer. You may not like the blogger’s self-promotional content, and your in-house marketers' text may not fit with the opinion leader’s standard pitch at all. Look for balance!

     4) Campaign analytics. Every ad campaign should be analyzed. The evaluation criteria are different and depend on the original goal, but ignoring the debriefing will not allow you to find mistakes and eliminate them in the future.

     If you still have questions, contact us. The DepthsSEO team will help you gather statistics on the audience of the opinion leader you’re interested in and run your advertising campaign effectively.