How Brands Can Turn Customers Into Influencers

What if what you’ve been looking for has been right in front of you all along?

No, this isn’t the plot for a rom-com-- we’re talking about the secret to more authentic influencer marketing, the untapped mine of personalities that contain your brand’s strongest advocates, the influencers in your customer base!

在当今世界，可以肯定地假设消费者有某种形式的社交媒体……而且没有什么阻止精明的品牌发现（和引人入胜）其中最有影响力的品牌。随着影响者技术的出现，直接从客户群挑选有机倡导者比以往任何时候都容易。That’s exactly what we do here atUpfluencewhen it comes to ambassador and influencer identification,and we’d like to share our insights with Influencer Marketing Hub. This article will map out the why, how, and when to turn customers into influencers.

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品牌如何将客户变成影响者：

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Why brands should leverage customers as influencers.

我们深入研究了Live Capture是为电子商务品牌设计的最新工具Live Capture，并将这些见解与我们的影响者分析师的见解配对who help clients identify and activate key personalities among their customer base. Here’s what we’ve discovered in terms of benefits:

与有影响力的客户合作是对受众定位的攻击。

在影响金博宝188备用网址者营销中，典型的是让客户人口统计数据（例如通过Google Analytics（通过Google Analytics（通过Google Analytics））提供信息的选择。目的是选择一个有影响力的人，他们在目标受众中有追随者。但是，与客户群的有影响力者合作的主要好处是，您保证与真正吸引目标受众的人合作。在人口统计学（例如年龄，性别，位置）方面，以及心理学（您的服装者的心态和亲和力）方面。他们毕竟是一个！目标是帮助您识别并与下一代品牌大使联系。

Insights, insights, insights.

As trendsetters and valued customers, influencers are definitely someone to learn from. They can offer perspective into where your brand shines, where it could improve, and how it lives out in the world. We’ve found that working with influencers who have already endorsed a brand (organically) offers more versatility in terms of partnerships. There’s extended common ground for mutual learning. Marketers should take the opportunity to really get inside their heads: encourage feedback, learn about their lifestyle, and build a better profile of their customers in the process.

Customers provide access to smaller, more tight-knit communities.

Everyone’s preaching “community” these days but what does that mean in practice? Small online communities (like group messaging, follower polls, tagging friends in posts, etc.) are more often than not the real source of inspiration for consumer decision-making. As a brand, it can be hard to tap into these “dark” areas of contact. They’re practically untouchable! This is why it’s essential to find and incentivize organic brand advocates which can do the heavy-lifting for you. They’re the ones which will start dialogue in the private spheres of internet communication… the unseen backbone of social media engagement.

Working with influential customers can be more authentic.

“Do influencers even use the products they’re promoting?不幸的是，这很有趣，我们遇到的频率更高。当然，当您看到那里的一些不切实际的伙伴关系（例如，促进他们几乎无法描述的影响者）开始理解为什么消费者可能会愤世嫉俗。有影响力的人应与其品牌合作伙伴兼容，否则合作风险是不真实的。当然，与已经成为客户的影响者合作有助于解决这种怀疑的促销。如果他们过去曾使用过产品或服务，事实上，他们是更可信的拥护者。这不仅对消费者更加真实，还促进了招聘过程中的简报过程。

Influencers who already support your brand are the easiest ones to recruit.

Upfluence analysts found that influencers who have expressed brand affinity (for example, a positive brand mention on social media) have the highest open rates during the outreach phase. This means that working with customer influencers can reduce time spent on outreach, expedite the recruitment process, and improve ROI (as monetary offerings can be supplemented with coveted samples/brand experiences… but more on that later.) Even if they didn’t like your product or service the first time around, there’s an opportunity to re-convert them via one-on-one communication. All of this just goes to show that a pre-existing relationship is full of potential for tactful brands.

Finding influencers in your customer base.

Now,thanks to software likeLive Capture,这是比以往更容易找到“有机advocates” or influencers among your consumers. We suggest two approaches to brands: looking back to find past influencer customers and looking forward to catch future influencer customers.

For illustration purposes, let’s take a look at Hydro Flask: do they have influential customers? How might they identify them proactively and retroactively? (As a disclaimer, Upfluence has no professional relation to, or partnership with, this brand.)

追溯识别有影响力的客户：

• 使用社交听力工具来查找在线提及您品牌的影响者。

• 分析您现有的社交媒体跟随有影响力的人。

Proactively identifying influential customers:

Finding a personality that fits your brand values and authentically promotes your products and services can be a daunting task. Imagine identifying your most influential customers and engaging them in an influencer marketing campaign for a brand they already know and love? How about that for authenticity?

• Asking customers to share their social media at checkout for special benefits.

Influencer relations may soon be incorporated into the very infrastructure of our shopping experiences. Be it in-store or online, the option to share one’s social media account with a brand could become as commonplace as subscribing to promotional newsletters or loyalty cards.

• 通过社交媒体，新闻通讯和专门的着陆页来促进大使机会。

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如何激活有影响力的客户

Influencers who already support a brand are uniquely suited for ongoing mutual partnerships.

• 他们知道品牌提供的是什么
• They can be incentivized by product
• They’re confident referring it to others

We recommend that brands leverage their influencer’s “organic affinity” by mixing and matching aspects of referral, affiliate, and brand ambassador programs. The idea being to create an offer that influencers can’t turn down. It should be fun, on-brand, and mutually beneficial.

This infers that influencers will have ample opportunity to be involved in the brand mission. For the content to be genuine, it’s important that they feel like partners. Some brands incentivize their influencers with experiences like邀请他们参加聚会, sending themnew product to test before it goes live, evenoffering influencers an allowanceto their online stores. Since the influencer is already a customer, it’s good to mix payment with non-monetary value… diversifying the offer keeps the influencer involved and differentiates your brand from another that may only offer money. Remember that influencers need new content opportunities (and “clout”) in order to stay influential,... and brands can offer that through experiences. What’s more, an influencer who has been involved with a brand over time has much more to share with their community. If the goal is to create more authentic content, nurturing ongoing relations (outside of just money) is the only way.

最后,所有这些微分之间的共同点t offers is that they’re designed to engage the influencer in the brand mission (more so than a “one-off” post). Whether it’s through referral, affiliate, or brand ambassadorship,影响者的参与增加导致更大的真实性.

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Conclusion

到目前为止，品牌一直根据兼容性，性能和其他素质寻求影响者，这些素质允许合作对消费者和合作伙伴的协同作用保持一致。

Customers as influencers seems like an obvious next step for brands who want better partnerships. From what we’ve seen at Upfluence, exploiting pre-existing relationships has benefits at each stage of the influencer process: from identification and performance to program longevity. By working with customer influencers, brand can expect:

• Easier onboarding
• 更大的观众匹配
• 长期，更具动态的伙伴关系
• Better content

所有这些都意味着更好的投资回报率，因为

• Reduced time and resources are being spent on outreach and negotiation
• Correct audiences are more likely to convert
• Ambassador programs rely on a mix of monetary and non-monetary compensation
• 有价值的内容可以在未来的营销材料中重新使用

Most importantly, though: influencers who have organic interest in a brand make for more authentic advocates in the eyes of consumers.

At some point, the days of thoughtless, #ad posts have to end. This industry cannot sustain itself if consumers are made to ask whether or not influencers are “even using the products they’re promoting”.

Of course, each strategy presents its own set of challenges: what do brands do if the influencer wasn’t a happy customer in the first place? How does a brand engage influencers without alienating other clients? Those that adapt to these hurdles have much to gain, though.

我们并不是建议品牌专门从客户群中吸引影响者……（可以找到以前从未听说过品牌的兼容人物）。话虽如此，我们敦促品牌将此策略添加到其工具箱中的前进中。

与客户影响者合作肯定是迈向更真实的影响者营销的一步，这是当今饱和广告景观的关键优势。金博宝188备用网址因此，如果您的客户群中有影响者，那么现在是时候激活他们了。