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Many years ago, on a seventh grade geography test I hadn’t prepared for, I decided it made more sense to write it as quickly as possible rather than labour over each question.
If I could use my pure intuition, how hard could geography be? After all, I would at least get a passing grade.
I finished that test in less than 15 minutes, and my geography teacher, Mr. Cruikshank, marked it in 5 minutes.
I passed, just barely, but that low mark brought down my overall grade in the class. That strategy wasn’t going to do me any good in the future.
All of us remember that kid in school who aced the midterm without studying. Some of us might have been that kid. (We didn’t like you, by the way.)
Whether it was some innate photographic ability of memorization, dumb luck or just plain cheating (it was probably cheating!), everyone wanted to know how they could ace the test without putting in the work. But of course it was fantasy to want that, and we were 12 years old.
In the real world, we would quickly learn, you’re not acing the test without preparation.
Don’t Let Your 12-Year Old Self Run The Strategy
But for brand marketers and agencies gearing up for influencer outreach campaigns, that same grade school mentality often still applies.
If you want your campaign to just barely pass, open the book the night before the test.
But of course there is a better way. A variety of tools and services, when used right, are helping brands and agencies understand their social landscape before initiating outreach activities.
Ace The Test
Taking time to prepare your research before a campaign sets the foundation for success, as Craig Rennick recently wrote.
Elquoa, a leading marketing automation company, recently noted that marketers who spent more time analyzing their program had a higher payoff than those who spent less time.
What preparation means for outreach activities is a clear understanding of not only the influencers around your brand, but their social interests, the content they share with their communities, your most effective content, the engagement that content is driving by platform, and the actions (sign ups, downloads, sales) that these influencers are generating around that content.
This, needless to say, is a time consuming and thankless task for the savvy and often unfairly derided millennials doing the grunt work at most agencies and brands. It requires a patchwork of free and paid tools and the aggregation of heaps and heaps of mostly low value data mostly unrelated to your brand. And your manager needed that data yesterday because the campaign starts today.
That workflow process is broken, both because there isn’t enough time (there is never enough time!) and because many people aren’t using the right tools for the job.
InNetwork’s robust platform is a tool we’ve used at Measurely to help us research, connect and communicate with verified influencers to great effect.
At Measurely, our content analytics tool allows our clients to create pre-campaign Discovery Reports that help them identify the key influencers that are driving engagements around their content.
It’s not enough to know influential people in your industry or related to your brand. You have to be able to understand the ones that are driving the key actions around your brand and content.
Our reporting dashboard aggregates all of the key metrics that establish your outreach objectives before a campaign, for example the ratio between an influencer posting content and generating social shares, the rate at which an influencer can generate clicks on your content, an influencers overall cost-per-engagement (CPE), and, even better, the recurring influencers around your content and the emerging or new influencers.
When preparation with the right tools helps you do the job faster, ROI is realized through time saving, giving you more time and resources to build a better campaign and preform more effective outreach.
That’s a strategy that will help you ace the test.
*This is a guest post by Ron Mashate. The author’s posts are entirely his or her own views (excluding the event of being possessed by an alien parasite that controls their minds) and may not always reflect the views of InNetwork.*
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Author information
Ron Mashate
Ron Mashate works on Content and Business Development at Measurely, a content marketing analytics startup in Toronto, Canada. He has worked as a communications strategist in the public sector and helped develop and execute social media strategies for large consumer electronics, lifestyle and food and beverage brands on the agency side.
His writing explores the intersection between technology, media and culture. He currently lives in Toronto, Canada.
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