Group influencers by brand affinity
Consistent outreach is key to building strong influencer relationships — but keeping tabs on all your influencers at once is a near-impossible feat. For this reason, it’s helpful to segment your community into smaller groups based on the strength of their affinity to your brand. This allows you to create targeted outreach plans for each group: for example, product sends might pique the interest of potential fans, while you can spoil your time-honored brand champions with a party or getaway. By tailoring your outreach to meet the needs of each cohort, you can conserve time and resources while maximizing your impact. It’s important to note that these groups are dynamic. Like leads in a sales funnel, you should nurture influencer relationships such that bloggers who start as potential fans eventually become brand champions, who can recruit new potential fans. Through strategic outreach, you can foster not only increased loyalty across your influencer network but also sustainable community growth.
Make retention your #1 priority
How do you know your funnel is working? The best way to measure the loyalty of your community is through retention: that is, the proportion of influencers who continue to post about you month after month. Strong retention is correlated with EMV growth, and top-performing brands tend to retain influencers at the highest rates. Fenty Beauty, for example, boasted a retention score of 75 over 2019, meaning that every month, on average, 75% of its influencers maintained or increased their EMV contributions from the previous month. This continued support from bloggers fueled the brand’s 41% year-over-year increase in EMV — one of the highest among 2019’s top 10 EMV-driving cosmetics brands. Since its 2017 launch, Rihanna’s brand has amassed a wide base of devotees with high-quality, inclusive products like the Pro Filt’r Instant Retouch Concealer, which has attained “hero” status among beauty gurus and continues to inspire waves of excitement around new products.
When choosing influencers, look beyond aesthetic
Many brands opt to work with influencers based on their image alone, but it’s important that the look and feel of a bloggers content represents your brand, and that your brand resonates with their audience. The best way to measure an influencer’s fit — how closely they align with your brand — is by looking at the engagement that posts mentioning your brand receive relative to that blogger’s other content. If these numbers match, the influencer is a good fit: your brand slides seamlessly into their personal story, and their followers are excited about it. But if branded content garners significantly less engagement than non-branded content, there’s a gap between your brand’s message and the messaging that their followers are expecting. At Tribe Dynamics, we assign fit a numerical score, where “100” indicates equal engagement across branded and non-branded content.For example, Arctic Fox Hair Color — which increased its EMV by 88% year-over-year in 2019 — boasted a fit score of 102, meaning that, on average, influencer posts mentioning the brand received slightly more engagement than posts that didn’t mention the brand. That’s because Arctic Fox Hair Color’s most impactful bloggers, such as Charity LeBlanc, not only create content that matches the brand’s playful aesthetic but are also longtime hair color enthusiasts whom their followers look to discover high-quality products.Celebrate influencers on a posting streak
Content creators that truly champion your brand don’t just shout out products once in a while — they endorse offerings they can’t get enough of month after month. In order to generate long-term buzz, you want to celebrate and encourage your most consistent supporters, whether by sending them refills of “empties” or following up after events. You can measure the impact of this outreach by looking at what proportion of your community is on a posting streak, or how many influencers have mentioned you for two or more consecutive months. It’s also helpful to track streak length: more influencers posting for longer periods of time indicates stronger brand loyalty. Gymshark has excelled at inspiring consistent content creation from its influencer network — an impressive 76% of its bloggers were on a posting streak of six months or longer during 2019. The athleisure brand, which saw a 9% year-over-year growth in EMV in 2019, has built close relationships with trainers like Brittne Jackson (@brittnebabe who religiously sport Gymshark apparel in their workout videos. The brand also rewards top influencers like Whitney Simmons (@whitneyysimmons) with career advancement opportunities including collaborative collections, forging a lasting, mutually beneficial professional relationship.
