Influencer Marketing: Should You Automate Your Influencer Program?

June 13, 2012 by

Set It and Forget It — Your New Influencer Marketing Mantra?

By now I hope you know that you ought to be thinking about how to incorporate influencer marketing into your overall B2B marketing mix. Influencer marketing is all about targeting the individuals or groups who have sway over your target audience.  Your buyers’ influencers may be analysts, consultants, social media mavens, associations, thought leaders, senior managers, or user groups. Or they may even come in many other forms. The goal of influencer marketing is to ultimately market to, through, and with your buyers’ influencers. By building lasting relationships with these influencers, your brand can realize increased brand awareness, be positioned as a thought leader, and be viewed as a trusted adviser.

But how do you balance yet another marketing activity when you are already drinking from a fire hose? I have previously shared 5 tips to help you make time for influencer marketing, and in this post I want to focus on influencer marketing automation. I know that a number of lists featuring influencer marketing tools have been popping up everywhere, so rather than provide another, instead I’d like to focus this discussion on why a company would consider automating an influencer marketing program.

Set It — The Pros

Obviously automating any activity or task is a huge time saver, and influencer marketing is a practice that does take a lot of time. Consider automating the following activities in order to dedicate your time to the tasks with the greatest impact potential:

  • Identifying influencers in bulk
  • Initial outreach to influencers
  • Connecting with influencers on Twitter
  • Delivering targeted content at the right time
  • Reporting and measuring your impact

Forget It — The Cons

On the other hand, automating too many activities could jeopardize your relationship with your influencers. I would offer some caution when thinking about automating the following activities:

  • Sending an auto reply or auto direct message on Twitter thanking for following
  • Requesting a LinkedIn connection
  • Delivering un-targeted content at the complete wrong time
  • Sending an automatic thank you
  • Ongoing communication

In the coming weeks, I’d like to dig a little deeper into this topic. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on automating influencer marketing?  Sound off!

photo by: barbourians
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Discussion

  • Anonymous

    Interesting question, Amanda. My instinctive answer is a booming No – you saw that coming, no doubt – but it’s surely more complicated than that. I think the answer to this question depends to a large degree on the sector/audience you want to target. If the purchasing decisions in the sector are influenced offline more than online, for instance, it’s hard to imagine what there’d even be to automate in the first place. So I’d say it’s worth considering this question only if the sector is influenced mostly online. 

    Second, I’d say it’s worth considering automation only for the research/identification stages of the influencer program. ‘Automated’ makes me think of mass marketing, which is exactly what influencer marketing is not supposed to be – I know you agree. I think there are too many pitfalls with automation, too many chances to bungle your relations with influencers, to incorporate it into the outreach/engagement stages of the program.

    Thanks,
    David
    http://influencermarketingreview.com/

    • http://blog.openviewpartners.com/author/amaksymiw/ Amanda Maksymiw (@amandamaks)

      David,
      Glad to see that Disqus started working :)

      And yes, I am not surprised by your response at all!  I wholeheartedly agree that the entire process should never be completely automated.  Influencer marketing at its core is about developing real relationship to ultimately champion your influencers to market with you.  I’d be shocked to learn about an example of this happening with automation. 

      I do think there is some value in distributing content efficiently with an automation service.  It’s something new to me but I think it could really benefit a large audience that, as you say, is influenced online. 

      Thanks for sharing your views!
      Amanda