A Cheaper, Faster Path to More Ideal Consumer Insights Through Influencers

07/05/22 • 35 min

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Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

The most overlooked facet of marketing execution across our industry is consumer research. The large brands and agencies swear by it. But the one-percent is just that: one percent. When you drop down to the lower end of the large brand spectrum, and then to medium brands and small businesses, consumer insights are seldom even talked about.

Not enough businesses invest in consumer research. Not enough agencies sell it through the way they should.

What replaces it for those who don’t invest in consumer research is typically generic, broad statistical analysis ... hardly qualifying as research ... proliferated by software companies as linkbait content on their websites.

The reason few brands actually invest in consumer research is that good, sound consumer research is cost prohibitive. It’s tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to commission a research instrument. They also take months to complete. So they’re pricey and slow.

But where there is a gap in the marketplace, there will be someone who tries to fill it. Matt Miller is the founder of Raadz, a tool to collect consumer insights in a matter of hours, not months. And for investments of hundreds to low thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Raadz allows brands to ramp up short question, and short duration, surveys for consumers in minutes. They’re gamified to drive participation and reward those participating. The questions are structured in a way that eliminates false answers and false positives from participants.

Brands can use the survey instrument for their own private list of participants, like customers or newsletter subscribers. Or they can build open surveys and promote them to their social media followers and other groups.

So what does this have to do with influence marketing? Raadz is actually going to market with the idea that brands can use Raadz to solicit feedback directly from the audience of the influencers they partner with. And there’s money in it for the content creator or influencer as well.

Matt and I caught up recently to allow him to dive into deeper explanations of all that here on the show. I am so gung-ho about this tool, I’m discussing a more connected partnership with Raadz moving forward. I want my clients to use it. I think your clients or brand should too. I think you’ll agree after hearing my conversation with Matt today on Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not enough businesses invest in consumer research. Not enough agencies sell it through the way they should.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previous Episode

Understanding Affinity to Find Success with Influencers

The word affinity has a wide range of meanings. The core one is, a relationship by marriage. That’s according to Merriam-Webster. But it can also mean a similarity based on a relationship or causal connection.

Which is to say the spectrum of the relationship can be strong. Or not so strong.

I have an affinity for bourbon. But I also have an affinity for Hanson’s 1997 album Middle of Nowhere. I can live without one of those, so the affinity is different.

And that is the underlying factor a good influence marketing strategist needs to keep in mind, about using affinity as a filter for influencer prioritization. If you’re not familiar with affinity and how that applies to influencer marketing, get out your notebooks. Today on Winflunce, we’ll take a quick look at affinity. What it means in the context of influence marketing and how you can use it to produce more successful influence marketing campaigns.

A lot of the inspiration and learning I’ve been doing about affinity that you’ll hear in today’s episode comes by way of my use of and relationship with Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing software platform that allows you to find, engage, book, collaborate, pay and measure influencers. Tagger is also the presenting sponsor of this podcast and the platform I use in my day-to-day work at Cornett to manage the influence marketing efforts of our clients.

In fact, Tagger has some proprietary affinity algorithms that do a lot of the discovery and connections for you in the tool. I’m going to talk about how they all happen today so you can know what to look for without it. But why wouldn’t you explore doing all this work with a platform that can help, like Tagger.

I highly recommend you give Tagger a look-see. Go to jason.online/tagger and sign up for a free demo today. It might just be the influence marketing management solution you’re looking for.

And the influencers and brands I use as examples in this episode for visual reference are:

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Next Episode

Leveraging Micro- and Nano-Influencers for Small and Local Businesses

Many of you are small business owners. Some of you might also work in marketing teams or even at agencies where influencer marketing budgets are thin. So when you hear people rattling on about the software platforms they use for their influencer marketing efforts, you probably think, “Yeah ... wouldn’t that be nice.”

The soup-to-nuts platforms are expensive. Or at least they are for small businesses. When you’re spending millions of dollars on marketing and hundreds of thousands on influencer marketing, $2-3 grand per month for software isn’t concerning. So the “expensive” label is relative.

But small business marketers have the same problems the enterprise does. They need a tool to help with discovery. They need the ability to manage campaigns. They want to measure their influencer marketing efforts. And doing it all manually, or in a spreadsheet makes it far more time and labor intensive. Which deters a lot of small businesses from even trying.

Even if you get past that problem as a small business, then you have to worry about what influencers charge if you work with them. So the path many small businesses take is working with nano- and mico-influencers. But how do you find them? And how do you manage and measure working with folks who don’t have talent managers and sophisticated software packages themselves to solve those problems?

When the big software companies don’t provide solution for the little guy, that creates a gap. And gaps create opportunities for other software companies to thrive.

Reach Influencers is one of those software companies. It is an influencer marketing platform and marketplace that includes almost all of the feature sets of the big, fancy, enterprise solutions. It’s built around small businesses and using micro- and nano-influencers. And it costs less than $100 per month on the annual subscription.

The first case study Nick Wise from Reach Influencers told me about was a small business in Hardinsburg, Kentucky of all places.

I tell you that for two reasons. First, you know I’m from Kentucky, so a little humble brag is in order. Reach Influencers is also based in Kentucky, so there’s that, too. But the main reason I tell you that is if a small, local business in a town of less than 3,000 people can increase their revenue and exposure using influencer marketing, then you can, too.

Nick and I sat down to talk last week. We focused on the use of nano-influencers and how your own customers can be the smartest influence partners you work with. We talked about how a small business in a town of 3,000 people can effectively find influencers that are relevant to them and their location. And we touch on the software, too.

Smart ideas for businesses small and large were had. And today, we’ll hear them from Nick Wise of Reach Influencers.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices