How to Win Friends with Influential People
PR. Marketing. Communications. Content Marketing. Social Media Marketing.
What’s the difference? It’s one big thing, really. We believe it’s all the pursuit of connecting — in a meaningful way — to someone (or a group of someones) who may be interested in buying your product/visiting your destination/staying at you hotel/advocating your cause.
When the waters get muddy and sometimes clients find their various partners and agencies angling for more of the pie, it can be difficult to understand who does what best and why. (Don’t worry, the thesis of this story is “We Can All Get Along”.)
One of those grey areas is Influencer Marketing. The “Marketing” part infers the work would go to your marketing team or agency. But the “Influencer” part would seem to imply the work should be done by PR and Communications, the people who foster relationships and pitch ideas in return for positive stories and mentions.
I’m here to say there’s room for both sides and an approach that’s easy to follow, based on your needs and requirements.
Who Ya Gonna Call?
It’s time to connect with PR/Communications when:
- You are focused on generating earned content and mentions.
- You are aligned with a more traditional Fam Tour approach.
- Participants can be “softly” directed in their agenda and deliverables.
- You primarily want to focus on getting a post-trip post/story exclusively.
- You’re not interested in a paid relationship beyond covering travel expenses.
- You’re closely aligning the effort with an overall media outreach/media impressions/results program.
Benefits:
- Cost often restricted to travel/attendance.
- Focusing less on pay-to-play could result in more journalistic-type content.
- Can be less time-consuming to plan, scope, facilitate and manage from an end-to-end perspective.
Content Partnership Program
This is a look at when it’s time for a content partnership program, for which you’ll engage your content marketing/social media team (ahem, like us).
- You’re focused on generating targeted content specifically tailored for target personas.
- Your content is created both for the brand’s owned channels and the content producer’s owned channels.
- You’re aligned with an “always on” content marketing approach.
- Participants are contractually obligated to provide specific deliverables within an agreed-upon timeframe and most often allow the content to be reviewed prior to publication.
- Participants/content producers are contractually obligated to share metrics/results of the content they create for you (so you can show ROI).
- The engagement is used to generate buzz prior to visit, on-the-ground content and post-visit content.
- Content producers are engaged based on the quality of their writing/videography/photography.
- You need to show real results and ROI and have that information integrated into customer journey funnels and real-time measurement dashboards.
Benefits:
- Creates a life-cycle of content (before-during-and-after visit).
- Designed to create content that fills a gap/meets a need/speaks to a target audience.
- You know exactly what you’re getting and when.
- It’s more focused on ROI and comprehensive measurement.
Sometimes, you need a mix of both solutions. We’ve worked with clients on projects where the PR team arranges influencer programs and we set up content partnerships and we all work together to make sure things are delivering. It just comes down to goals, objectives and budget.
However, although we are biased, we do believe content partnerships are an important part of any integrated marketing program. We’ve seen them work and work well.
Helpful? Still confused? We’re here for you. This is just the first of several posts we’ve got planned around influencers and content partnerships. Stay tuned. See you online.
Steph heads up the Content Team at VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
