Why Influencers Are Key to Transforming the Marketing Landscape

A Brave New World

Display advertising is dead. Or so they say.
It’s a common belief that consumers no longer respond to such efforts, but Kevin Akeroyd makes a compelling argument that quite the opposite is true. He also believes that focusing your energies and creating efficient tracking systems are key to maintaining marketing success.
He is a huge fan of making it easy for your brand to create powerful influence marketing campaigns and feels that influencer marketing is changing the way in which we do marketing as a whole.
Cision allows you to dynamically manage your earned, paid, and owned media in one united platform and is hailed as the best media and information monitoring solution. They are dedicated to connecting your brand with influencers and decision-makers in order to create and maintain efficient and effective campaigns.

In This Episode

• How marketing has changed due to the rise of influencer marketing
• How to give your influencers the right information to make them successful
• Why it’s key to not waste time on redundant internal tracking systems
• How to test your campaigns on small consumer audiences
• Why it’s important to measure the final conversions created by your influencers

Quotes From This Episode

“We’ve got to get to not just measuring audiences of influencers, but how are those influencers actually impacting the end user.” —@Akeroyd
“Display advertising has never been more robust, and more healthy on the planet despite the fact it was written off for dead ten years ago.” —@Akeroyd
“This isn’t a solution trying to evangelize or convince a communication industry that it’s got a problem. This is a communication industry that’s had a problem for a decade and can’t wait for somebody to help them solve it.” —@Akeroyd
“It’s not even like we’re recreating the wheel here. We’re just bringing the same data-driven, audience-driven mentality over into the communications side of the house, where it’s been alive and well, and driven the kind of impact we’ve been talking about for the rest of the company.” —@Akeroyd
“As simple as that sounds, getting to one system rather than seven different point solutions is a mission-critical step.” —@Akeroyd

“We’re talking new technology. The provider and business partner has got to be there with strategy, got to be there with best practices, got to be there with the right use cases, got to teach the professional how to be an excellent practitioner. Not just a thought leader, but an excellent practitioner, how to actually derive, measure, and get agreement on results and then, quite frankly, how to highlight the success and the impact they’re having in the organization.” —@Akeroyd

“Trusted journalists are critical influencers no matter what. We can’t ignore the journalists because they’ve never been more influential.” —@Akeroyd
“That’s really the four-step transformation is data, targeting, end-user analytics and attribution and then make sure that we teach the industry how to get up that learning curve fast.” —@Akeroyd

Resources

• In the News: Report: Snapchat Parent has Confidentially Filed for an IPO
• Brian Littleton on Twitter: @Akeroyd
• Cision.com/cloud
• Oracle Marketing Cloud
• RR Donnelley
• Salesforce
• Jigsaw

Would You Rather

Would you rather have no taste buds or be color blind?
Colorblind. I kind of mentioned that robust male thing in the last segment. Let’s just say that I really enjoy my wine and my food.
Would you rather lose your keys or forget your cell phone?
Oh boy, I think I would rather lose my keys. Again, I think that’s an easy one. It’s almost no fair because I’m relatively tech… well, let’s just say I don’t spend as much on tech gadgets as I do on wine. But I’ve gotten pretty gadgety, and I’m one of those guys that can take an Uber from my cell phone to the dealership and get another key.
Would you rather live in space or under the sea?
Oh wow. That’s an interesting question. I think I would rather live under the sea. The reason why is that—and this is theoretical of course—it feels to me like it would be a lot easier to remedy something if anything went wrong.