Influencer Marketing Archive

Winning an award for your hard work is always a pleasure, but to receive recognition towards the end of the year, just short of the holidays, has added extra bang to our festive crackers.

Last week we became the proud recipients of The Drum Social Media Award for Best Use of User-Generated Content for our work with Microsoft and the Excel Creator program.

I have outlined the entry below, but really this post is a shout-out to our incredible team who have worked so hard on this project:

• Bianca Hu and Amber Martin for guidance and strategic oversight
• Wayne Pua for splendid all-up leadership of the program
• Guillermo Garcia for meticulous research and analytics
• Hunter Hill for creative video and design materials
• Eric Fetters-Walp for engaging copywriting
• Chelsea Slocum for writing the winning award entry

Huge thanks too to Cuong Pham from Microsoft for believing in our team and the program and for being such a delightful client and partner on this project!

The Winning Entry – Public

Microsoft Excel has been a mainstay in the business application world since 1987, and its engineers are releasing new product features, hacks, and innovative ways to use Excel all the time. Delightful Communications was asked to position Excel as a fun, productive solution while reaching new, relevant audiences and driving amplified awareness across social media platforms. We did this by building an Excel Creator community of global experts who were already leveraging Excel as a tentpole in their own social strategy. These individuals were releasing content about Excel and making it incredibly easy to digest and engaging for a young, global audience, and we wanted to help them take it to the next level. To do this, we developed a symbiotic relationship with Excel Creators that promoted innovative ideas, highlighted product features, and helped them continue to create that emotional response that Excel can be fun. To date, we are working with 31 Excel Creators representing 16 countries and 6 languages. Excel Creators work with us to hear information live that’s fresh and relevant, and to be on the cutting edge. Reciprocally, we have an opportunity to highlight key features that are targeted based on what Microsoft wants people to know about. The end result is amazing, original user-generated content published by a robust community of global Excel Creators that are invested in learning about the latest Excel product innovations and driving awareness throughout their own user bases

Well done to all the award winners and those nominated. We thought the fine folks at The Drum did a great job with these awards and we look forward to sharing our great work with them next year.

Cheers, Mel Carson – Founder & CEO at Delightful Communications

At Delightful, we believe content marketing and influencer marketing can’t live without each other.

Content can be seen as the currency of most influencer marketing activities and, on the other hand, influencers help amplify content and bring brands the credibility to reach and engage with relevant audience.

However, it’s not easy to find the right influencers to help you create killer content and amplify it. Most influencer marketing tools that can help marketers find influencers evaluate how influential they are based on their social media performance, while the influencers content marketers value the most, are those who write and share not just on social media, but also on their blog and 3^rd party publications.

Buzzsumo is the perfect tool to solve this problem for content marketers. By providing powerful content insight, the tool can help marketers find the right influencers to boost their content creation and amplification numbers.

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Earlier this month I was invited onto Webcertain TV to share some thoughts and wisdom on how to get started with influencer marketing.

In this 12 minutes video, we discuss the ins and outs of influencer marketing including how to get started with influencer marketing, how to integrate influencer marketing with your social media and content strategy, how to find and approach influencers online, what influencer marketing technologies are available out there, what to measure and how to align your influencer program with your business goals, and more.

Check it out…

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In a digital world, content is the currency of influence. Obviously, most marketers nowadays are aware of the importance of content marketing: according to recent studies, 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing, and 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day.

Along with the explosion of content, marketers are challenged to make their voice heard. That’s why influencers should be a part of your content marketing strategy. Traackr Academy of Influencer Marketing recently brought us a new course, Confluence: The Meeting of Content and Influencer Marketing, to help marketers attract and convert customers by aligning influencer and content strategies.

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We are big-time supporters of Majestic here at Delightful, and while the British search engine tells you who is linking to whom across the web, we want you to uncover everything it has to offer beyond just being a tool for SEO (search engine optimization).

I chatted to Duane Forrester, VP of Organic Search Operations at Bruce Clay, at a conference recently about how content marketers and digital PR people could use link data to tell better stories about their campaigns and how to get creative when planning outreach to influencers.

Duane says, “the reality is links are a source of direct traffic,” and gives you the opportunity to uncover potential partners and evaluate the success of your content. You’re putting in the work, but still, how well do you know your customers? Who are your key influencers? What is the net long-term effect of the content and campaigns you are producing?

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All of us here at Delightful have finished the course from the Academy of Influencer Marketing (AIM) powered by Traackr!

Traackr is a solid influencer marketing platform that Delightful has been using for 2 years to help clients set up and run strategic influencer marketing programs. We love Traackr not just because it’s a great tool, but also it shares a similar methodology on influencer marketing with us which is building authentic and strategic relationships through a value exchange and mutual benefit framework.

The 1.5 hour course provided the Delightful team with a systematic crash course on understanding influencer marketing, identifying and engaging the influencers, setting up an effective influencer marketing program, and defining a measurement framework, etc.

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In the information age, we are all influenced by the inexhaustible flow of digital media, content, and messages.

All of the time.

The Internet makes it more difficult for brands to manage their online reputation and consumer sentiment because they themselves are not the main source of their own message anymore.

Brands are simply not as authoritative as they used to be:

• Fewer than 10% of shoppers actually visit manufacturer websites when researching a purchase.
• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations while just 33% trust ads.
• 43% of people say they turn to blogs when they are looking for inspiration.
• 48% of consumers discovered new brands and products, mostly while browsing content online.

(From Influence Now)

So who are sending out the messages that actually influence your consumers? How can you find them in order to build healthy relationships? Should you start an influencer program or campaign in the first place?

A recent e-book >> Influence Now by Linkdex and Momentology answers all these questions for you.

Mel Carson, Delightful’s Founder, has shared his thoughts in the book on what makes a successful influencer.

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Every marketer knows that “people are powerful distribution channels for your brand message”, said Jon Dick a couple of weeks ago during a wonderful webinar we watched here at Delightful.

However, the question this poses, he went on to say, is: How can you get people to talk about your brand?

The webinar organized by Klout and Simply Measured answered this question for us by introducing how to successfully manage an influencer program for your brand. Featuring Jon Dick from Klout, Uri Bar Joseph from Simply Measured and blogger and digital marketing influencer Jess Estrada, the webinar showed how to identify, engage, and measure the success of relationships with influencers.

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It’s January and many of us will be embarking on new resolutions that we hope we’ll still be keeping by the end of the month.

Some maybe health and fitness related, some maybe career-driven and some will be a combination of both.

Although many of us focus on the physical health of our bodies at this time of year, it pays to have a think about the mental or attitudinal aspects of where we want to be in the next 365 days and how we are going to get there from a cerebral point of view. It’s all very well losing 10 lbs. or cutting down on caffeine, but physical health needs to go hand in hand with some mental limbering up as well.

When it comes to that new job, promotion or next round of VC funding you’ve promised yourself, personal branding and how you present yourself online (or off it) has never been more important to think about, especially in this age of ubiquitous social media.

Photo by artwork_rebel on flickr

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