The more I think about this, the more I believe that it will have an increasingly important impact for US MRKT going forward.
This from a recent Forbes magazine article in social media influencers: “When you consider that 40% of Twitter users have made a purchase as a direct result of a tweet from an influencer.”
We’re taking about micro influencers (MI) – A term that references those on social media with 10,000 to 500,000 followers, and whose followers are generally more engaged with that person, more likely to trust them and more likely to buy a product recommended by them. The successful MI does not blatantly sell, they tell stories and recount their experiences in a manner that is not an outright “pitch”. This is also referred to as “social selling”. And it works.
At US MRKT, we are working on a (still) conceptual strategy that will increase engagement. We call it “influencer aggregation” (IA). IA is an idea that seeks to establish an engagement metric for lead generation by analyzing the performance of a group of influencers (e.g. 1,000 influencers with 500 followers each, equals 500,000 followers). The crucial aspect is that the 1,000 influencers should be engaged with their followers based on a common interest such as beauty products, health and fitness, real estate, automotive and racing, as examples. US MRKT is developing an IA matrix in order to be able to identify and categorize certain MIs by category and thereby offer its POs the ability to tap into a focused group of SAs that coincides with what the PO is offering.
Stay tuned as we push towards the launch of the US MRKT APP. In its initial launch, the APP will be for sales associates only, but hopefully soon after it will be usable by Product Owners and Customers.