June 26, 2018 11:50 am
Published by Webfluential
According to the founder of Dicks and Betties, Steve Bryant, there are only two ways to tell your story. You can find the original article here, but we’ve summarised the key points of the article below.
On getting attention
Brands do not want attention, primarily they want revenue. A brand acquires revenue by selling its products. However, in order to sell their product, they must first get people to pay attention to their product. So by default, every brand is in the business of getting attention before it gets revenue.
The only way to get attention is to tell stories and there are only really two ways to tell stories – Tell your story, or, get others to tell your story.
Getting others to tell your story
The challenge: Storytellers want to tell the brands story in their own way.
The opportunity: Storytellers have large audiences. Storytellers have large audiences because their stories cater to their audiences’ needs and aspirations. Their audience cares and wants to hear the storyteller’s story. When others tell your story, you rent their audiences’ trust.
Telling your story to others
The challenge: When you tell your own story you have control of that story, however you reach a smaller audience. Instead of understanding your audience you are asking your audience to understand you.
The opportunity: When you tell your own story you create trust with your smaller audience. Trust over time equals a growing audience. But there is no trust without consistency.
The third way
We said up front that there are only two ways. But actually, there’s a third way. Don’t tell your story at all. Tell your audience a story about themselves. Tell a story about an aspirational topic that exists between you and your audience that is born out of mutual interest.
This is how Vanity Fair or WIRED works. Editors who are experts in their field, tell stories about the topics that they are experts in, to an audience who are already interested in those topics. For Editors, these topics are an expression of their expertise, while for the audience these topics are an expression of their aspirations.
An example of this is how Google is in the business of selling information, and Google’s Think Quarterly covers the future of marketing.
By being customized to your interest, Facebook and Instagram work in the exact same way. They are interested in telling you stories that you are interested in.
That’s where influencer marketing finds its sweet spot between creators and brands. Mutual interest between brand and audience, in a story, told by a credible creator. So, pay attention to the stories people want to hear. There’s money in that banana stand.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Feel free to share this post with your audience.
Start working with influencers by creating a marketer account here. If you’re an influencer, sign up here or if you are already registered, login here.
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March 7, 2018 2:35 pm
Published by Murray Legg
As an influencer, it matters to you how you market and monetize yourself. You’ve worked hard to create engaging content and grow your audience base. People trust the way you tell stories, including marketers wanting you to include their brands as part of the stories you share.
This year, we’ve rebuilt our influencer dimensions which we covered in this blog post. We’re the only influencer marketing platform that takes a deep scientific look at your IBM Watson personality insights and consumer tendencies, your audience categories and the performance of your content, as well as your work ethic and feeds that into an influencer search engine.
Influencer search results are important to influencers and marketers
This week we released a new version of our influencer search engine to the 8,500 brands and marketers that use our software to run their influencer campaigns. It’s a big improvement in helping marketers find the perfect influencers for their work. If you’re up to speed with how our influencer search works, and you do the necessary work to keep your profile updated and active, you’ll be able to rank higher on the influencer search and as a result, win more work.
The most asked question by influencers to us is “Why am I not getting any work on Webfluential?” In almost all cases, the influencer hasn’t invested time into setting up their account properly, responding timeously to messages, or preparing their media kit, so they just don’t feature in influencer search results. Further to this, influencers don’t pay Webfluential to do pitch them for work, so we can’t ever be expected to favor one person over another. We rely on maths for this in our influencer search results.
What does an influencer search look like? Well, we’ve actually released a public beta of our influencer search here with limited influencer results. For marketers on a Premium account, the influencer search results looks like the image below:
Just like Coca-Cola, our influencer search algorithm is part of the secret sauce of Webfluential that only two people know about, so we’ll not be able to share just how to get to the top, but here are a few key ingredients for influencers to follow. Follow us on Twitter and keep your eyes open for some other secret reveals inside your influencer account.
Top tips for influencers to increase influencer search rankings
- Update your search tags on your profile and make sure your selected categories accurately describe the content you produce
- Make sure your email address and telephone number are up to date – we track all outgoing communications for delivery, opens and clicks which informs the description of “Likely to respond within X hours”
- Create your IBM Watson personality insights. You can include those on your media kit. Here’s a blog post all about that.
- Make sure you have a compelling and completed media kit. If you can take the time to create a personalized showcase of your content, brands are more likely to engage with you. Secret tip – add previous brand work you’ve done. That tells us (and marketers) a lot about you! Here’s an example media kit reference
- Share your media kit on Facebook, Twitter and include it on LinkedIn. We track how interested marketers are in you by viewing your media kit. You, too, can track this inside your dashboard.
Over time, we’ll include more dimensions as they become important to brands. We’ll keep you updated. In the meanwhile, hope to see you at the top of our influencer search results!
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