According to Digital Influence Report published by Technorati, Brand budgets are not fully aligned with how the consumers are seeing value and being influenced, to where the brands are spending on Media, largely on account of lack of metrics that help in defining the influence of content on a purchase decision. To understand the key areas of Brand Digital Spend, and the growing importance of Influencers, it is important to look at the key trends that are influencing consumer behavior, digital media spend and the influencers in your category.

Digital Consumer Behavior and the Influencers

Consumers follow brands to keep up with the activities, learn about brands, products and services, sweepstakes and contests, provide feedback, join a community of fans, make purchases and complain about a product or service. The detailed channel breakdown for each of the activities is below.

Influence is inversely proportional to the size of the community and blogs, retail and brand sites are most likely to influence a purchase.

An infographic below explains the impact of blogs and influencers on a purchase decision in the Electronics/Tech category.

Trends in Brands Digital Media Spend 

Digital Spend in Social is likely to increase for all brands with Display advertising and Search contributing to the largest share of advertising spend increase. Social constitutes 10% of the brands total Digital Spend including the influencers Outreach Program with majority of spend being on Display, Search and Video.The breakdown of Media spend across categories and social is given below.

 

 

 

 

Trends impacting Influencers

Influencers are defined as “A person who has a greater than average reach or impact through word of mouth in a relevant marketplace.”

Influencers are becoming increasingly important as published content is an important source of information for brand and consumers, the type of content that influencers use are:

Channels where Influencers follow Brands

One of the key reasons, Influencers follow brands is to keep up with activities and learn about the products and services offered by the brand

Steps to Building Digital Influence for your Brand

1.Understand how social works for influencers in your category and the type of content that generates shares, referrals and increased online consumer engagement.
Look at the associated categories that are most viewed by the buyer, and how the content that helps in influencing the purchase for your category can be integrated in your content strategy. For example if you are a Cereals brand then content pertaining to Nutrition could be the mainstay for your blog or content stream.

2.Define social metrics that are applicable for influencers such as page views, likes,comments, followers and retweets and categorize influencers based on their relevancy.

3.Understand the level of consumer engagement with the influencers, include attribution for qualitative elements such as style of writing, blog coverage and thought leadership.

4.Understand the source of influence for your Influencers’ content to see if it is aligned with your brand objectives.

5.Define Metrics for determining Influence in your category. Analyze the key sources of information that influence the buyer in your category, and look at the critical success factors for the type of content consumed and how you could best integrate the same in your consumers path to purchase.

Source : Digital Influencer Report, TechnoratiMedia
Methodology
The three surveys (consumer, brand, influencer) were conducted in November and December 2012, closing between Dec. 5-11, 2012. The consumer survey was run on the Appnexus exchange (approx.reach of 120 million), and responses from those under 18 were omitted from the final results.
The Influencer Survey was sent to Technorati Media’s index of 2.5 million email addresses of influencers, and the responses cross referenced with the Technorati Authority index to insure a representative sample of the total influencer population. The Brand Survey was sent to account and media supervisors and planners at the top digital agencies as well as the digital marketing leads at Fortune 1,000 companies in the U.S.

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