1Influencer Marketing & Relations in 2018 Content Playbook 11Influencer Marketing & Relations in 2018 Content Playbook

P L A Y B O O K

How Influencer-Generated Content Accelerates Trust & Transparency in the Customer Journey

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It’s understandable that Marketers today feel the unyielding demand for a higher volume of more trusted and transparent content, amid the proliferation of touchpoints as well as, the growing pressure to remain relevant against Amazon and newer, digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs).

Gone are the days of brands and agencies bearing the sole responsibility – and control – of the daunting task of content creation to meet the higher expectations for immediate, personalized information throughout a shrinking path-to-purchase. According to recent research:

• Content from “people I know” drives discovery and research: 74 percent of consumers who discover new products from people they know are likely to explore it further (Forrester Research, “Four Steps to Add Social to Your Marketing Strategy”, 2017)

• Influencer- and user-generated content helps customers explore and inform purchase decisions: 37% of customers go directly to a brand’s website to research products or services, and 49% use a search engine, leveraging blogs, UGC, and reviews to explore product offerings. (Forrester Research, “Four Steps to Add Social to Your Marketing Strategy”, 2017)

• Consumer-generated content validates consumers’ high expectations. Consumers are increasingly seeking out content and signals they need to make a decision on demand, such as products recommended by other customers that are ‘the best’ or ‘the worst’. (Google, 2017)

• Influencer-generated and user-generated content allows consumers to make decisions faster. Consumers are searching for products and product reviews directly through their most trusted channels (vs. search alone), and expecting to act on those decisions to buy immediately (Google, 2017)

The content consumers trust today is content that’s created by influential consumers. An influential consumer can take different forms - from brand advocates with few friends or followers to expert reviewers to those most often associated with Influencer Marketing & Relations, i.e. those with a lot of fans and followers. The content they create can also take different forms - from photos to social proof like star ratings to long form reviews or even survey results. The combinations are infinite.

Marketing & Communications that focus on integrating authentic, trusted influencer- and user-generated content across their customer journey deliver to personalized, relevant experiences for their consumers at every touchpoint will accelerate their brand trust.

Influencer Marketing Content &

Creative Partnership

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How to Use IGC and UGC to Adapt to an Accelerated Path-to-Purchase

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What Every Brand Can Learn from Influencer Marketing at Amazon Amazon

How to Develop an Influence-led Communications Roadmap & Editorial Calendar [Template]

How to Identify IGC Criteria & Create an Integrated Influencer Marketing Content Mini Brief [Template]

How to Generate Omni-Channel Influencer Content via Brand and Campaign Onboarding Guides [Template]

Brand Example:: Godiva’s Micro-Influencer Program Powers a Confection of Content, Conversation & Commerce

Readiness Checklist: Are You Using IGC and UGC to Accelerate Your Consumers’ Path to Purchase?

2018 Trend to Watch: The Path to Purchase is Getting Shorter04

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Among the 100 billion searches Google processes every month, a growing number of those searches are queries of extremes. New data from Google shows a significant increase in consumers searching for products ‘to avoid’ and ‘the worst’, increasing 1.5x since 2015, and mobile searches for ‘the best’ have grown 80%.

This seemingly subtle change in behaviour signals a more dramatic shift in the content consumers want when making purchase decisions, as well as their expectations when receiving that information. Amid the wealth of content available and its proximity to consumers today, consumers are able to research and validate their consideration for products they need or desire within moments of their initial discovery.

2018 Trend to Watch: The Path To Purchase is Getting Shorter

Sources:1.Forrester Research, “Four Steps to Add Social to Your Marketing Strategy”, 20172.Google, “Micro-Moments Now: 3 New Consumer Behaviors Playing Out in Google Search Data”, 20173.Deloitte, “Navigating the Digital Divide”, 20154.Bazaarvoice, Higher Review Volume and Average Rating Correlate with Order Increases,, 20155.PWC “Total Retail 2016”, 20166.AdWeek, “Twitter Says Users Now Trust Influencers Nearly As Much As Their Friends”, 2016

Consumers’ need and expectation for in the moment validation indicates a new language of trust and desire for transparency is driving digital commerce that marketers need to communicate in the moment of consumer demand, as well as an accelerated path-to-purchase.

With consumers expecting in the moment validation, marketers must make sure that they're communicating with prospective shoppers across all touchpoints, and doing so in ways that build trust.

Consumers Seek Out and Rely on Influencer-Generated and User-Generated Content at Every Touchpoint, Accelerating Intent at Every Stage of the Path-to-Purchase

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Influencer- and user-generated content positively impacts every touchpoint of today’s modern customer decision journey, proven to drive discovery, increase consideration and purchase intent, and even prime consumers to be more receptive to brand advertising. And every positive interaction not only continues to reinforce the behavior of relying on influencer-and user-generated content to make a decision, but also leads to more positive brand engagement overall.

According to recent research published by MIT, consumers were even more likely to engage with ads for luxury goods, such as jewelry, cars, and bags, after seeing peers’ endorsements for those products. “We found that status goods had much stronger social influence than non-status goods. Status is very important motivation for consumption – and for ads,” said MIT Sloan researcher Shan Huang.

And this type of priming is effective because of who and how consumers trust today. According to Rachel Botsman, the leading expert on consumer trust in the digital age, “Trust and influence now lie more with the people –families, friends, coworkers, even strangers –than with top-down elites, experts and authorities. [Today’s] an age where individuals matter more than institutions, and where customers are social influencers who define brands.”

Simply put, from Botsman, institutional trust was not designed for the Digital Age. With trust in all four major institutions at an all time low, what marketers say about a brand is no longer seen as credible.

Trust is highly contextual, with the convergence of modern tech, digital commerce, and social media driving a fundamental shift in consumer behavior towards democratized influence and distributed trust, power and information that flows laterally across digital communities among consumers (most who have never met in real life).

As a result of this shift in trust from institutions to individuals, the impact of influencer- and user-generated content when shared at specific touchpoints is significant. As such, marketers have developed influencer, advocacy, referral and loyalty programs in response at rapid rates. But as singular tactics, that impact is limited to that one touchpoint at that point in time – hardly enough to be able to adapt to today’s accelerated path-to-purchase.

The potential, more substantial impact of these influence-led marketing tactics remains not in their singular execution – but in the cumulative impact of all together executed as a cohesive content strategy.

This playbook details how influencer-generated and user-generated content produced as a result of seemingly disparate word-of-mouth marketing programs validates consumer confidence and communicates transparency at every touchpoint. As such, we share how marketers can use influencer-generated and user-generated content to make smarter marketing decisions, and the adaptations marketers need to make to align and operationalize influence-led programs with their greater marketing strategies to execute all in concert, together, in order to accelerate the path-to-purchase.

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Every company has had the opportunity to adapt to these new consumer behaviours. But despite the fact that consumers have embraced mobile technology and social media for over a decade –most corporate leaders do not feel urgency to compete differently.

This is a huge problem for marketers.

From product reviews to influencer recommendations, content created by consumers – regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of influence – is the new currency of social capital and brand trust, and it’s critical to keeping (and gaining) market share and competitive advantage in 2018.

To understand how this works, you need to look no further than Amazon. There are few companies that so consistently integrate dimensions of social proof into customer experience touchpoints as Amazon, and fewer still with anywhere near its platform capabilities for creating, cultivating and repurposing influencer-generated and user-generated content across its entire brand experience.

On the long scroll down to read a review on any given Amazon product page – now most likely to be the first and last touchpoint on any given customer journey – consumers have the opportunity to engage with no fewer than 12 different indicators of social proof, varying from recommendation widgets displaying influencer-and user-generated content to average star ratings.

Not one. Twelve.

Validating Consumer Confidence & Communicating Transparency: What Every Brand Can Learn from Influencer Marketing at Amazon

And while Amazon is thriving – its revenue has increased 5x to $80bn since 2010 – the other side of retail isn’t so hot. Since 2016, there have been 18 retail bankruptcies; hundreds of store closings from former anchor stores like Macy’s, Sears, and JCPenney; with even new-era retail darlings like Lululemon and former hipster-fave Urban Outfitters’ stocks reaching new multi-year lows in 2017.

Most marketers understand that it’s no longer enough to compete on products or services alone – Amazon has made sure of it, almost systemically rendering entire industries obsolete through elevated experiences, prices, and customer service – and in doing so, it’s changed customer’s brand expectations fundamentally.

This type of disruption is known as the Amazon Effect – and it has every brand and its marketing team on notice. If you’ve ever found yourself two years deep into reviews or seven products beyond an influencer’s curated Amazon shop, you’ve felt its impact first-hand.

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Here’s how we’ve observed Amazon doing influencer marketing – and it’s quite different from how most marketers are doing influencer marketing today.

Chances are, your current influencer marketing workflow looks something like this: once the campaign strategy and brief is already baked, a marketer decides the type and category of influencer they want to work with, typically based on reach, engagement rate, or CPE. They then choose a tool to help with at least one of the following: one that searches for relevant influencers, via a database/marketplace or social listening; another that manages communication and activation of those influencers; and another that that measures the results of activating those influencers.

This approach often leads to any number of content challenges, primarily:• Difficulty finding the right influencers who align with

your planned campaign strategy • Influencer-brand dissonance in the creative process,

resulting in influencer-generated content that is off-brand, off-campaign and/or inauthentic to the influencer’s aesthetic

• Lack of scale – at the end of the campaign, still lacked the volume social capital assets required for significant measurable improvement to the bottom line.

Amazon’s Influencer Marketing Ecosystem

What separates Amazon from the rest, in its ongoing disruption of every industry from fashion to food, is not only how it has designed its influencer marketing programs to overcome these challenges – but how it has scaled its influencer marketing strategy in its use of influencer- and user-generated content to establish trust, affirm consumer trust, and communicate transparency at every touchpoint, in multiple formats depending on consumer context.

Amazon is as much a bonafide, self-sustaining word-of-mouth ecosystem as it is an e-commerce powerhouse. From Amazon Vine, which provides free products to consumers selected by Amazon to review, to its recently launched Amazon Influencer Program that rewards qualified social media influencers for their curated product picks, Amazon has integrated influencer-generated content at every customer experience touchpoint, while providing influential customers across the spectrum of influence every opportunity to tell the world about the products they love.

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Influence Persona

Influencer Marketing Program

Recruitment, Discovery &

IdentificationContent Activation Incentive Journey Impact

Influencers Amazon

Influencer Program

Application

Product recommendations on Youtube, Facebook,

Instagram, Twitter, or Amazon Spark with a

vanity link to their own curated Amazon

shop with featured products

Revenue share: influencers earn

money from qualified purchases sold

Awareness, Discovery

Advocates Amazon Vine

Invite-Only based on helpfulness of reviews

voted on by other Amazon customers

Ratings, Reviews & UGC

Free, first access to product

Research & consideration across

SKUs

ReferrersAmazon

Associates Program

Sign-up to join

“Tools for every site” Embeddable affiliate

links & referral widgets of featured

products

10% ad fees + revenue share from purchases Consideration, Decision

Loyalists Amazon Prime Paid membership Ratings, Reviews, UGC

Free shipping, exclusive rewards,

discountsAdvocacy, CLTV

Inside Amazon’s Influencer Marketing Ecosystem

Amazon is able to achieve scale by creating and integrating owned, influence-led marketing programs that feed each other and generate the content required to impact consumers’ path-to-purchase.

The result, is that Amazon not only has the Influencer-generated content to cover the massive breadth of its SKUs, but it’s also able to scale its influencer marketing programs in a way that makes each touchpoint more personalized and contextually relevant to its consumers, by combining them.

And Amazon isn’t alone in expanding the tools and technologies available to better capitalize on the wealth of influence consumer social capital can create.

Both Facebook and Instagram have introduced tools designed to amplify influencer-generated content, crowdsource recommendations and feedback from friends and family, and develop influencer relationships to create video content.

So how can Marketers operationalize the influence-led marketing programs they do have to replicate this success? Here are five factors critical to Amazon’s strategy that can take any influencer-marketing program to the next level.

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Always On: Content is the only constant. To stay relevant, Amazon supports its seasonal campaigns around high-shopping cycles (ie. B2S, holiday), with cultural, categorical, even its own, made-up event – Prime Day –to give consumers any number of reasons to shop. Almost everything about Amazon is – down to its incentives and rewards structure, so long as you’re performing – and ensuring the most sku coverage as possible. Products that increase in ratings or number of reviews should be flagged for consideration

Owned Influencer Programs: Who has influence, in Amazon’s perspective? All Amazon customers. And there’s an influence-led program and community for every customer – even casual shoppers are asked to submit ratings & reviews. You won’t see Amazon ‘renting’ out influencers any time soon – its programs are relatively self-sustaining, with each one a natural progression (with more exclusive benefits) to the next based on social capital and performance: Prime Members who reach a spend threshold are accepted to join Amazon Spark; those who leave the most helpful reviews are accepted to join Amazon Vine; with application processes and exclusive rewards in place for its most valuable programs – like Amazon Influencer Program (curated recommendations).

Integrated: There’s a reason there are at least 12 displays of social proof on any given Amazon product page – the level of transparency and trust is nearly indisputable, ever more important now that it bookends the beginning and end of the majority of consumers’ path-to-purchase. Influencer-generated content is exponentially more powerful when combined. On any given product search, you can consult no fewer than three types of customer sources – influencer recommendations, poll the Spark community, and read reviews – with both Spark and reviews combining user-generated photos and text.

Repurposed: Influencer-generated, inspired, and validated content is created for and repurposed across channels. Amazon brings new meaning to ‘shop the feed’. Vanity links enable Amazon influencers to share their curated product recommendations with their audience anywhere – even Instagram. Customizable widgets enable consumers to shop countless blog posts. In fact, Amazon is among the largest spenders on Facebook ads.

Personalized: Amazon leverages its intricate, proprietary shopper algorithms, recommendation engines and embedded widgets to repurpose and integrate relevant influencer- and user-generated content at every customer experience touchpoint, based on over 30 consumer data points, including: search history, purchase history, social data, and loyalty points program (owned or partnered). Each one is designed to accelerate the path-to-purchase and bridge the trust gap by removing doubt in the process.

10Influencer Marketing & Relations in 2018 Content Playbook

Playbook: Influence-Led Communications Roadmap, Editorial Calendar & IGC Briefs

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With influencer- and user-generated content meticulously optimized in Amazon and Facebook feeds alike, influencer- and user-generated content is the great equalizer. In the moment it takes for a thumb to scroll, consumers can be inspired to buy, knowledgable about product attributes, validated in their decision and make the purchase.

But given that 3.2bn images shared and 3.27m blog posts published on average every day, the value of influencer-generated and user-generated content, as well as the ability to seamlessly adapt to today’s rapidly evolving landscape of new technologies and consumer behaviors isn’t more content. But rather, it lies in delivering influencer-generated and user-generated content on demand when consumers seek it, which accelerates their confidence in making a purchase decision.

How to Use IGC and UGC to Adapt to an Accelerated Path-to-Purchase

The impact of an influencer-led marketing strategy that integrates influencer, advocate, referrer, and loyalist content across touchpoints becomes exponentially more powerful when those dimensions of social proof are combined together.

While ratings and reviews or an influencer-generated photo alone can improve the efficacy of any single touchpoint – it doesn’t compare to the compounded impact of when that influencer testimonial and advocate product review are paired together and then amplified across touchpoints.

Accelerating Trust & Transparency in the Path to Purchase with IGC and UGC

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Executed in this way, the value of influencer- and user-generated content lies in how it reinforces the path-to-purchase, inspiring trust, instilling confidence, and validating purchase decisions as a transparent, authentic account of other consumers’ experiences.

As such, where consumers are seeking out content and signals that give them the confidence to buy and make purchase decisions in the moment, influencer- and user-generated content needs to reflect and empower consumers to do that. This includes activating influencers to create content on Instagram and write a review, but also, creating opportunities to integrate influencer-generated and user-generated content within a single touchpoint –like advocate reviews with influencer videos.

Communicating value in a way that is meaningful to consumers now demands that marketers start thinking beyond point solutions in order to leverage influencers, advocates, referrers, and loyalists to create and engage with cohesive content experiences that accelerate brand trust. Detailed in the following section, there are three steps Marketers can take to align their current marketing strategies to better leverage influencer- and user-generated content, as well as adapt to today’s shortened path-to-purchase:

● Develop an Influence-led Communications Roadmap and Editorial Calendar

● Identify Influencer-Generated Content Criteria & Create an Integrated Influencer Marketing Content Mini Brief

● Using Brand and Campaign Onboarding Guides to Generate Adaptive Influencer Content

● Brand Example: How Godiva’s Micro-Influencer Program Powers a Confection of Content, Conversation & Commerce

Are You Integrating Dimensions of Social Proof at Every Touchpoint?

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Marketers can create the same diversity of social capital assets that replicate the more impactful, integrated programs from Amazon and other market leaders to achieve the same (if not better) personalization and contextual relevance at scale by expanding the role that influencer-generated content plays in their communications roadmap and editorial calendar.

As we mentioned, up until now influencer marketing programs have been largely one-dimensional – generating content for a specific campaign use case. Evolving to an omni-channel, always-on influencer marketing program designed to generate content that can (and will) be repurposed across channels requires that influencer, advocate, referral, and loyalty programs are integrated with your larger enterprise communications roadmap and editorial calendar.

This not only helps to identify content requirements to include in influencer campaign briefs and opportunities to differentiate the overall communications strategy, but emphasizes:

Relevance to shoppers when they see influencers they follow across different channels, including search, as well as content aligned with cultural and seasonal events throughout the year.

Transparency to shoppers when they see other customers’ experiences (ratings, reviews) communicated across touchpoints – even preempting the research phase, enabling broadcast touchpoints to become a point of discovery.

Consistency to shoppers when influencer- and user-generated content reinforces primary campaign themes across paid and owned channels as well as reflected in customer feedback. The consistency of customer experience is critical to accelerating and reinforcing consumer trust, in which products featured in influencer-generated content are validated by advocate interactions on social and ratings & reviews on product pages.

In our 2018 Strategy & Planning Playbook, we asked Marketers to audit their existing customer journey and map target consumers’ circle of influence at each touchpoint, adding influencer marketing swimlanes that included the influence personas (influencers, advocates, referrers, loyalists), types of IGC and UGC, and channels at that touchpoint.

In this next exercise, add those insights to new influencer, advocate, referrer and loyalist swimlanes to your communications roadmap and editorial calendar to not only align those content strategies, but identify how you now must adapt corresponding influencer content briefs in response.

How to Develop an Influence-led Communications Roadmap & Editorial Calendar01

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Template: Enterprise Com

munications Roadm

ap & Editorial Calendar

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How to Identify IGC Criteria & Create an Integrated Influencer Marketing Content Mini Brief02

Now, with the understanding and intention that influencer-generated content should be repurposed across any number of different touchpoints, as well as combined with other forms of social proof like product reviews, new criteria is required for alignment with other marketing strategies and needs to be effectively communicated to the influence personas generating that content.

This may include, but is not limited to:

Create, Amplify, Submit Content Executions: To deliver a cohesive experience across touchpoints, influencers should not only be creating original content, but also sharing other influencer-generated and user-generated content, amplifying referral codes and membership criteria to their audience, and submitting their own star ratings and reviews. Marketers should also be looking to coordinate opportunities to incorporate multiple dimensions of social proof into each touchpoint, which may mean coordinating influencer, advocate, and referrer activations around specific instances of influencer-generated content.

High Priority Search Keywords: Influencers’ websites and blogs often possess high search authority around brand-relevant topics and keywords, and can be instrumental in driving search and discovery for new products.

Permission to Amplify on Social: The content lifecycle of a social post – regardless of the persona who’s publishing it – nearly necessitates that influencer-generated content requires paid amplification to scale. Facebook and Instagram are continuing to introduce more tools and controls for marketers to use and repurpose influencer-generated content. Facebook now lets brands promote publisher and influencer posts as ads through sponsored posts.

Paid Media Requirements: Make sure any targeting and re-targeting pixels are in place to successfully re-engage consumers who have interacted with influencer content across the many digital touchpoints influencers are now being activated.

Original Content: If planning on repurposing influencer-generated content in any print media – such as magazines, out-of-home, or in-store displays – the original, hi-resolutions photos will be required to maintain print integrity. While Instagram supports higher-resolution images and Facebook just introduced hi-res photo sharing in Messenger, image size restrictions are limiting and at least some degree of compression will be applied to any image published on social media.

An Influencer Marketing & Relations campaign brief is a document that captures all requirements for campaign content and its use cases (see template on following page).

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Project Key Messages Remember Positive Mentions and Keywords

Date Submitted Why Care

Requester Why Share

Division Call to Action

Run Dates Destination URL

Calendar Dates Campaign Code for Website Analytics

Budget Platform FB | IG | TW | PT | YT | Amazon | Other________

Key Performance Indicators Content Created Video | Photo | Blog | Rating & Review

Location(s) specific Y/N, if yes where:

Content Amplified Link Share | Video View | Social Post Engagement | Review Vote

Target Audience(s) Content Submitted Ratings & Review | Product Feedback | Consumer Insights

Influencers to help with Research & Strategy?

Content Specs & Requirements

Influencer to help with Big Ideas and Validation?

Paid Media Amplification. Targeting | Amt | Tagging | Pixels

Products that need to be featured: Additional Touchpoints & Channels Repurposed

Restrictions or messaging requirements:

FTC Hashtags & Disclosure

Influencer Onboarding Guide Link Community Management Guidelines, Optimization and Responses

Template: Integrated Influencer Marketing Content Mini Brief

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How to Generate Omni-Channel Influencer Content via Brand and Campaign Onboarding Guides03

Just as Marketers’ influencer-led marketing strategies aligns with their enterprise communications and media planning – the content consumers are seeing from influencers should also complement and align with the visual messaging and communications across other owned and paid touchpoints. Even with the most thoughtful briefs, among marketers most common influencer marketing challenges remains influencer-brand dissonance in the content creation process.

Often, as an industry we collectively fail to empathize with what influencers anticipate, think, see, feel, want, and need earlier in the marketing process – before the campaign launches. When in reality, they are more similar to an art or creative director in how they plan, storyboard, test, and create content. How is it, that they successfully influence the same audiences that you are also working to influence?

Through your customer journey mapping and communications roadmap, you’ve already identified the opportunities to repurpose IGC across your digital touchpoints or to amplify via paid – but this is only possible if the influencer is fully onboarded with the brand’s style guide and campaign vision.

Onboarding influencers to your brand style guidelines and campaign vision works to align expectations towards co-creating a cohesive brand experience, integral to helping the consumer find the information the need, regardless of the device, network, or channel, as well as increasing the available on-brand, high-quality content required to repurpose across your campaign touchpoints.

Establish creative boundaries without compromising their creative autonomy – by working with influencers as co-creatives using the brand onboarding and campaign style guide templates on the following pages.

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HERO IMAGE

BRAND GUIDELINES BRAND PERSONA

CREATIVE DIRECTION

COPY DIRECTION

IMAGE DIRECTION

ART DIRECTION

STYLING

LIGHTING

FTC GUIDELINES, DISCLOSURES & HASHTAGS

CONTENT SPECS & REQUIREMENTSCONTENT FORMAT(S)

BRAND ONBOARDING STYLE GUIDE

MOOD BOARD

CONTENT THEME

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HERO IMAGE

CAMPAIGN GUIDELINES & FLIGHT DATES

TARGET AUDIENCE PERSONA

CREATIVE DIRECTION

COPY DIRECTION

IMAGE DIRECTION

ART DIRECTION

STYLING

LIGHTING

FTC GUIDELINES, DISCLOSURES & HASHTAGS

CONTENT SPECS & REQUIREMENTSCONTENT FORMAT(S)

CAMPAIGN STYLE GUIDE

MOOD BOARD

CAMPAIGN THEME

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Faced with the dynamic proliferation of Digital channels and increasing complexities of Influencer Marketing & Relations, howdoes Godiva, among the world’s leading luxury chocolatiers, efficiently meet the ongoing demand for premium brand content during not one – but three key seasonal campaigns?

Godiva worked with Mavrck and Curalate to implement a micro-influencer strategy led by a select community of #GodivaInsiders, who created and captured moments of joy & delight around seasonal Godiva products in the weeks leading up to the Holidays, Valentine’s Day, and Easter. Micro-influencer generated content was then repurposed on Godiva.com through Curalate’s Fanreel integration, which enabled consumers to purchase the products featured in the content.Through these campaigns, Godiva not only appealed to the complex emotions and tastes of today’s modern consumers across key brand touchpoints, but transcended the feed to drive incremental brand engagement, ecommerce conversions, and content efficiencies.

Godiva’s Micro-Influencer Program Powers a Confection of Content, Conversation & Commerce

Opportunity To meet the content demands of today’s fast-paced social landscape, Godiva needed to develop an efficient, authentic influencer-generated content strategy during key holiday seasons that delivered incremental value and sales

GoalIncrease Godiva brand awareness, traffic, and sales through high-quality influencer generated content during three seasonal campaigns: Holiday 2016: ‘The Box That Keeps Giving’; Valentine’s Day 2016: ‘Give Love, Give Godiva’; and Easter 2017 ‘Godiva Spring’.

#GodivaInsider Program OverviewGodiva used the Mavrck platform to identify relevant micro-influencers and engage them across two core use cases:

● Activate Micro-influencers to create and share original branded content on their own Instagram feeds.

● Amplify and scale campaign by repurposing Micro-influencer generated content across brand-owned social media channels, as well as brand.com e-commerce destinations through Curalate Fanreel

Return On Influence In achieving greater incremental revenue and content efficiencies with Mavrck, Godiva decided to implement an ’always on’ #GodivaInsiders program, activating micro-influencers monthly to create authentic brand content around core and seasonal products.

04B R A N D E X A M P L E

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Key Results

360 158,534 43% 18XMicro-influencer

ActivationsEngagements on Micro-

influencer PostsIncrease in Organic Brand Engagement on Instagram

More Cost-Effective vs. Macro-Influencers

“Everyone loves the posts, they add so much life and flavor to the brand. They are very useful on our site to drive revenue.

– Christina Roperti, PR Manager, Godiva North America

How Godiva Accelerates Trust & Transparency in the Path to Purchase with Influencer-Generated and User-Generated Content

22Influencer Marketing & Relations in 2018 Content Playbook

Checklist: How are you using influencer-generated and user-generated content to accelerate your consumers’ path-to-purchase?

❑ Are you identifying opportunities across your customer journey to accelerate the path-to-purchase by repurposing or combining influencer-generated and user-generated content?

❑ Before a campaign launches, have you planned to integrate influencer- and user-generated content across touchpoints to ensure a cohesive and transparent customer journey?

❑ Are you evolving your influencer marketing program to an always-on strategy that

prioritizes influencer relationships

❑ Are you activating influencers and advocates in the moment to create content?

❑ Have mitigated your risk for influencer-brand dissonance by using influencers to test and validate your creative briefs?

❑ Does your influencer brief include a mood board to inspire influencers, rather than using explicit instructions that might compromise creativity?

❑ Are you able to fulfill the breadth and volume of content required to meet the consumer demands of a shorter path-to-purchase?

❑ Does your influencer marketing mix include and cross-pollinate content from

influencers, advocates, referrers, loyalists?

❑ Does your creative brief include repurposing high-performing IGC across owned channels, based on your influencer-augmented customer journey?

❑ Do you know your share of influencer voice in comparison to your competitors?

❑ Are you evolving your influencer marketing program to an always-on strategy that prioritizes influencer relationships

❑ Are you activating influencers and advocates in the moment to create content?

Know Before You Go

23Influencer Marketing & Relations in 2018 Content Playbook

Mavrck is changing the face of Influencer Marketing & Relations for Fortune 5000 brands.

The company's all-in-one influencer marketing platform allows marketers to seamlessly manage influencer, advocate, referrer and loyalist discovery, identification, recruitment, segmentation, activation, measurement, and retention. Using Mavrck's Influence Plugin, brands can create an omni-channel influencer discovery and activation experience across the customer journey, from consideration to purchase.

Influencer Marketing & Relations will become a more significant topic in the boardroom with Mavrck, as brands look for ways to more effectively execute on enterprise-level digital, influencer and CX initiatives.

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