Leveraging Business Partnerships for Influence Marketing

A recurring theme on this show is finding examples influence marketing, not just marketing involving online influencers. When we uncover a non-traditional perspective on this thing we do, it unlocks a lot of interesting thinking for all of us.

I am one who geeks out about offline examples of influence marketing, but there are variations of the theme online, too. And you find those examples sometimes in the most unexpected places.

Travis Huff cut his teeth in the digital marketing space with local businesses in Northern California. Instead of listening to the social media talking heads about how to do all this, he experimented, tried things, learned and developed his own approach to influence marketing.

He tried to forge partnerships from business to business. So one brand, let’s say a car dealership, would create a partnership with, let’s say, a bank offering car loans. Each would leverage one another’s social accounts and audiences to increase the reach of their offers and messaging.

Travis was an old TV station sales guy, so building creative advertising solutions came natural to him. He’s coordinated a number of brand-to-brand influence relationships over the years, but also manages social media and what we call regular influencer marketing campaigns, using online influencers rather than brands, with his firm Realtime Outsource. 

One of the things I love about Travis is you get the feel he doesn’t worry about fancy strategies or consultants or big software packages. He just rolls up his sleeves and figures it out. You can learn a lot from someone like that. He even shares an astonishingly simple, but apparently effective tactic on the show today that flies in the face of what the “experts” say. Listen close for that. I was kind of stunned.

Travis and I caught up to talk about his own path to figuring out influence marketing and what works for the businesses he works with.

Today’s episode is sponsored by my friends at Tagger.

It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I’ve told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. Here’s all the information I have on the campaign report … and remember … I built this in five minutes using Tagger’s drag and drop report builder. But here’s all the things the client sees in either a webpage version of the report or a PDF I can kick out on a daily basis if needed:

The first page has the overall campaign performance in a succinct chart broken down by platform. So I see that this particular campaign currently has a reach of 2.4 million people and 102,000 total impressions. I see my total engagement, engagement rate and the organic lift for the content. But I see that broken down by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on.

I then have a timeline chart so the brand team can see how the volume of content has hit over the last couple of months.

Page two breaks it all down by creator. So I get to see all those performance metrics by influencer. This makes it super easy to see who is performing well for us and who might need some help, paid spend to supplement their post and so on.

Next I have a list of the top Instagram posts for the campaign and their corresponding metrics, then Facebook. Then YouTube … you get the picture.

The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jasonfalls.co/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

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