Brand Influence: Is Your Company Maximizing the Return on Its Efforts?

Over the last 4 weeks, I have written a series of posts on how to measure an individual’s online influence and provided tips to improve your return on investment in the Blogging, Tweeting and LinkedIn influence channels. This week, I will shift my focus to online brand influence.

Earlier today, OpenView released the second of its 2-part series of reports on online influence in the Venture Capital space. The latest report ranks the top 10 most influential venture capital firms online and provides some highlights of the tactics that these firms are using to bolster their online influence.

In this post, I’d like to share some of the best practices that virtually any company can implement in order to elevate their brand influence.

• First and foremost, to develop a successful brand influence program your company needs to a) know who it is trying to influence; and b) focus its efforts on serving that group of individuals’ interests and needs.  For B2C companies, this is pretty straightforward. Your audience will be defined by the key characteristics in your ideal customer profile. For B2B companies, finding your target audience is a little more complicated. You will first want to identify your ideal customer profile and the characteristics that define that group. Then, you need to identify the buyer personas, user personas, and influencers that are involved in the purchasing process at target companies. These individuals will be your most targeted audience group. Depending on the size of this group of companies you will likely want to refine your requirements slightly to increase the size of your target audience.
• Identify where members of this community go for information that is related to your company’s product offerings and services. Often there are great marketing channels that provide very little overall influence value because individuals from a given community may not rely on them for information. Therefore, the return on investment in these types of channels may be minimal. You can identify the top influence channels to interact with your target audience via an online survey or a simple LinkedIn poll.
• Make your company’s online presence an important component of the community of companies and individuals that it does business with.  For example, the most influential venture capital firms have realized that they are at the center of startup and expansion stage company job searching, and have made this a key functionality of their webpages.
• Leverage other community channels to expose other members of your target audience community to your content and brand, and expand your brand influence. The more touch points that you have with your target’s community, the more likely your target will become aware of your company and what it does and will potentially follow you in one or more of your target influence channels. This will lead to more chances to influence these individuals and engage with them directly.
• Align the interests of your company with your target audience community. This establishes a relationship beyond being a customer with this individual. For example, companies selling to US pharmaceutical companies may want support online movements protecting drug patents, as this is an issue that is important to these individuals.
• Align your key employees with your brand.  Your employees are an extension of your company, so you should leverage their involvement with your community to amplify your influence. One way you can easily do this is by publicizing the activity of the key players in your company with your target community across each of your major channels of communication.
• Engage directly with your target audience directly using your corporate communication channels.

If you are interested in learning more about brand influence, I recommend reading Inc.’s article on “How to Measure Your Brand’s online influence.”  Additionally, please follow me on Twitter at @bhickie to stay abreast of my current thoughts on startup and expansion stage marketing and business strategies. I post my weekly blog post to my Twitter feed each week.

 

Editor’s Note: To get more great tips on building your brand influence and helping your company grow, sign up for the OpenView newsletter.