Market demand has shifted from simply engaging bloggers to activating the most brand loyal and influential brand advocates online. These online influencers have a reach and audience that transcends their daily blogs and instead ripples across multiple social platforms in a personal brand ecosystem.
The evolution of influencer impact is coupled with the need for brands to more clearly demonstrate return on investment when it comes to influencer engagement. It is no longer just an impressions game; 68% of marketers see influencer marketing as a means for generating leads, creating engaging content, and driving direct sales lifts.
While its roots are in public relations, Coyne has been active in blogger relations for nearly a decade, serving as a strategic partner for numerous brands since the dawn of the age of the Mommy Blogger.
Coyne set out to develop a contemporary influencer marketing service offering that would build upon its strength in the marketplace in blogger relations, but differentiate it in an expanding category of competing agencies who all claim influencer capabilities.
Strategy
Based on the critical insight that relationships still matter to influencers, the strategy for Coyne Connect was built on an approach the agency coined as HumIntelligence. The approach is based on two principles:
- Technology plays a critical role in providing market intelligence to help identify opportunities, and bring clarity to the marketplace and its participants like never before. However, the tools that bring forth the data to determine influence have limitations; and, perhaps even more importantly, it's difficult for influencers to have a relationship with a machine.
- Influencer marketing, just like public relations, is a relationship business between people.People must be at the forefront of any influencer marketing effort – not only to nurture the relationships between brands and influencers; but also to assess and identify who would make an effective partner for brands to engage with.
With those two principles in place, the strategy entailed building an influencer marketing service capability that combined the depth of best-in-class analytics tools with the insight of human analysis and relationship management to produce content and award-winning campaigns for brands.
Implementation
Coyne developed Coyne Connect, a proprietary influencer service that includes influencer identification, custom influencer network builds, and a network of more than 6,000 online influencers who have opted-in to a relationship with the agency in order to connect with brands.
The service is sourced by a full-scale influencer marketing team within Coyne's social media practice, operating as a standalone service, but also easily integrating into the agency's larger social media and PR practices as part of larger strategic communications initiatives.
Coyne's digital division maintains foundational analytics platforms to feed insights to the Coyne Connect team with leads on who may fit the profile of a brand's influencer using a range of objective data benchmarks and customized brand criteria.
The Coyne Connect team employs a strict subjective assessment methodology, delving deep into each influencer's social media footprint to determine reach, relevance and sentiment. This subjective assessment includes a historical review of social media activity to root out any conversations that may indicate advocacy, or perhaps more importantly risk, for the brand.
Once an influencer has been identified, the team establishes a direct relationship, through which the influencer opts into the network, offering relevant information for their profile.The Coyne Connect platform houses more than 200 individual data points for each network member, enabling hyper-targeted campaigns for brands that are also highly relevant for influencers.
With the analytics tools underpinning the service, and the scale of the network and its participants, the Coyne Connect team provides a range of services to internal and external clients, including research (influencer identification and mapping; market research, surveys/polling; pre-market testing); engagement (campaign strategy; blogger, social and ecommerce product review campaigns; content creation; ambassador programs; custom network builds; email/CRM campaigns); analytics (custom reporting; ongoing conversation monitoring; conversation analysis); and administrative support (governance documentation; regulatory counsel).
Over the past year, Coyne Connect has conducted more than 50 campaigns for clients activated across all agency practice areas.Coyne Connect campaigns have been recognized with numerous industry accolades, with campaigns exceeding ROI standards for the industry.
Successful campaigns include:
- Eggland's Best tapped Coyne Connect to identify online food influencers for recipe creation. Images were leveraged through their social and digital platforms, helping to drive consumer engagement.
- Just Born's leveraged Coyne Connect to help create PEEPS® dioramas and promote seasonal activations, which have generated social content, and increased engagement and sharing.
- Perrigo, the makers of store brand infant formula, engaged mom bloggers to submit photos of their "unique babies" to appear in a digital advertising campaign to launch a sweepstakes, generating thousands of entries.
- VTech Toys utilized Coyne Connect to customize key product introductions to moms of children within key age groups.The campaign resulted critical product reviews on blogs and retailer websites that have a proven link to sales.
- Red Robin Restaurant used Coyne Connect to put a laser focus on the online food allergy community with the launch of its new, allergy-sensitive menu.
- The Disney Moms Panel turned to Coyne Connect to expand outreach to multicultural moms for promotion of its yearly Panel search.
- Humana leveraged Coyne Connect for a regional campaign inviting local Chicago influencers to share information about the healthy options available at the Taste of Chicago festival, of which Humana was a key sponsor.
