QOTD: Do People Follow You For [Vertical] Advice?
Our latest Question Of The Day is an accelerator program for your
brand’s influencer marketing endeavors — discovering up & coming social
media profiles, and nurturing your brand advocates to grow into
influencers themselves.
Question Architecture
Beyond just plugging your vertical into this question (we’ll use fitness
in the example here), there’s a bit of an art to the messaging. For
instance, asking the question in this yes/no fashion makes it easy to
answer while still getting to the point. It’s also a good idea to
consider what kind of influencers you want to learn about here, as a
fitness brand will likely gather different responses depending on
whether they ask about “fitness advice” vs “health advice”.
A follow-up question helps to
operationalize these insights, and the key here is that each response
deserves a different type of follow-up. For example, if the response is
“No, I follow others for fitness advice”, you might aim for a
clarification like this:
We don’t have a hard & fast recommendation on audience targeting for
this question, as the right timing may depend on your vertical, or even
the shopper’s purchase behavior. For instance, a fitness brand might
have a product line geared toward prosumers — that’s certainly a
consumer profile you’d want to append this QOTD’s response to.
Use Cases: Personalization, Influencer Marketing
Each of the three responses in this template will lead you down a
different path that simply can’t be revealed without talking to your
customers. Just another reminder about the power of zero party
data .
No, I follow others for fitness advice
This group offers a few interesting opportunities. As stated above, a
follow-up asking which influencers they follow will generate a massive
list of potential social media collaborators, many of whom you may have
never considered.
Alternatively (and specifically if you’re asking this question to New
Customers ), you might want to ask a demographic follow-up question so
you can pinpoint which of your current influencer collabs might be worth
expanding into lifecycle marketing campaigns. That is to say: if a new
customer of yours is looking for relevant advice, what better way to
boost retention & LTV than by pointing them to influencers whose content
you’re sponsoring?
Mostly just my friends & family
An interesting response, right? What might you do with this? Depending
on the follow-up question, you’ll get different utility out of this data
— the world’s your oyster. One approach we’d recommend for the example
fitness brand here is that you just learned this customer has some
hyperlocal influence… perhaps they’re a social media micro-influencer in
the making. A follow-up like, “would you be interested in reviewing our
products on social media?” or “do you want to join our referral
program?” gets you affiliated with these folks on the ground floor, and
perhaps even at bottom dollar.
Yes, I have an audience of followers
There’s plenty to be done in following up this response as well. The
obvious move is to ask them for their social media handle, or ask how
many followers they have so you can bucket these responses into
quintiles and communicate differently with each group. Beyond that, a
follow-up question like “what would you charge for a collab with us?” is
pretty much the fastest possible path toward finding affordable
influencers who are already advocating for you.
This article is part of our Question Of The Day (QOTD) series, where
Fairing teams up with the industry’s smartest qualitative marketers to
deliver expert perspectives on zero-party data. Find more of these best
practice questions in our Question
Bank.