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.

‍