Activating Influencers with Highly Engaging Interactive Content

By David Henry, EVP Client Solutions, NextWorks

Engaging influencers is a key objective for many public relations professionals today. Analytics are providing brands with in-depth information on who is influencing conversations related to their products and services. But getting those key influencers to talk about your brand message or share your content remains a challenge. From my experience, most brands are being left with a list of influencers, but the list alone doesn’t impact business. It doesn’t increase in sales.Initially, earned outreach worked fairly well, but as influencers and their blogs became more powerful, it’s become difficult to rely on earned outreach alone. In order to see real business results and guarantee that influencers share your message, paid placement across blogger networks has become a necessary strategy.One innovative approach that’s being readily adopted by brands and PR agencies is using a Content Capsule to embed, measure and update highly visual and interactive experiences on influencer blogs. This strategy places brand content in contextually relevant blogs that also lend credibility to the story through the influencers’ implied endorsement.NextWorks, developers of the Content Capsule platform, helps clients create and embed Content Capsules in stories written by bloggers. This case study video about a program for Allianz Global Assistance explains how it’s done.In the Allianz case, the Content Capsule served as the campaign website on a custom URL. The company also embedded the Content Capsule on its Facebook page. The Content Capsule was then embedded in more than 40 different blog posts. Each post featured the Content Capsule embedded in editorial the bloggers’ wrote based on information provided by NextWorks. As you can see in this example blog post, the Content Capsule is embedded in copy written by the influencer. Also note how the Content Capsule has responded to the size allotted in the post. This is the same Content Capsule as in the campaign website. This makes the Content Capsule a tool that can check off a lot of the necessary boxes across channels and devices when activating a campaign.

[author]About the Author: David Henry has been a leader in the public relations and marketing services business for 20 years. At NextWorks, he works with a variety of clients to find solutions to their content production and syndication needs. [/author]