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Find and Activate Influencers With Insightpool

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Marketing Marvels is the place to discover amazing new marketing technology that will improve your social media, content marketing, digital marketing and beyond. Hosted by Jay Baer, President of Convince & Convert, Marketing Marvels features short demos of remarkable software platforms, view all prior shows.

Chris Hackney talks about Insightpool, the influencer marketing tool that will transform how your brand connects with authentic advocates.

Insightpool - Episode artWelcome back to a brand-new episode of Marketing Marvels, where I’m joined today by Insightpool COO Chris Hackney!
Influencer marketing is the next frontier of social activation-meets-marketing. As the online world becomes increasingly saturated with content, it’s becoming harder and harder to earn and sustain consumers’ attention. Your brand’s influencers are a powerful way to seize that attention—but finding those few, perfect influencers is no easy feat. That’s where Insightpool comes in.
Chris is here to walk us through exactly how Insightpool helps marketers locate the perfect influencers online and facilitates first contact. He’ll also demonstrate how Insightpool organizes potential influencers, measures their impact, and suggests new connections. It’s a robust, exciting tool that will transform how your brand connects with authentic brand advocates.
Watch the video for a detailed demo of Insightpool and learn how to start using Insightpool yourself, with one month free!

Jay: Hey, everybody. This is Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, and welcome to Marketing Marvels, the show where we talk about amazing marketing technology that you, the marketer, should be adopting.
I’m super-excited about today’s episode, because we are going to feature a tool that I’ve had the pleasure of using for a little while now, and they’ve made amazing strides. It’s in the influencer marketing space, something that’s really important to everybody. The tool is called Insightpool. Joining us today to talk about Insightpool is their President and Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Chris Hackney live from Atlanta. Chris, thanks for being on Marketing Marvels.
Chris: Hey. I’m super-excited to be here as well. Thanks, Jay.
Jay: You bet. It’s going to be fantastic. I can’t wait to show everybody the tool. A reminder, as always, for viewers of Marketing Marvels, there’s a special offer from Chris and the team at Insightpool. So watch the episode. Towards the end, I’m going to tell you how to get some discounts and free stuff from Insightpool. You’re going to be excited about it. Once you see this demo, you’re going to be clicking that link very, very quickly.
So what does it do? Let me frame it up for you briefly. So look, we all know that content marketing is more competitive than ever. Everybody is making more content. I’m making more content. Chris and his team are making more content. You’re making more content. That’s probably why you’re watching this show, and that’s not going to change. The genie is not going back in the bottle. We’re not all going to like call a truce at some point and say, “Yeah. You know what? Let’s just all create less.” It’s not going to happen.
So consequently, it has become a challenge to get eyeballs and earholes on your content. You’re making it, and it used to be if you made it they would actually download it or watch it. That’s not the case anymore. Now, you actually have to get reach and exposure for your content. So content amplification and content promotion is in many cases the determining factor for content success.
As many people know, one of the very best ways to do that is to use influencers. In many cases, citizen influencers, people who are already customers and activating those people, and get them to talk about your product or service. Get real people to do your marketing for you. In fact, we have a podcast in the Convince & Convert podcast network called Influence Pros, which is all about influencer marketing. We talk about it every week.
Insightpool plays exactly in that space. They do three things. They help you identify the right influencers for your brand. They help you approach and activate those influencers at scale, in a way that doesn’t require a bazillion staff hours. Then, they help you measure the effectiveness of your influencer program and how efficacious you were in reaching out to those influencers, and sort of bringing them on your site and getting them to talk about you. It’s all three legs of the stool, sort of the magic triangle of influencer marketing, and I am super-excited to have Chris show us a little bit more of the platform.
Chris, are you ready to show us, and any prefacing words you want to add that I did not cover?
Chris: No. You did an amazing job there. So no. Everything you said is right. We’re going to show you a demo, kind of how you walk through it. But the one thing I would add is authenticity is key to us. Most marketers are trying to go out and find the right person for the right message that they’re going out with, the content issue you just talked about. But how do you really find authentic influencers? Not paid, not hyper-influencers, but who can be relevant and resonate with the people you’re interested in influencing yourself? So that’s what I’m going to show you, is kind of how the tool does that, focuses in on that search capability and authenticity. We’ll walk through it now.
Jay: Yeah. I love the way you framed that up. I’ve seen Rand Fishkin talk about that a lot in Whiteboard Fridays and other things at Moz, this whole premise of don’t try and influence your customers. Influence the people who influence your customers. That’s what Insightpool is really great at. Right? This is not the tool that you’re going to use, and there are tools out there that do this and they’re great. This just isn’t that tool. If you’re like, “Hey, what we need to do is find a way to get Kourtney Kardashian to tweet about our teeth-whitening thing,” that’s not what Insightpool does.
There are companies out there, maybe we’ll have one on Marketing Marvels at some point, who do that and there is definitely a place for that in the market. That’s not what this is, though. This is where you find people who are real people that you can then approach who will then influence your customers, and perhaps in many cases they already are your customers.
Chris: Well, exactly. I love the way you put that, because I would equate it to the same way when we talk about, with our clients, viral marketing. You can’t plan viral. But if you . . .
Jay: Yeah. There’s no such thing as viral marketing. There’s no such thing. Viral marketing doesn’t exist. There’s marketing that goes viral. But there isn’t such thing as viral marketing. It is never inherent. It is an outcome, not a component.
Chris: Yeah. We even say, I would even say, while there’s marketing that goes viral more often than not we’re seeing conversations that go viral, that can turn into marketing that’s viral.
Jay: Yeah. That’s true.
Chris: So when you look at someone like Chewbacca Mom, no one can predict Chewbacca Mom. I can’t give you an algorithm that’s going to predict her. But the moment it happens is the moment you as a marketer want to pick up on it and understand this influential conversation. How can you fit into that, and can you? You might not be able to. But if there’s relevance to you, you might want to jump on that.
Jay: Yeah. How can you do it in a way that’s not yucky? That’s the problem. That’s the bigger issue is that brands will be like, “Well, sure. Then, we’ll just give away Chewbacca masks.” It’s like, “Well, yeah. But that’s so lame.” They’re just like, “That’s a terrible idea.” Right?
Chris: That’s just lazy marketing.
Jay: Yeah. If you guys can invent a tool that saves marketers from their base impulses to do the wrong thing, that’s a billion-dollar company right there. That’s the next one you’ve got to work on, is the tool that saves marketers from themselves.
Chris: We’ll make sure to add a button, the “Do You Really Want to Do This?” button.
Jay: I love that. Yeah. I love that. Like, “You know what? Our algorithm has determined that this may be actually a bad idea. So we’re just going to make you double-confirm.” I love that. I want to invest in that company.
Chris: All right, perfect. That’s our next . . .
Jay: It’s like that . . . What’s the thing called that Google has, at night? Is it Google Goggles, where you have to do the math problem before you send people emails or whatever, because you’re probably drunk? We need that for marketers. Like, “Let’s just make sure that this is going to work.” I love it.
 
Chris: Okay. So what I’m going to walk you through, and feel free to jump in with questions, as you go. I’m sure it’s the same questions your audience has. But what I’m going to walk you through is the basic flow in our platform that most of our users go through. So what you’re looking at now is the Insightpool tool.
Where most of our clients start is a very simple premise. They really want to understand the audience around a topic. So we built the tool to kind of look at different data sources, social data sources is where we focus, to get an understanding of a group or audience so that we can then lead that into a discussion around, “How do we find influencers who appeal to the motivations and purchase decision or consideration decisions that go into a certain business line or channel?”
In this case, what I’m showing you is within our platform Facebook data is one of our main sources. It basically gives us all . . . We’ve got relationships with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others, where we get direct access to public and private information. In cases where it’s private, it’s anonymized by the data. So Facebook doesn’t tell us exactly who in all cases. But they’ll tell us as an audience what’s happening.
In this case, the example is a client who might be a yoga studio. Down Dog Yoga is the name of the title. The topic they would search for is they want to understand users who are interested in yoga, maybe to build their brand with, to drive traffic or retail sales, however they might want to look. We haven’t gotten to that stage of it yet. But they really want to understand the yoga conversation and where they might fit in.
So in this case, we as a company set up the filter of yoga, the Boolean search terminology for a client. So we have all that expertise. Once that’s set up, this interface basically tells you everything you want about the topic in real time. So this is actually real-time data coming out of Facebook of all the conversations in Facebook around that subject. For those who are more experienced in the marketing tools area, this will look very much like a standard listening tool that you might use.
Jay: Absolutely. Yep.
Chris: So you’ll have sentiment analysis here. You’ll see it by day. Obviously, yoga, it’s mainly a positive conversation, denoted by the green. You’ll see topics associated with that topic, meditation, Namaste, love, so there’s a love of this topic, which leads into emotional resonance. What is the emotional resonance of this topic, positive and negative, and the breakout? This becomes more important as we get to brands and the emotional resonance around those brands. Then, I’m going to skip this real quick, we also have standard demo information, which a lot of our early clients like to look at and get a sense of.
Of course, in a yoga conversation here, female audience is the preponderance, and then you can start to see age breakdowns, etc. What we really love is you can, A, manipulate this any way you want. If I want to look at just people who have positive conversations, I can. By geography, I can. But what I really, really love within that, what people are doing in influencer marketing, you need to understand, is each network has their own rules. In Facebook’s case, they love to kind of have you discover things, but they’re going to move you straight to a paid conversation. Where a lot of our clients want to do organic conversations first, so they want to do one-to-one marketing.
What we started to do in our network, in our platform, is connect those networks. So you could truly learn in one network and apply it into another, and then optimize in a third. So in this case, I’ve shown you Facebook data as a way to understand an audience around yoga. In here, a case like hashtags, whatever the hashtags used by people in this conversation, #yoga, #fitness. This is an interesting one, #yogaeverydamnday. It just kind of has a little power to it. It’s a little different. On the right-hand side here, we’ve got a feed into Twitter. Even though this is Facebook data, we have now linked it to the Twitter database to see every conversation happening in real time in Twitter.
So I can go to one-to-one, when Facebook would anonymize it and kind of hold that back. That’s really cool. This is real time, so I can’t promise everything is appropriate. But you get what you get. Okay? So what we do is, what we say with clients, is a lot of our clients love to learn, but with a lot of tools they have a problem, because you can’t take that to an action path right away. So if I used a typical listening tool, this is where that pathway would stop, like, “Hey, here’s everything about yoga.” What we do is we build in these connections based on kind of the history we have with each of these networks, and we turn them into action paths.
So in this case, we have a capability called “Send to Search”. What “Send to Search” does is take everyone who, in this case, for this example, I’ll use everyone in Twitter having this same hashtag conversation, and I find everyone in that environment who’s having it.
Jay: Is that over a particular date range, Chris?
Chris: You can do it a couple ways. Right now, the one I’m going to show you is past 32 days.
Jay: Okay.
Chris: We can go back in an archive basis. For more complicated conversations, we do. But a lot of our conversations, our clients are fine with kind of the last month’s view. So right now, I am in our Discover Center. This is where you find influencers. It’s like kind of a Google environment for finding influencers. In this case, as we mentioned up front, conversations and other characteristics of people determine what’s an influential experience. In this case, we use the conversation “Yoga Every Damn Day”. I am looking at that same view of everyone in real time using that phrase in Twitter.
I can do a variety of things that are really cool with that. Right now, I’m looking at it chronologically. I can look at that by the reach that person has, the relevance to a conversation if I put in other filters around yoga or something else. Or I can do it by rank, and rank is simply a measure of . . . We have a proprietary algorithm on the backend based off of the tens of thousands of campaigns we’ve run with clients that can predict the propensity of a person or an influencer to engage with a campaign from a brand. Based on that proprietary data, we feed that into a ranking algorithm, and we can show you only the people who have a high propensity to do so.
Jay: That relevance option is really interesting, especially when you start thinking about kind of the Venn diagram of somebody who uses the hashtag #yogaeverydamnday, but is also part of a different tribe. So if you’re trying to reach yoga moms, for example, you could cross-section this audience by moms, or somebody who identifies as a mom or uses the content “mom”. Yes?
Chris: Yes, absolutely. What we can do is we can look at it from a sorting perspective. But where that real relevance comes from is on this left side with all the filters we have. So we’ve listed everyone using this kind of conversation. But we can figure out, “Do they follow a certain person? Do they cross-reference with a certain profile topic or clout interest?” As we go down the list at a certain location? Or they may . . .
Jay: If you only wanted people in the US, for example, you could do it that way.
Chris: I could absolutely do it that way. So most brands have come to us with a variety of filters that are the easy cuts they want to do to get down to a limited audience. In this case, if I really want to get special and go, “All right. Let’s look for people who just follow you, for instance,” having this conversation around yoga, or at least using this hashtag around yoga . . .
Jay: I don’t know, man. I am super-inflexible. This could be a small list. I don’t know. Yeah. Five, exactly. That’s hilarious. Of the 213,000 who follow me, 5 have used the hashtag #yogaeverydamnday. I’m surprised it’s that many.
Chris: Exactly. But you can start to understand . . .
Jay: That’s awesome.
Chris: . . . “Is this the audience that’s right for me or not?” I’m going to take you out of it since you’re super-inflexible. But I can also look at those audiences, like we started with the data set of Facebook, which for a lot of brands is really helpful. But if I want to dive into audience insights within Twitter, I just want to look at kind of all the insights within Twitter and just start quick and easy there, we can do the same thing. I can take everyone having this conversation about “Yoga Every Damn Day,” and I can do an aggregate view. So I can see who they follow. I go down the list, “yoga journal.” All right. That’s an interesting, what I call “media influencer” in this space. We’d want to look into that.
Jay: Yeah. If you’re thinking about, “Wait a minute. We should do a native advertising campaign,” that might be an interesting option.
Chris: Exactly. So you can kind of go down the list and see who you want to look at. I can look at the topics, I can look at the clout topics going on, and I can look on kind of who’s dominating this conversation from a gender or location perspective. So the idea is it’s extremely flexible, just like a Google is for you, in finding influencers. Not finding topics or websites you go to, but who are the people having the conversation, or by any filter you want are relevant to that conversation with certain reach parameters or other parameters that are important to your brand, and like you saw it in this demo, do it instantaneously?
That’s one of the biggest things that holds back influencer marketing for a lot of the brands we work with, is they know they need to be there. But it seems overwhelmingly daunting to them, so they don’t do it in the first place. Or they try and just hand it off to an agency and hope they do something there. But because the data sets are opening up . . . by the way, even a network I haven’t mentioned, we’re going to be building out Pinterest and YouTube coming up. But a lot of clients ask about even Snapchat.
Jay: Sure.
Chris: That’s really a . . . network to activate. You see NBC doing that. A massive campaign with them is Olympics going on right now. But you don’t hear me speaking about Snapchat, because their API isn’t opened up yet for it.
Jay: Yeah. Can’t do it.
Chris: But I can guarantee you in 6 or 12 months it will. So the reason this is all so embryonic and advancing so quickly is because the data sets are opening up for us in real time. The Facebook data I showed you, nine months wasn’t opened up. Now it is, and this is what we built off of it. So you’re going to see this industry and the capabilities around it mature really quickly as the data becomes available and we learn what works and what doesn’t through it. Make sense?
Jay: Absolutely. Yep. So right now, you can find people in Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Chris: Right.
Jay: YouTube and Pinterest in the next suite that you’re working on, and then you can reach out to those people primarily in Twitter.
Chris: Correct. Well, through either. Primarily, organically through Twitter. Twitter allows the most organic or deepest organic kind of outreach. We can push paid advertising through any of those networks. Facebook loves . . .
Jay: How would you do that? Just sort of take this group of . . . What is there, 714 here? Take this group and export it as a custom audience, or something like that?
Chris: Yeah. So I’ll show you. What would happen typically is in our platform, I can auto-select the people from this group that I want to go after. You create a segment. So in this case, “Jay Baer,” let me get that right, “yoga test.” So I’ve got a group of people who make sense for this yoga studio. We go to what’s called our activation center right here in the main nav. What you’ll start to do is you’ll just start campaigns. What those campaigns start with is, let’s say, “Jay Baer yoga first contact.” I go in there. You’ll see the group of people we already saved right here. I’ll click on that.
Very simple. I go to a next step. I pick the audience it’s going to go to. Oh, let me get that. The network is where that starts to come in. so when you look in at a certain network . . . Oh, I’ll just resave it again. There. So you’ll see in here a variety of options, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In this case, I’m really pushing this as a Twitter demo. If we were doing this as a setup through Facebook, Facebook basically I’d be able to click and then push it as a paid campaign over there.
Jay: Sure.
Chris: Through a data export. Exactly. You’d link your Facebook Ads account to this system, and it would push all that directly into there. Same with Instagram. So basically that’s how it works. I get to pick the network. I get to pick organic or paid through it. The organic and paid is really important for us, because we have this concept called Mad Tech that we really believe in as a company. The idea that if marketing is going to be done at an exponentially better level, you have to marry organic and paid environments together better. For us, Mad Tech is the alliteration of basically marketing automation and advertising technology together, and bringing that together. That’s what we’re trying to do through our system.
It’s early stages. It’s about exports into another system. But you’re going to see us advancing that quickly, and we think that’s a direction the industry really should be going. So you can hyper-target in certain ways with influencers, get scale through their own reverberation and kind of networks, but also get scale through paid campaigns once you know it’s working in organic campaigns. Make sense?
Jay: Absolutely. In this case, you would use Twitter organically. You wouldn’t necessarily export it to a paid Twitter audience. You would actually reach out to that group of influencers organically. What’s really amazing about this part is that this works just like a marketing automation system, like HubSpot or Infusionsoft, or Pardot, or Eloqua, or anything else. But it does it inside Twitter.
Chris: Exactly. So in this case, if we stay in organic, it’s a much easier process. We don’t have to export. I can go to a next step, which kind of tells me the types of things . . . Like in this case, what I can do in Twitter, I’ll do an @mention to them, which is just a simple outreach effort. I’ll create some content, past content. If I want to as a marketer do A/B testing, I can create multiple types of content. I can add visuals. I can add video. I can add links, so if I want to see conversion.
The point of this too is there is attention in the space of influencer marketing. How do I do things that scale, but stay authentic? There are tradeoffs. So copy variation is a tradeoff to keep the appearance of authenticity there while you’re trying to go out to a bigger audience, in case someone just checks your page. Timing is the other one. If I look . . . Let me just save that real quick. If I go out all at once with a blast, it’s obviously going to be an anomaly of my own field. So what I need to do is schedule that over time. The system lets you do that over a number of days so you don’t have to sit there and monitor it.
Jay: So if you’re going to try and reach out to 500 people and say, “Hey, you should look at my free yoga eBook,” you don’t want to send that 500 tweets in a row. You want to throttle that so it’s a couple a day for a while, or something like that.
Chris: Yeah, exactly. Like 20 a day, go out for two weeks so you can start to kind of understand that. Then, as responses come in, there’s a response management system. But in general, you schedule that on your calendar and you let it run. So in this case, the campaign is loading, I’ve now got a . . . Usually, clients like a final check on kind of what’s going out. So you see copy variation going out.
If you wanted to do personalization, you could do personalization too. We can automate the insertion of a first name, or some other variable. All of that’s easily automated too and approved, and you’re ready to go.
So what’s important for our clients is they really . . . One of the misperceptions of influencer marketing nowadays is that if you want to do it, especially with grassroots or citizen influencers, something at scale, it’s this insurmountable hurdle that they don’t have time for right now. What we try and teach them through the technology is technology should free you up to get past that and say, “No, we can do it. What we just went through takes 5, 10 minutes. Then, as you see things that interest you, it lets you do more and more. We’ll respond in real time, which is so important to influencer or social marketing. Then, you can see a trending conversation and jump on that, determine if that conversation is relevant to your brand, and if it is, start to put something together that is scalable.
Jay: Yeah. I love it.
Chris: Okay. So the last thing we have, and you see this in the master nav, is our Insights area. One of the biggest problems we have and most of our clients have is, the junior to midlevel people absolutely get it. They know influencer marketing is something they have to do. They’re excited about it. They’re the ones who have grown up in social. They might have started as a community manager, and they understand the need for it intrinsically. But you have to show the numbers, and that’s why we built out a robust Insights section.
So what typically happens is they go, “Hey, I love what we’ve been doing. I need to expand my budget. I’ve got to go to my management. I have to prove the value of it in a way my management understands.” That’s where analytics centers come in, where we can start to look at reach, engagement, conversion is so important, especially for B2Bs, and start to prove that case within the environment in a real-time kind of data area.
Jay: How would you measure conversion in that case, Chris? Would you actually put sort of a UTM tracking code into a link that you put into the tweet, and then measure downstream webinar signups or something?
Chris: Yeah. There’s two ways to do that, really. You actually just mentioned the more complicated one, so kudos for being ahead of the class. Typically, the more dumbed down version of it is just a simple URL and tracking of that to . . . If you used the example the yoga webinar, the webinar link coming over, tracking that through your Google Analytics, and then looking at signups or registrations there. The more advanced though is that kind of offer tracker.
We’ve got a couple clients, one who is a big food and beverage company, who did exactly that. They had a relationship with Target and what they want to do is offer a unique coupon through social to influencers around a Target offer only exclusively available there, and they did exactly that. They could see in-store traffic based on a socially-seeded campaign through influencers directly show a 12% increase in Target traffic during the time period that was going on and the two weeks following.
Jay: Nice.
Chris: So if you’re a marketer like that, that’s where that’s real results you can take back and go, “No. This isn’t just something fun we’re doing.” Influencers aren’t just kind of this fluffy audience that we want to go after. It’s real people. We can see that they have strong networks, and those networks combined are really powerful. By the way, if you’re looking at it through organic, it’s pretty much free. So while you can scale it paid and still paid media and social is at bargain prices for most categories, even as you’re looking at organic, it’s low-hanging fruit to do something free with high upside if you’re doing it right.
Jay: Absolutely. You’ve just got to pay for the tool.
Chris: Yes.
Jay: Speaking of which, what do you charge for this tool?
Chris: So it’s a monthly subscription model, SaaS model for any of your audience who’s familiar with that. But like all technology tools, it’s a monthly fee. It goes anywhere from roughly $2,000 a month to $6,000 a month, depending on the self-service model and the services model, but obviously workable with new clients coming in. Like you said, we have the offer coming up.
Offers like that and others, we gear them towards a simple premise. We have seen consistently that clients who come in and use this are thrilled with it. So we are happy to kind of get introductory offers out there and get people in it, because we know the product proves itself.
Jay: Does the price change if you want Twitter plus Facebook, plus Instagram? Or do you always get Twitter plus Facebook, plus Instagram? Or are those different packages? Then, we have in this demo, been talking about the overall topical category of yoga. Does the price change if you have multiple categories?
Chris: So it does not change based on number of users or number of categories.
Jay: Okay.
Chris: Absolutely flat. Part of it is we want to encourage high usage. Right?
Jay: Yeah. You want people to come and experiment, and look around. Yeah.
Chris: And do it. So activity level doesn’t dictate. What dictates is number of presences or handles managed.
Jay: Okay.
Chris: So if you’ve got a Twitter handle and an Instagram handle, it will be a different price, and the idea . . . Or if we work with different groups who manage different groups who manage different handles. So we work with a lot of companies, where we work with both their brand teams and their PR teams. Those are different. But we are offering right now . . . Well, it’s not a stated offer with Marketing Marvels. But in general, because we’re adding so many networks so quickly right now, we’re offering grandfathering in for some of those that we’re introducing like Pinterest, YouTube . . .
Jay: That’s great. Well, I love the fact that it’s not a charge per topic. It’s one of the problems I have with some of the social listening tools, where its price is a disincentive to listen more broadly, which seems to be counterintuitive to what most customers actually need.
Chris: Absolutely. So on here, the last thing I’d say real quick is while we have all this information, what we’re really proud of is the ability to use the data in constructive ways once you’ve learned from a campaign, and find scalable audiences tied to this. So in this case of yoga, we’ve got a lot of results. At the end of this, we kind of show you who’s engaged with this and who hasn’t, which gives you kind of an idea of who has the most interest. I used to be a brand manager myself, and I would say with marketing it’s a study in consistent failure with a few wins. I’ll be thrilled that I got a 5% response rate on something, but I failed 95% of the time still.
Jay: Sure.
Chris: So what we’ve started to tackle is, with that historical question and issue with marketers, how do we make them better? The way we’re making them better right now through the use of data is what we call “micro-cluster analysis”. What micro-cluster analysis is, is a very simple concept. I want to go in and if I run a campaign with you and with these influencers, I want to study those who engaged with you and really dissect through all their social data what makes them unique from those who didn’t engage with you.
So I want to look at both of those and say, “What’s different about the people who did something back with the brand from those who didn’t?” If I do that, I’m going to click a view here, what I can start to see is associations within that group that as a marketer I never would’ve thought of necessarily. What’s important about those associations is when a marketer goes after a target, a target is really a hypothesis. It’s a hypothesis that, “This is someone with a passion or interest that aligns with my brand, and I’m going to focus on that subject.”
It doesn’t mean that’s really the best thing to focus on. So through micro-cluster analysis, what it does is it sifts through everything else about those people and it tells you back, “Here’s what you should be focused on, in addition to where you were.” So if you start to discover those things, what’s really important about it is you can take hyper-targeting, and then you can smear these audiences and scale them back up against those variables. So when we work . . .
Jay: Sort of a birds of a feather type of an approach.
Chris: Exactly. That’s been the conundrum of big, major brands like, “I love influencer marketing. I like what you’re doing. I understand the scale of influencers and their networks.” But if I only end up with five influencers and their networks, if I’m a giant brand, maybe that’s not big enough for me.
Jay: It doesn’t matter, it’s irrelevant.
Chris: Exactly. So how do we get back to a mirrored audience that can be more relevant? That’s where the grassroots and others come in and mirror the attributes that make them all unique. That’s what we’re doing here through this kind of search. If I do it, by the way, if I just Generate New Search, to come full circle, I come back to right where I started, a discovery process for new individuals who . . .
Jay: Yep. Who meet those conditions.
Chris: Yep, exactly.
Jay: On these individual influencers that are surfaced here, Catie, for example, there in the middle, some of these have yellow bars and those are the ones who are likely to interact with you more based on your analysis. But if you click on her name, it will pull up sort of her overall kind of social media profile. Is that right?
Chris: Yeah. Well, we’re more focused on groups of individuals and affinities. We obviously recognize that a lot of our clients want to go in and curate segments. In this case, we can start to do that. We can start to look at individuals through an individual view here. If I like someone in an individual view, I can click this button. I can add them to a segment. So if my segment is I want to look at yoga, people who love yoga and marketing, or Jay Baer, if I find someone, I add them to a segment. I continue to curate that segment and build it into something that has multiple touchpoints, and that’s exactly what that is.
Jay: That’s great. I love it.
Chris: That’s it.
Jay: Yeah, and super-cool. It is really, really easy to use. I love the fact that it really does meet all three of those conditions. Find influencers, activate influencers, measure the efficacy of the campaign, those are the three things that everybody needs and it does it all really seamlessly. I mean, you guys make it look deceptively simple. The data challenges behind the scenes to pull all this together and make it run really fast is significant. So kudos to the engineering team, because I know there’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes that they’re making look very, very simple.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a great engineering and data science team in one of the other rooms here that everyday I’m amazed by what we do with what we have.
Jay: We told everybody that we were going to give you a special offer, if you want to access the power that is Insightpool, find influencers, activate, and measure them. So here’s what you do, ladies and gentlemen, Marketing Marvels fans, go to www.insightpool.com/marketing-marvels. That’s www.insightpool.com/marketing-marvels. We’ll put the link below as well.
With a six-month agreement with Insightpool, and you’re going to use it a lot in those six months, I can guarantee you that, you’re going to get a seventh month free, which is not insignificant. As Chris said, it’s $2,000 to $6,000 a month, which is a small price to pay for this kind of horsepower. You get six months, you get the seventh month free. That’s a free $2,000 to $6,000. I’m not a math major, but I’m almost positive that’s the value of the offer. I think that is really terrific. Chris, thanks very much.
Chris: Oh, appreciate it. We’re glad to offer it. Like I said, I think, you come in, you’re going to see the value, and that’s why we’re excited to offer this.
Jay: So before we let you go, tell me about your background. I know you’ve been in other marketing technology organizations in the past. Tell us about that a little bit. You’re a smart guy. You could work for lots of different companies. Why are you at Insightpool?
Chris: Oh, I know. It’s a good question, why Insightpool. So I do have a . . . I feel like I have a good background for this. I never thought I’d end up here. But it’s been a natural progression. I started my career on the brand side after grad school at Coca-Cola. So that’s how I ended up in Atlanta. I was a brand manager for the Coke brands. I worked on [inaudible 00:32:56] Coke launch, our Coke Zero launches, a lot of our activation including our Winter Olympics.
I loved that job. But I saw how the power of media was changing and the power of data was influencing that. I had the opportunity to go work at a couple of places along the way. I ended up, about five years ago, at a place called Vitrue, which was one of the first social publishing platforms.
Jay: Pioneers, I remember.
Chris: Yes. So I got to join Reggie Bradford and that team as an executive there. We had an amazing run.
The reason I ended up here is I saw a lot of market dynamics here that I saw way back then, that’s just about five years ago now. It was interesting. We take for granted the power of social networks today. But I remember going to F8, seeing Zuckerberg talk about the social graph for the first time and everyone was like, “What is that?” We had to spend a lot of time, even for social publishing at the time, translating that for our clients.
Jay: Sure.
Chris: We had some of the biggest clients in the world, McDonald’s, Proctor & Gamble brands for the most part, a heavy-hitter list, and the conversation every time came down to this. “I know Facebook is there. I know it’s big. I know my customers are there. I don’t know how that’s ever going to move the needle on my business. Tell me how it’s going to happen and how I can make that happen.” So we had to explain social to these brands.
That’s five years ago. I saw the same thing with listening tools. “I know people are complaining about my brand. I know I need to do customer service. I know I need to hear these data points. Tell me how I could actually synthesize that and bring that together,” and listening tools sprung up.
I ended up at Insightpool, because I fundamentally believe that the next frontier of social activation and marketing kind of metamorphosis is influencer marketing. The idea that there are all these people out there that could be powerfully activated, whether they love you or hate you, they should be engaged, learned from, synthesized, activated, and hopefully optimize what you do. But influencer marketing will become a fundamental part of what you do. Social is going to be at the centerpiece of it, because that’s where the data points are.
We have a true data revolution happening across all aspects of both SaaS and marketing, and I believe that the number one use case is going to be the use of data to understand your consumer like you’ve never done. And get to that Holy Grail of one-to-one marketing that every marketer wants to get to, with one-to-one accountability on the backend of knowing who’s doing what and whether you should invest back in them or let them go. So I ended up at Insightpool because, seeing that revolution coming, I wanted to be a part of it, I wanted to lead it, and I think we’re doing an amazing job and I look forward to seeing where we go from here.
Jay: Oh, fantastic. I think you’re spot on in terms of riding on top of that large trend. Tell me, before we let you go, Chris, what’s a marketing marvel to you? There’s lots of marketing technology out there, as we know. There’s thousands and thousands, and thousands of marketing tools. What do you think is cool? What do you think would be a tool worthy of this fine program?
Chris: Well, it stems from the last answer I gave you. It’s not sexy, but I love data. I think we are living in a special age, where whoever as a business can harness data and turn that into something that moves their business properly is going to win in the market, whoever it is. I love companies who are doing that, like we’re doing it with influencer marketing. So two I love are, I love Ditto on the social listening space. Most of the social networks rising up like Snapchat and Instagram that we talked about are largely visual-oriented, leading into video.
For those of us in technology, that presents a myriad of problems to solve and they’re doing a great job of it. I love how they’re taking that data and synthesizing it. I also love Banjo. I think they’re doing a great job as kind of a social anomaly tool. So figuring out what the baselines of social activity are, and when changes are seen like a pebble being thrown into a pond with ripples, reporting on that in real time to news agencies and others. It’s interesting in their data, like the minute something happens, a shooting or a fire, or something like that, people report it on Facebook and social before they call the police.
Jay: Of course.
Chris: They know about it. If you can harness that data to help first responders and everyone else, that’s a powerful civic benefit that can be garnered, that can be explored by other companies. That’s what I get excited about, is companies who are tackling that type of stuff.
Jay: Well said. We’ve got to recruit those folks to be on the show. Maybe we’ll get them on future episodes of the big Marketing Marvels.
A reminder again of the special offering. Get six months of Insightpool, get the seventh month free. Go to www.insightpool.com/marketing-marvels, www.insightpool.com/marketing-marvels. Chris, thank you very, very much for being on the program. Congratulations to you and the whole Insightpool team for the fantastic things that you are bringing to the market for revolutionizing influencer marketing at scale. Super-easy to use.
As mentioned, my team and I use it at Convince & Convert, big fans. You’re going to love it to. Go to the URL that we mentioned and dig in. You are going to love it.
Thanks as always for watching Marketing Marvels. As you probably know, we have new episodes every couple of weeks or so. To find them, go to our YouTube channel and subscribe. The best way to do that, the easiest way to remember it, go to bit.ly/marketingmarvels. That’s bitly/marketingmarvels. Marketing Marvels is a production of Convince & Convert Media.
We of course have a very, very large digital magazine at convinceandconvert.com. We do six podcasts a week, including Influence Pros, which I mentioned earlier which is a podcast every week all about influencer marketing and a bunch of other shows for folks like you, who are going to love it. Check that out. Go to convinceandconvert.com/podcasts for the whole collection.
Until next time, I am Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. He has been and is Chris Hackney from Insightpool. This has been Marketing Marvels. Thanks, everybody.

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