Social media has brought about a major shift for brands brands with respect to what constitutes truly effective brand messaging. The importance of peer recommendations versus other forms of marketing has risen to historical levels driving influencer marketing as the preferred way to reach young audiences.

In an increasingly fragmented digital world, peer recommendations are now doubling the effectiveness of campaigns and boast a 37 percent retention rate.  It’s easy to see why: consumers, particularly millennials and gen Z, have banner blindness.

For brands, developing a relationship with influencers is critical to brand growth as digital audiences look for authenticity. Put simply, the equation for the level of influence itself is widely acknowledged as:

“Influence = Audience Reach (# of followers) x Brand Affinity (expertise and credibility) x engagement”. 

Given that there are already 400,000+ influencers and growing with millions of followers, brand marketers must find and develop relationships with the right influencers to generate desired social recommendations and amplifications while maintaining brand integrity. As is the case with most areas of marketing, this is not easy to scale nor is it easy to repeat.

For each campaign, influencers must be discovered, cultivated and managed and the results of these influencer marketing campaigns must be analyzed and optimized constantly.

ION, an influencer marketing agency with Ayzenberg has been drawing upon 25 years of brand management brand expertise to create an optimized matching platform for brands and influencers. In applying hundreds of social graph data attributes and 31 dimensions, ION identifies the parallels between a brand’s story and influencers’ audiences. It’s a brand new social science-based approach to influencer marketing that gives brands a long-term and scalable way to activate social content in one platform, the ICN, of Influencer Channel Network.

Unlike working directly with individual creators or MCN’s, an ICN provides custom and comprehensive subscription channels for brands. Brands achieve via ICNs the right mix of content and activations, with unlimited ROI potential.

Brand marketers can now benefit from a business-grade platform to manage their influencer efforts with ION’s proprietary tech stack and managed service.

This sponsored post is produced by Ayzenberg.