Key points
Marketing is broken, because it no longer contributes directly and tangibly to sales. This situation pits marketers and sales forces against each other in animosity.
Marketing doesn't work because there are too many marketing messages bombarding prospects, all the messages sound the same, and even if your message is heard, prospects don't believe you. But they do believe influencers.
Influencer Marketing is an approach that identifies and targets influencers in a market. Influencers make up communities called decision-maker ecosystems, which revolve around a decision-maker.
Most firms decide their marketing budget by looking at what they did last year and making minor modifications, or following what other firms are doing. Yet there is precious little measurement on marketing effectiveness carried out by marketers, on which to base investment decisions.
Activities such as advertising, trade shows and sponsorships demonstrate almost no tangible benefit, if they are measured at all. What metrics do exist, in PR and AR in particular, are typically based on quantity rather than quality. Little research is done to determine which analysts and journalists are influential to the target audience.
Almost all marketing is aimed at prospects, virtually none at influencers. Which means that when marketing messages are thrown at prospects they usually bounce off. Influencers, though, are harder to target than prospects because they are difficult to identify.
Connectors, mavens and salesmen are three well-known types of influencers. But they are insufficient to describe the complexity of a business decision and the roles that influencers play within it. In particular, the importance of connectors is often overstated.
We've detected 10 different roles that an influencer can play in a decision process. But remember that not all roles may be played, a single influencer can play many roles, and that roles can overlap.
Influencers gain their influence from other influencers. Influence is transmitted between influencers, and there is no rigid hierarchy. But often there are small cliques of influencers that cluster together, which can create a groundswell of influential opinion.
There are multiple categories of influencer, which makes it extremely difficult to guess who might be influential, and to what extent, in a specific market. The difference in perspectives between sales, marketing, product development and other operational functions increases the danger in assuming the set of influencers.
A further degree of fragmentation has emerged due to Web 2.0 technologies. This means that influence is no longer the preserve of an elite, but can also bubble from the bottom up. The background, location and age of individual influencers is unpredictable, meaning that companies looking to work with them cannot expect to apply a 'one size fits all' approach.
The influencer categories we identify can map onto various influencer roles. But the mapping is indicative, not absolute. There are always exceptions, so understand your influencers well.
Measuring influence is inherently subjective. Our four suggested criteria are stable and proven, and balance any differences that exist in how influencers exert their impact. So we can compare apples and oranges.
Avoid selecting industry leaders and CEOs as influencers. Reaching such people with marketing is extremely difficult. It may also be plainly wrong: most decision-makers are influenced by individuals much closer to their business.
Influencers are individuals, not categories or firms of people. You need to identify not only the influential businesses but also the key staff within them. Again, avoid picking the CEO, as the influencer may be lower down the organization structure.
Influencers don't buy from you, so you can't market to them like you would a prospect. You need to find out what their needs and wants are, to create messages that are relevant and interesting to them.
Prioritize your influencers. There will be some that are more important than others, so you need to focus on those. Understanding more about your influencers, and knowing their perceptions of your firm, is useful input to prioritization.
Approach influencers in their networking groups, or create a group for them to meet. Then move this to a 1-to-1 basis. The objective of influencers talking to you is to get them to talk about you.
Getting influencers to carry your message is a legitimate exercise, as long as it's genuine and credible. There is an important difference between paying for the time of an influencer to speak their views, and paying to have an influencer speak your views. Don't confuse the two.
Influencers love to influence. So give them the tools of influence. Find out what they're saying, build a message that supports them, and build simple collateral around it. With collateral, less is more--don't crowd the influencer's own collateral.
Create different messages for each influencer. What you use in the extra effort required will be regained by higher traction from your influencer community.
Embed influencers' messages in your marketing collateral. It has a greater chance of reaching your market, of it being heard and of it being believed.
Align your influencer-led collateral with sales objections. Do this by eliciting your typical objections, creating counter-arguments, then mapping appropriate influencers to those counter-arguments. Try to use a broad spread of influencers, so as to keep them fresh.
Influencer-led collateral can include pre-existing material, so it can be cheap to gather. This can include articles, books, webcasts and so on. It does not have to have your brand on it. But pay attention to copyright and such like. If in doubt, ask.
You can use influencer marketing to tune existing marketing programs for optimal effect and budgeting utilization. Your ranked list of influencers directs you to the most important journalists, analysts, trade shows, channel partners, forums, magazines and blogs.
By identifying the top influencers you also identify new routes to market. Use influencers to gain access to prospects, and pre-influence the market by involving influencers in product launches.
Use influencers in your lead generation activities. And use influencer-led collateral to counter sales objections and close leads. Your lead gen quality will increase, and sales cycles will decrease.
Word of Mouth (WOM) is a powerful communications mechanism. But it matters whose mouth the words come from. Using influencers to communicate messages means that WOM is carried to the right people and with credibility and authority.
WOM doesn't work well in B2B markets. This is because of the lack of opportunities for business people to converse, and due to the commercial sensitivities that exist between firms.
WOM is prone to urban myth and just plain wrong messages. Influencers can optimize WOM by correcting erroneous messages and misunderstandings.
Social media are enablers of influence: they are not by themselves influential. Today most influential social media users gain their influence through other means, and migrate it to blogs and other media. Influencers blog, more than bloggers influence.
The influence of bloggers is highly dependent on the subject matter. Blogger influence is higher in more technical subjects, and lower (sometimes zero) in more service-based and business-orientated markets.
Links are the best metric we have for measuring popularity of social media sites. But they can be faked or increased artificially. They also over-state influence in the general market, which in most cases extends far beyond the blogosphere.
The social media that are influential on buying decisions today are those that contain user feedback. This means that user feedback will emerge as an important influencer in decision-making.
Anonymity undermines influence. There is no business reason for anonymous blogs or posts and it creates the impression you're hiding something.
Normal rules for influencer marketing apply to social media. You should treat social media as an extension to your normal marketing, so don't try to shoehorn traditional marketing approaches onto blogs and social networking sites. They work just as badly there as in real life.
People trust people like themselves. That's why WOM is powerful. But consumer influencers are hard to identify and to reach. WOM is therefore difficult to control and to direct towards your target audience.
There's only one reason why you'd need to do stealth marketing, and that is if your product is not worth talking about. Otherwise, don't do it.
People always trust third parties, whether based within the consumer supply chain or outside it. These parties are much easier to identify and to reach.
Consumers trust a host of influencers other than people they know. These influencers are untapped and unexploited by marketing, but are much easier to identify and target than consumers.
Within the supply chain, the closer to the buyer an influencer is the greater the direct influence on the decision to buy. So retailers tend to exert more influence than manufacturers.
The more complex a product becomes, or the higher the value ascribed to the product, the greater the opportunity for value-added influencers to make an impact. Conversely, the simpler or commoditized a product is, the less scope there is for value-added influencers.
