Are you marketing to the wrong people?
November 3, 2009 Attending an Institute of Direct Marketing event recently I was reminded of the basic marketing principle that seems to have fallen off many businesses radars - the crucial importance of marketing to influencers.
Influencer marketing is about identifying the people who shape your customers views by validating and qualifying your marketing messages. Engaging with these influencers is now more important than ever. In this information age, our ability to control the messages about our brands and set the agenda is being constantly eroded. Consumer trust in ‘official’ sources of information such as brand owners and the press is on the decline while trust in peer reviews is on the increase.
The significance of this can be easily demonstrated by looking at sites such as www.currys.co.uk which are one of several sites to incorporate user reviews of products into their site. Why are they doing this? Because they know that 81% of people use consumer reviews* in their purchase decisions and they don’t want them leaving their site to find them.
Whilst online retail is an easy example, the power of influencers is just as important offline and by no means limited to the general public. In fact your influencers are likely to be from a range of sectors and use a range of media to publish their opinions. Likewise, their followers will share those opinions on and offline. Social media and user generated content will play a significant role in communicating opinions, but concentrating on these areas alone will give you a skewed or incomplete picture.
How do you harness the power of influencer marketing?
The first step in influencer marketing is identifying who the key influencers are for your brands. Identifying the top 10 or so influencers will allow you to concentrate your efforts and budgets on engaging with those who will make a real difference. As always, a scatter gun approach sending generic messages to anyone who might be important is unlikely to deliver results.
Influencers love to influence but won’t want to simply parrot your marketing messages. So having identified a manageable group of key influencers you need to talk to them about what they are interested in and give them the tools and information to help them do what they do best – influence!
But don’t make the mistake that this process is about ‘getting influencers on message’. This is about engagement which means listening more than talking. Engaging influencers can also present you with a great opportunity to discover new ways to improve your products and services.
Of course, nothing stays the same. One of the speakers at the IDM event, Duncan Brown, Managing Director of Influencer50 Ltd, commented that typically they see a 20% churn in influencers a year, and at times of economic upheaval such as we are experiencing now, this can be much higher.
Find out more about influencer marketing
If you would like to know more about how you can benefit from influencer marketing, or if the explosion of new online marketing channels has left you feeling uncertain about their role in the marketing mix - or even their value – then talk to Gillian Angel at Clarity In Marketing on 020 7520 9404. You can see me interviewed at the IDM Influencer Marketing event video below.
*Source: Nielsen Online via BizReport, February 2009