Influencer Marketing Primer 2 - Who are your influencers?

Influencer Marketing is the practice of marketing to, through and with influencers. This definition begs an immediate question – who are my influencers?

Influencers are people whose actions or opinions have an effect on someone else. In the context of B2B marketing (the focus of this blog) we are specifically interested in those individuals that impact on the buying decisions of firms.

Influencers include a variety of types. Journalists and analysts are probably the better known categories. But influencer types also include systems integrators, consultants, academics, authors, management gurus, purchasing co-operatives, regulators, government executives, standards setters, resellers, lobbyists, environmental activities and bloggers. And probably other types we haven’t mentioned.

The only reliable way (as far as we know) of identifying your influencers is to conduct an in-depth market research exercise. In other words, in order to establish who influences a community of decision makers, you’ve got to ask those decision makers. It is therefore critical to understand exactly what community you’re looking at. This is all to do with market segmentation.

For example, the set of influencers for the retail banking segment is different to that for the local government segment. There may be overlaps, but unless you do the research you’ll never know whether the overlap is 10% or 90%.

Ideally, you should narrow the segment even further. If you’re selling VoIP you’ll have different influencers to those if you’re selling ERP applications. If you are a multi-product firm, you’ll have a different set of influencers for each product, in each industry sector, each country, and so on. Segmentation is a dark art, and you’ll know what makes sense for your market. If you go too niche you’ll find that the target market is too small to make the research exercise worthwhile.

So, you conduct your research and arrive at a bunch of names. What then? The next step, and an even darker art, is ranking in order of importance. There’s no point in treating all influencers the same – some influencers are more influential than others.

More coming in Influencer Marketing Primer 3 - Ranking influence

On Blogger relations and Influencer relations

There's a really interesting discussion on the emergence of Blogger Relations and so-called Influencer Relations at the ARmageddon blog. It's based on the idea that, as existing analysts increase their use of blogs and new analysts gain prominence through blogs, traditional analyst relations (AR) must evolve.

AR professionals are clearly unsettled by this move. Analysts have typically dealt in secrets, based on private briefings under NDA. Blogs, on the other hand, trade in openness. There's obvious conflict here. How blogs impact the analyst community is uncertain, hence the discussion.

There's an important shift happening in marketing generally (and I include corporate communications in this category). The shift is towards two-way communications with the market, sometimes called conversational marketing, or Marketing 2.0 (yeuch!). Blogging is an online version of this, but it's happening offline in a big way, often as part of a Word of Mouth marketing strategy. Good sources of info for this move include Naked Conversations, Seth Godin and Andy Sernowitz.

A few thoughts on the debate:

- Blogger Relations and Influencer Relations are functions of marketing, as are Analyst relations and PR. It's all marketing, just perhaps not direct marketing. So all of these "Relations" branches are subject to the big shift towards two-way communications.

- The term "Relations" is missing the point. In my 12 years working in analyst firms, vendors always think of analysts in marketing terms. Vendors understand the influence analysts have over prospects, and they market to analysts in order to affect that influence. So rather than "relations" (which sounds friendly and cosy) we should really call it marketing. That's why we're open about our use of the Influencer Marketing term - it is what it says.

- We should treat all influencers with the respect they deserve. This may mean adjusting our perceptions of who is important. Blogging is enabling the small guys (eg Redmonk, MWD) to compete with Gartner, Forrester et al. Ranking and prioritisation of analysts is more important nowadays.

- We mustn't forget the non-analyst influencers. They're just as important as analysts, and need to be marketed to (though in different ways).

Brand effectiveness - does it exist?

Here's an interesting exercise you can try at home, if you have access to research databases. I'd love to get some feedback on this.

I searched in EBSCO, a database of journals and academic papers, for "Brand" in the title. I got 2028 hits. I then narrowed the criteria to "Brand + effectiv*" - 21 hits. This means that there is less than 1% of research articles relating to brand that deal with its effectiveness. It gets better.

I then searched for "Brand + ROI" and got one hit. I even read this article - a weakly researched piece of assertion by a brand consultant.

Just in case EBSCO is particulalrly weak in articles on branding, I tried the same exercise with ProQuest. Similar results: "Brand" = 2262 hits, "Brand + effectiv*" = 12 hits, "Brand + ROI" = zero hits.

Now, this exercise is less than scientific. But at best it does indicate a paucity of robust research into brand effectiveness. At worst, it confirms scepticism of the value of brand and rubbishes the idea of brand equity.

If anyone knows of research that demonstrates the value of brand and can directly relate it to sales, I'd be really interested.

Turn up the volume on WOM & Blogs

Influencer Marketing is part of a marketing revolution that embraces word-of-mouth, conversational marketing and social networking tools. By targeting influencers, you can amplify the effect of these techniques. As Seth Godin says, if you want ideas to spread you need sneezers (talkers) with influence. Otherwise your messages either won’t spread, or they’ll die because they don’t have the support of influencers.

Influencer Marketing Primer 1 - Why Influencer Marketing?

Influencers are important because they affect decisions made by your prospect customers.

Influencer Marketing is therefore important because you can use influencers to improve your marketing to prospects.

Influencer Marketing is about identifying and ranking influencers. It is about marketing to those influencers, so that they know who you are and what you do. It’s about marketing through influencers, so they create market awareness for you. And it’s about marketing with influencers, applying their influence directly to your prospects.

Influencer Marketing is about creating qualified leads, leads that are influenced in your favour. And it’s about addressing objections to sales, by creating influencer-led collateral for your sales people.

Influencer Marketing is about making your business more successful.

How influence works

This post is a very personal take on Influencer Marketing. I worked in market analyst firms for 12 years between 1995 and 2006, first for Ovum and then IDC. Importantly, I had also been a customer of analyst firms at my previous “end-user” jobs at Nationwide Building Society and the Post Office.

I’ve therefore seen B2B decisions being made from three perspectives: the buyer (of technology products and services), the vendor (of analyst consulting services) and independent third party adviser. In fact, depending on who was paying the bill I’ve been adviser to the buyer or vendor (but never both, obviously). You get a rounded view of how influence work when you play these different roles.

Influence and Buyers

Buyers use influencers to reduce the risk that they select a duffer product or supplier. As a buyer, I used analysts to guide the general direction of a technology – what functionality to request, which vendors to talk to, and so on. As an adviser to buyers I would do requirements elicitation, product comparison and recommendations on selection. I even did a financial assessment of a firm believe to have flaky accounts.

As a buyer I also joined user groups, to talk to other customers, and collectively we applied pressure to vendors’ future product plans. I acted as a reference for other companies considering technology purchases. I employed independent experts in areas beyond my experience, and followed their advice. Twice I fell under the influence of standards bodies as we pushed for ISO9000 compliance. I was influenced by James Martin, a management guru and eponymous founder of a consulting firm. I interacted with academics in trying to establish interoperability standards.

It should be obvious from this list that buyers draw influence from a wide variety of sources, and certainly not just analysts and journalists. In fact, it would be wrong to say that analysts had substantially more influence than some of the other players. Some people were influential early in the decision process, other much later on.

I am certain that my experience is the normbased on numerous discussions with buyers – decision makers are influenced by numerous people at different times on a variety of subjects.

Influence and Vendors

Vendors use influencers to remove risk from decisions in their favour. From a vendor perspective, the use of influencers is all about increasing sales and reducing sales cycles by making the decision process run smoother and faster.

As a vendor of consulting services I deployed customer references as often as practical, as strong influencers on prospects. But I would also drop influencers into conversation - books and papers I’d read. I would cite The Economist. Nicholas Carr’s IT doesn’t matter article in HBR still serves me well three years after it was written. I used the influence of the media, writing by-lined articles, appearing as an “authority” in numerous publications, and appeared on TV. I used the kudos of my MBA college (Henley, since you ask) as an influence on other MBAers. Anything to create a positive environment in which to sell whatever I was selling.

Again the theme here is variety of influencers. Not variety for the sake of variety, but to draw on a kitbag of resources that could be searched for that appropriate tool. It’s all about removing risk and objections to sales.

Influence and influencers

Most influencers don’t know that they influence. Those that do know rarely know who they influence. Those that do know who they influence end up influencing a few people only.

Influence is a game of scale. If you advise specific people on a regular and personalised basis you can’t get around many people. You just don’t have time.

An independent financial adviser may have a few hundred clients. A few hundred – in a consumer-based mass market of millions. But they’ll know each client well, and have a strong referral network in place.

In a B2B context, most independent consultants have a few tens of regular customers. They are very influential, but don’t have broad reach (though blogs may change this).

Most influencers draw at least some of their authority from their firm. We know the firms that convey the most credibility, and employees of those companies command influence. Companies are important to influencers because they provide the scale that eludes independents.

Influencers also interact with other influencers. Some influencers inherit influence from other influencers – Influencer Marketing’s version of name dropping. While I don’t believe there is a strict hierarchy of influencers, there are clear relationships and interplays between influencers that affect both vendors and their prospects.

I expect the nature of influence to change, as influencers become aware (through the rise in Influencer Marketing) that they have influence. Influencers will want to maintain or increase their influencer. Those that don’t have influence will want to obtain it. Those under influence will want to understand its intentions and potential outcomes. It will be interesting to chart the progress of influence.

Is eBay nuts?

So I'm watching a repeat of Friends on Tuesday evening when I'm interupted by the TV ad slot. I'm hypersensitive to TV ads ever since I read Seth Godin's Permission Marketing, where he differentiates Interuption Marketing (= getting your attention) from Permission Marketing (= offering anticipated, personal and relevant messages).

But even so, I was aghast when the new eBay commercial was shown. Why is eBay advertising on TV? It has little discernable competition. It has immediate and widespread recognition. It's product is simple to use and understand.

What can they be thinking? Do they have a huge marketing budget to burn through this year? Is there anyone out there that has a PC but hasn't heard of eBay? Have the creatives used all the other marketing channels, and TV's turn has come up?

It's not as if eBay has a strong track record in TV ads - they've been panned fairly regularly by the businesss press in the past (check out this example at Business Week).

Why advertise on TV when you have to hand the best adverts of all - happy customers. eBay is driven by its users, from sporadic buyers to power sellers. They do all the marketing eBay could ever need. This TV ad shows bad marketing judgement, profligacy in budget management, and a lack of appreciation of the power of customers.

It's not even a very good ad...