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
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
Labels: influencer marketing, influencers
posted by Duncan Brown at 1:45 pm
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