On Influencers in consumer markets

Good article here, written by Nilofer Merchant, CEO of Rubicon Consulting. She’s just been inspired by The Influentials, as I was when I read it.

Nilofer makes some interesting points which, despite seemingly focused on consumer markets, apply equally to the B2B market. Specifically:

• Influencers are not (necessarily) journalists and traditional PR targets. In the B2B world we’ve identified more than 20 influencer types.
• Influencers are specific to the market under examination. Just as school advice wouldn’t come from the BBQ expert, so security software influencers don’t normally come from the printer industry. We see that market specialisation also applies to geography and company size (SMBs are different in their influences than enterprises).
• It takes hard work to identify true influencers. Our experience shows that an intuitive guess is no better than 20% correct. Research is the only answer.
• Influencers love to influence. They’ll want to influence you – let them.

A couple of reminders:

1. In B2B markets, influencers are usually not customers or prospects. Which means that you can’t try to sell to them. Find out what they do want, then supply it.
2. You can’t rely on on-line channels to communicate with influencers. Research shows that, at best, 10% of communication is on-line, with the rest being telephone or face-to-face.