Influence as vocabulary for integrated marketing

One of Influencer50’s first clients initially thought that Influencer Marketing could unite the disparate silos that existed in the marketing department. Thanks for the confidence, guys!

Much as we’d like to position Influencer Marketing as a panacea for marketing’s ailments, it doesn’t work quite like that. But strangely, and probably because the client’s expectation was set from the beginning, the outcome was closer to their aspiration than we thought possible.

It works like this.

A major issue in marketing is the silo mentality that divides operations into a wide range of disjointed activities. So we have PR, AR, partner marketing, events (from conferences to podcasts), user groups, collateral development, and so on, as well as a host of telesales/telemarketing and mailings.

Now Influencer Marketing doesn’t promise to unite all of these distinct activities. But what it does do is identify where the influence on decision makers lies. It does ask the question: “How does this activity relate to influence on decision makers?” And it does suggest that if and activity cannot demonstrate an impact on influence then you should stop doing it.

Influencer Marketing applies right across the marketing operational domain. It covers press and analysts, and partner organisations, and end-users, and events and other influence categories. So it offers a vocabulary for discussing the widest range of marketing activities, uniting at least the terminology for discussing and managing marketing.

Our client runs marketing operational management meetings, at which all representatives report on their activities. The reports are provided in terms of their impact on the identified influencers relevant to the activity. So PR reports on progress in engaging with the most influential journalists. Events are scheduled to leverage the most influential conferences (a diminishing category), and influencers are solicited to speak at client-arranged seminars. Partnership strategy is oriented around the most influential people in third-party organisations, even if formal partnerships don’t already exist.

Thus influencers have become a way of everybody reporting back using the same terms, and with the same degree of focus on who really carries influential with decision-making prospects.

We, and our client, are smart enough to recognise that this isn’t truly integrated marketing. But it’s a useful start, easy to implement, and aids management. It also helps to present marketing in a more organised and professional light to the rest of the organisation. This is important, especially with a recession looming and the budgetary axe being lifted.