Influencer marketing

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Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orientates marketing activities around these influencers. Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, or (in the case of business-to-business transactions) they may be third parties.

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[edit] What is “Influence”?

Most discussion on the generic topic of social influence centres on compliance and persuasion in a social environment, as exemplified in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: Science and Practice[1]. In the context of Influencer Marketing, influence is less about argument and coercion to a particular point of view, and more about loose interactions between various parties in a community.

[edit] Influencer Marketing as a marketing discipline

Influencer Marketing, as increasingly practiced in a commercial context, comprises four main activities:

  • Identifying influencers, and ranking them in order of importance.
  • Marketing to influencers, to increase awareness of the firm within the influencer community
  • Marketing through influencers, using influencers to increase market awareness of the firm amongst target markets
  • Marketing with influencers, turning influencers into advocates of the firm.

Influencer Marketing is enhanced by a continual evaluation activity that sits along side the four main activities.

[edit] Identifying influencers

The first step in Influencer Marketing is to identify influencers. Influencers are specific to discrete market segments, and are used as conduits to the entire target segment. While there are lists of generic influencers (such as the Time 100) they have limited use in marketing programmes targeted at specific segments.

Market research techniques can be used to identify influencers, using pre-defined criteria to determine the extent and type of influence. For example, Keller and Berry (2003) propose five attributes of influencers[2]:

  • Activists: influencers get involved, with their communities, political movements, charities and so on.
  • Connected: influencers have large social networks
  • Impact: influencers are looked up to and are trusted by others
  • Active minds: influencers have multiple and diverse interests
  • Trendsetters: influencers tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets

Most of the literature on influencers focuses on consumer markets. There is less insight into business-to-business influencers. A key distinction between consumer and business markets is that most influencers in consumer markets are consumers themselves. In business marketing, influencers are people that affect a sale, but are removed from the actual purchase decision. Consultants, analysts, journalists, academics, regulators, standards bodies are examples of business influencers.

Not all business influencers are equal. Some have more influence than others, and some mechanism of ranking is required, to distinguish between key influencers and less impactful people. A model for ranking business influencers has been developed by Influencer50, thus:

  • Market Reach – the number of people an individual has the ability to connect with.
  • Quality of Impact – the esteem in which an individual’s view and opinions are held.
  • Frequency of Impact – the number of opportunities an individual has to influence buying decisions.
  • Closeness to Decision – how near an individual is to the decision-maker.

Several companies including Liquid Intelligence in the US and Vocanic in Asia have developed their own proprietary methodologies for identifying and targeting influencers for a brand.

Fred Reichheld, a consultant at Bain & Company, has developed a methodology to determine the extent to which firms’ growth is influenced by customers’ propensity to make referrals to colleagues.[3] Reichheld distills his research down to a single question: how likely is it that you would recommend company X to a friend or colleague? From answers to this question, a Net Promoter Score is determined, which correlates strongly with a firm’s growth rate.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Cialdini, Robert. Influence: Science and Practice, Allyn and Bacon, 2001
  2. ^ Keller, Ed and Berry, Jon. The Influentials, Free Press 2003
  3. ^ Reichheld, Fred. The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, Harvard Business School Press, 2006

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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