When businesses first enter the Internet space, most don’t have the trust or relationships to truly market their goods effectively. Some use the reputation that others in their industry have already built. Leveraging these people is called “influencer marketing” and can be an extremely effective way to broadcast your message. Before you can use this technique, you have to find and inform influencers.
Who are Influencers?
The first step to finding influencers is defining them. For a marketer, an influencer is someone who has built a following based on trust and reputation.
What exactly is a following? In some niches, having a blog that receives 100 unique visitors daily is a huge achievement, while in other niches having 1000 twitter followers is nothing new. So the answer to the previous question is simply, “a large enough amount of influence to allow the passing of a message from one level to the next”.
What I mean by this is, an influencer has to be able to “influence” his or her followers into doing something. The most basic of which is passing a message along.
With an idea of how we define influencers, how do we find them? Thanks to the fact that it’s very simple to find and process data on the Internet, we’re given a multitude of points to use when identifying people of interest.
The following video outlines a mathematical model used to highlight influencers in a blogging network. It gives us a basic idea of the characteristics of a person that is more likely to have a higher reputation and high level of trust in their community.
Identifying the Influential Bloggers
Nitin Agarwal
Main Slides from Video
Finding Influencers and Consumer Insights in the Blogosphere
Hikaru Yamamoto, Naohiro Matsumura, Daisuke Tomozawa
Main Slides from Video
Why do I want to give them information?
Now that we know who our influencers are, why should we share information with them? Why not simply try a blanket approach, giving everyone the same information?
By highlighting what’s most important and giving it to your top tier contacts, you create a system where they pass along the information for you. Instead of using a brand’s nearly non-existent trust, you take advantage of a blogger’s influence.
However, you don’t always have to push information only to the influential. Making content available to everyone can sometimes allow the influential to show themselves. Recent research shows that people who become informed about a product are quick to share that information with others. Although their influence sphere may not be large, the information they share is the extension of their influence.
“Consumers who research products online appear to be more knowledgeable and eager to share information,” said Gary Drenik, president of BIGresearch. “Because they are likely to tell a friend about their experience, they become a building block for viral marketing efforts.”
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What kind of information do they need?
The information you pass along to your consumers has to be informative and energizing. Simple technical data usually isn’t enough (unless your fanbase goes nuts over this), instead you need something fun and exciting.
A few examples of this are things like off label use, ingenious things people have done, step by step tutorials, and in-depth how to’s. Explain how to set up your product, share tips, share personal stories. Consumers want to know about other people’s experience with your product, and what your product can do.
Sharing the Information
Once you have the information, how do you share it? Your strategy here depends on what you decided before. Are you going to highlight and target influential bloggers and community members? Or are you going to equally disseminate information in the hopes that influencers will show themselves?
Emailing and keeping in touch with influential members is the only way to facilitate strategy number 1. A private social network, or newsletter may work as well.
For passing information along to everyone, equally, a blog is the best place to do this. Most are usually SEO friendly, easy to setup, cost efficient, and can be updated easily. Brands can also leverage newsletters and wiki’s for this as well.
The Internet has created a new commodity that is information. Content can drive sales, and is what pushes word of mouth marketing. How you pass that content along decides part of your social media strategy. Should your brand depend on influencers? or do we try to create the buzz ourselves?
Do you know of any companies that did influencer marketing well? I’d love some examples and any case studies that stood out. Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
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