Who are the influencers in your industry — the voices you seek out for trends and insights that help you shape your go-to-market or product development strategies? If these thought leaders are not employed by competitors, why aren’t you recruiting them to be influencers for your brand?
Influencer marketing is widely believed to have hit its stride in 2017, in part because of the growing use of ad blockers and other tactics used to prevent more conventional advertising from intruding on target audiences’ lives. Influence marketing — the use of highly respected voices in a particular field to promote a product or service — is more commonly associated with consumer campaigns even though it is tailor made for B2B marketing efforts.
“As consumers, we probably all agree that we trust humans far more than faceless corporations, and this applies to B2B brands too,” states Maz Nadjm, founder of SoAmpli, a cloud-based advocate marketing and sales platform. “Influencers operate with the universal currency of trust, and trust, to put it simply, converts into brand engagement.”
As content strategist and Forbes contributor Steve Olenski points out, once you have identified and reached out to the key players in your industry, it’s time to set a budget (top influencers command up to $100,000 for a single mention), develop a strategy and track the ROI. Be prepared to conduct a lot of A-B testing with aspects such as targeting, and don’t take failure as a reason to give up.
Here are some influencer marketing tips to incorporate into your efforts:
• Build the story you want to tell.
To leverage the power of your influencers, the first thing you need to do is to build your own values and messages, says Nadjm. This is what’s called brand storytelling, and it involves articulating the narratives of your company: Why did you set up the business? How did you get started? However, be careful to keep your story relevant to your prospects when building your brand story. It’s important to reflect how your mission fits into their lives.
• Delivery is as important as content.
Who are the buyers you want to reach and who do they like to talk to when pondering a major purchase? What are the channels they trust and use most? This is more complex for B2B marketers. As Joseph Serrano, president of CX Insurance told Olenski, “Using an influencer to motivate such disparate groups as retail banking technology buyers, capital markets, the telecom industry and also enterprise technology purchasers, takes a deft and confident touch. Too broad a stroke means that pinpointing the influencer will not be possible, and the wasted time and expense can become considerable.”
• Make your message short and sweet.
Get your influencers on board with the “elevator pitch” concept of presenting themselves to your customers. You should be able to have your influencers motivated to explain in three brief sentences or less how the brand works and how it is relevant to customers, says Olenski.
• Say goodbye to transactional relationships.
Instead of looking at influence marketing as campaigns, think of each connection you make with an influencer as a relationship. Focus on building long-term relationships with the influencers you work with, advises inbound marketing specialist Dominique Jackson. “The way many brands work with influencers today is very transactional. You pay them X amount of money, they publish X amount of posts for you. Once it’s done, you move on. In 2018, the brands that see success with influencer marketing are going to be the ones that treat influencers as partners rather than a means to an end.”
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