Influencer Marketing
People Listen to PeopleThe concept of influencer marketing has risen to prominence off the back of paid-for celebrity endorsement in primarily B2C campaigns.
That’s not what we’re talking about here though. At all.
B2B influencer marketing is more specifically about identifying influencers for specific topics, or in specific markets, and using them to amplify your marketing messages. Influencers tend to be highly vocal individuals, many of whom are on the lookout for highly relevant and valuable content to share with their audiences.
Gaining mind-share with these individuals and having them share your content can provide a huge boost to your reach and engagement across your target market.
Mapping Influencers to Your Market
The first step in influencer marketing is to listen and identify influencers in specific market segments. We can help you identify who these influencers are, which channels they use, what topic areas they have the most influence in and what content gains the most engagement for them.
This level of insight proves invaluable when creating content and determining how to distribute this content.
Knowing who has influence over who else is extremely valuable insight. Using this, you can put effort into bringing influencer on-side and let them do the hard work of winning over hard-to-reach individuals without you needing to directly market to them.
One fascinating effort to create a truly global map of who influences whom can be seen in the recent Initiative Q trend (apologies if you’re reading this after 2018). This is the topic of a blog post in itself, but at its heart was an effort to build a huge map of who influences whom (as far as we can see – we’re not convinced by the cash-replacement, pyramid money scheme).
What Makes a Good Influencer?
When mapping out influencers, we look for individuals. Ideally, these individuals should be highly vocal and not aligned to a specific brand in your market, nor responsible for any product or service which could be seen as competitive with your offering.
Influencers could be bloggers, vloggers, pubic speakers, entrepreneurs, inventors, celebrities or from a wild variety of other backgrounds. Moreover, are they respected, followed and engaged with by your target audience?
We talk about tier 1, tier 2 and even tier 3 influencers. Sometimes it is simply impractical to attempt to win over a tier 1 influencer (e.g. Richard Branson) for something which does not emotionally resonate with their values and interests.
Looking to lower-level influencers can prove just as effective, and in some cases we take an “influence the influencers who influence the influencers” approach.
Get In Touch
Glastonbury, Somerset, UK
+44 747 666 2948
marc@glastonbury-marketing.co.uk