Influencer Marketing is difficult and often misunderstood. Let’s start at the begging to understand what it is and how can it help with a marketing strategy.
We all recognize that we live in a world where people consume and share information in a very different way than they did just 10 years ago. There is no need to convince anyone of the impact the internet, social media, and mobile devices have had in business and in life. And still, in most companies, the PR function has not evolved in almost a century.
Only a few years ago, information sources were centralized. People got their news from a handful of newspapers, magazines, and TV stations. Reporters writing for these news outlets were the main source of information. They were, in a sense, a bottleneck or a monopoly in buyer opinion and education. Inside a company, the public relations function was the practice of informing and influencing these reporters with the intention of getting favorable news coverage.
Today, this is an obsolete paradigm as newspapers are moving from print to digital or going out of business. An article printed in this morning’s newspaper is not news anymore, it is history. We learn about the news in real-time via Twitter, Facebook or online news feeds. Millions of amateur and professional writers have become publishers thanks to blogging platforms and other social media channels. Anyone can write news. The problem in the world today is that we have too many news sources, too much to read and too many point of views. Continue reading “PR in the Digital Age: Welcome to Influencer Marketing”
No one knows more about using the new tools and strategies to spread ideas, influence minds and build business than David Meerman Scott. His books and blog are must-reads for professionals seeking to generate attention in ways that grow their business. He is the best-selling author of titles that include The New Rules of Marketing and PR to World Wide Rave which are changing the world of public relations and influence marketing.
I am truly honored to have David share his insights with us in this interview.
1. What company is an example of good marketing today? Who do you admire?
I admire HubSpot very much. They started the company in 2006 and today, less than ten years later, they have 650 employees. There growth is all attributable to the content they create online, a strategy the teach others in the HubSpot Marketing Blog. http://blog.hubspot.com I admire them so much that I joined their advisory board. Continue reading “Marketing Leader Interview: David Meerman Scott”
Like most business people with global responsibility, I fly quite a bit. I have been a Platinum member for a couple of years and have flows withAmerican almost a million miles now. A few weeks ago I headed to the counter and asked to be added to the list to get upgraded. After all, I have 18 segment upgrades in my AA Account.
“No can’t do. You cannot use your segment upgrades anymore” said the AA Lady. Wait…what? Last year because I was transitioning to a new job, I did not fly much, and when I flew other airlines were more convenient. I did not get enough miles to qualify for Platinum – or Gold. I missed by just about 2,000 miles. I was demoted from Platinum elite member to member. And if you are not Gold, you cannot use your earned segment upgrades. American won’t allow me to use the upgrades I earned by being a loyal flier for years.
Then, I got an email yesterday where American is asking me to pay $559 to retain my elite status at Gold and enjoy benefits such as checking two bags at no extra cost, which I get at Southwest.
What American does not get is that I am the same guy they used to pamper with free upgrades to business class on an intercontinental trip, complementary access to lounges and other perks. Now that I am traveling again, I don’t feel compelled to use AA – for them I am just a guy. In reality, I am a business traveler, and I spend more than I would like on travel – and American knows it. American’s loyalty program failed to prove loyalty to me as a customer .
American has lost my loyalty and the loyalty of thousands of customers. Now American is in bankruptcy and at their current market ($218 million) Apple could buy the airline with the profits they make in a day and a half. But the goal is not to pick on American or rant about my experience, I am using it as an example of having the wrong idea about what a loyalty program should be.
“ Loyalty programs should be about demonstrating loyalty to your customers, not about bribing customers to do business with you”
Here is the problem: Most Loyalty programs are focused on rewards, which ends up being the same as bribing the customer to do business with you. Ironically, there is no loyalty in bribery: as soon as the bribe stops, customers will go elsewhere.
What if you thought about a loyalty program in a different way? What if the goal of your loyalty program is to demonstrate your loyalty to customers? Customers that feel appreciated, that feel they trust a company, that believe a company will stand by its principles, will become a loyal customer. Customers will be loyal because they will want to do business with you. Not because you bribed them. Seth says “Loyalty can be rewarded, but loyalty usually comes from within”
Maybe that’s why Forrester Research found no correlation to a small negative correlation between customer loyalty and having a loyalty program.
The key driver of loyalty is good, consistent, trust worthy service that meets the needs of your customers.
The old customer marketing funnel based on the AIDA model (attention, interest, desire and action) is obsolete. The new marketing funnel needs to be customer focused. The new customer model is CSLA (horrible, but hey, acronyms suck anyway): Costomer -> Satifaction -> Loyalty -> Advocacy
You create a Customer when they buy a product or service from you
Customer becomes Satisfied when you meet or exceed expectations
Satisfaction drives Loyalty, which is repeat purchases
Satisfaction and Loyalty make the customer an Advocate that promotes your product or service via word of mouth
Influencer strategy seems to be one of the pillars of social media marketing. There are many questions about how to identify, reward and empower influencers. So let’s say you have identified the top 1000 influencers in your space. And then what? It reminds me of the U2 song that goes “We thought we had the answers….it was the questions we had wrong”.
What is an influencer? Often an influencer is measured in terms of the number of friends of twitter followers. Fans and followers are a measure of reach or popularity, not influence, but it is related.
A definition of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the discipline of identifying and building relationships with the people who have a disproportionate ability to shape how others think and buy — not because they’re popular, but because they combine three key factors: reach, contextual credibility, and salesmanship.
Unlike traditional advertising, which tries to persuade the masses impersonally, influencer marketing works through personal relationships with a smaller group of people whose opinions others already trust. For a deeper look at influencer marketing and how to identify real influencers, see PR in the Digital Age: Welcome to Influencer Marketing.
Getting Influencers Wrong
“influencer” is not a label for people in general. It’s not a species. There is no influencer gene that I know of. People have different levels of influence in different topics, it is contextual. For example, I am an influencer when it comes to photography, but a normal guy when it comes to sports and very much not an influencer in terms of cosmetics.
How do I know I am an influencer in the context of photography? Because many of my friends and colleagues have purchased digital cameras based on my recommendations. Many people I don’t even know have done the same – people I have never met, never exchanged emails with, people that don’t follow me. How? I have influenced them because they have read my opinions online and relied on my knowledge to make a buying decision. They trust me because I am a regular consumer, like them, and I have lots of passion and experience about photography.
All consumers, myself included, avoid or ignore advertising. When exposed to advertising most people don’t believe what it says. Grab a photography magazine and look at the ads: all of them say their cameras are awesome. People don’t trust marketers. But they trust people like them. They will be influenced by other customers who have experience with the products they are considering. People who like talking about their experiences, share their knowledge and opinions are advocates.
The most common influencer strategy is to find the top influencers and reward them for their advocacy. Depending on the nature of your business, this could be a good strategy – or not. Often these customers, identified as influencers, are already predisposed to buy. Surely they deserve some recognition and special treatment, and you must empower them to be advocates. However, you cannot influence the influencers easily. They are experts; they know their stuff and probably know more about your products than most people in your company.
Here is an interesting idea: instead of finding influencers why don’t you create influencers. Or better said, you can turn a customer who is very satisfied into an advocate by empowering him or her to influence others.
Imagine you are in the banking business. Now imagine you have a customer that is really happy with your checking account, the service from your credit card and your credit services. This customer is willing to tell other people about how great your bank is.
Imagine how powerful it would be to put this customer in a center of a room full of customers who are interested in checking accounts. Imagine if he had the ability to share his experience with your bank, in his own words, to all these potential customers. That would be really powerful, right? This room full of prospects is your website, they are visiting the “checking accounts” page, or the “credit cards” page. They are interested in your services, why else would they be there?
That’s the power of empowering customers to share opinions and experiences (what we at Bazaarvoice call reviews and stories). They allow customers to become influencers, enabling “normal” people to become advocates for your brand, in a very authentic and very convincing way. By enabling this conversation on your site, on your product or service pages, you are creating an influencer strategy that results in more sales. It’s a proven system.
A great thing about a customer influencer strategy is that you don’t even have to find these influencers. You don’t have to identify them or know their name or pamper them with special treatment. However, you can still recognize them. You can give the more influential customers a badge that recognizes their contributions or their expertise.
And this recognition can be helpful for customers. It helps them find among dozens of other customer opinions and give content to these opinions. In fact, customers can vote on the helpfulness of other customers contribution and sort them based on their helpfulness. The helpfulness votes help identify the most influential customers, those that write reviews that help customers make decisions, which earn them badges in turn.
All these pieces work together to promote advocacy, identify and recognize influencers in a way that helps customers buy. This system of advocacy and influence is customer centric, customer-driven and helps customers. Except for the sales, which benefit you and your business.
How to turn customers into influencers:
Give reach to people who don’t have their own audience. Most satisfied customers have no blog, no following, and no platform. You can provide the traffic and exposure to their influence. Give them a voice. Empower them to become advocates.
Let contextual credibility surface on its own. Don’t assign expertise, instead let it emerge. A customer who writes detailed, specific articles or reviews about a particular use case is demonstrating contextual credibility. Find these authors and turn them into influencers.
Verify the source to protect credibility. Tag reviews as “verified buyer” or “verified customer”. Your credibility will collapse if readers suspect the opinion isn’t authentic or paid for. Be transparent.
Recognize salesmanship without paying for it. Some customers are simply more persuasive writers than others. Use badges or reputation levels to reward the contributions that demonstrably help other customers decide, not the ones that are just longest or most frequent. Microsoft created the Microsoft created the MVP Program to recognize independent technology experts who share deep technical knowledge with local and online communities. Influencers are often driven by status: recognition is more important than rewards
Let readers vote credibility and salesmanship into rank. Helpfulness votes let your community of users itself decide whose contributions they find most useful. This approach is more reliable than any internal guess at who your top influencers are.
Track sales impact, not follower count. The only real measure of influence is whether a review or contribution is associated with a buying decision. That’s the ultimate KPI to focus on, not likes or shares.
Don´t confuse correlation and causation. Your most influential customers are already predisposed to buy from you
Conclusion
The lesson here isn’t that influencers don’t matter. It’s that you don’t need to chase them, bribe them, or artificially create them. Every business with a good product already has customers who are satisfied enough to become advocates; the job of an influencer strategy is to give them the platform, the recognition, and the reason to speak up.
