Influencers

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Why are influencers important?

Seth Godin says “It doesn’t scale because we tell the world, it scales because if we treat five people so well they will tell other people... And they will tell five, and those become twenty and that’s when it scales.”

When thinking about your influencers and advocates, it’s really beneficial to make sure you’re treating your customers in a robust way to delight them. Because, in essence, what that creates is advocacy, which then extends on and on and on, creating a scalable rule for your organization.

Techniques for engaging influencers

You can use a number of techniques to engage influencers:

• Give influencers creative control: Let them be a part of the organization process that you have to be able to let them create their own type of versions of the content you’re creating.
• Engage with influencers who love your offering: If you engage with them, they will love you more.
• Create a mutually beneficial relationship: You also need to understand what exactly is in it for them. A mutually-beneficial relationship is critically important from an influencer perspective. Remember, this is always a two-way street, and we need to be very mindful to make sure that we understand what’s in it for them and play to that. There’s nothing wrong in having a mutually-beneficial relationship.
• Look for an influencer with a dedicated audience: A lot of these influencers will have their own very big fan bases. And once they tell one person, or once they tweet one tweet, it could actually go to hundreds of thousands of people. So choose those people carefully, and reach out to them and embrace them.
• Use influencers as reporters for your brand: Make sure that you’re giving them news first. There’s nothing wrong with trying to basically drip-feed information out into the ether through your influencers. They will be your strongest advocates. Give them priority.
• Sponsor influencer-run competitions: Make sure that you actually are part of their word and giving value back to them.
• Respect influencers’ judgment: Respect their judgment when they give you feedback. It’s a great way of being able to understand what your core consumers may be thinking ahead of time
• Do not confine your search for influencers to celebrities: In fact, very often the key influencers are ones that are not so well known by the mainstream public, but actually, in a niche area are extraordinarily well known. So seek those individuals out!
• Have actionable goals for influencer campaigns: Make sure you’re targeting them in the right way and have key KPIs that you’re leading up to, to make sure that you track how well you are responding to your influencers.