Marketing and influence are inextricably linked. As a marketer, after all, your job is to influence someone to buy your product. If your marketing has zero influence on whether or not anyone buys, then your efforts have been in vain.
Anyone can exert influence, though. Your own clients and patrons, for instance, can influence whether their friends buy from you through customer referrals or positive word-of-mouth. Their potential to influence others is actually greater than yours; people know that marketers are trying to sell them something, whereas a third-party recommendation is unbiased.
Influence marketing seeks to capitalize on this fact by getting third-party influencers to tout the company's products or services.
Influence Marketing Defined
Though anyone can have influence, some people have much more influence than others. "Influence marketing" refers to engaging these highly influential people.
The first step in influence marketing, therefore, is to identify who the influential people are. There are several things that can make a person influential on a particular topic:
- Expertise. This is why the list of influencers will vary depending on your industry. People are most credible when talking about subjects they appear to know something about.
- Independence. If a person is getting paid to promote a product, their message is less powerful than if they are giving an unbiased opinion.
- Reach. This refers to how many people will hear what the person has to say.
- Relationship. The stronger the connection between the speaker and their audience, the more people will value what they say. This relationship is not always personal, such as when fans closely follow a celebrity they have never met.
- Persuasiveness. This is how effective they are at conveying the message itself.
Once you have identified the influencers, the next step in influence marketing is to market yourself to the influencers. You want to influence them to use their influence to talk about you. There are several possible ways to do this, including:
- Developing a relationship with the influencer.
- Providing product samples, in the hopes they may review it favorably.
- Gaining them as a satisfied customer.
- Paying them as a spokesperson. This does reduce their influence somewhat, because they are no longer giving an independent opinion.
Influence Marketing and the Web
The Internet has had a major impact on influence marketing, for several reasons.
For starters, it has turned many more people into influencers. Anyone can publish online and gain an audience. By focusing on narrowly-defined niches, numerous bloggers have become the go-to experts for specific topics.
The web makes it easier to identify influencers, as several services rank online influence.
The open nature of the Internet and social media also gives marketers greater access to top influencers. You can contact them directly, and some are surprisingly responsive. A public reply or retweet by the right person can lead to your content trending on Twitter or going viral.
Finally, influence marketing is also a big part of SEO. Search engine rankings are determined largely by the number and quality of links to your site. Links from really influential people or sites are really beneficial to you, which is why link building often closely resembles influence marketing. And Google's Author Rank is in many ways a measure of influence.
When done right, influence marketing can produce big results with a minimum of hard cost. It does require some effort, and it does carry some risk, since an influencer might recommend against buying your product. But if you truly have something to brag about, getting someone else to do the bragging for you can be a powerful marketing tool.
* Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
