This guest blog is written by J-P De Clerck, who is an experienced interactive marketing journalist and blogger. Like Mindjumpers, he is associated with Social Marketing Forum.
Word-of-mouth is one of the most important phenomena on which companies focus their social media marketing activities. They try to tell the right stories, combine the proper social networks to get them told (or shared if you prefer), and of course identify the so-called ‘influencers’.
It’s a mistake to think that the identification of people who have ‘influence’ is exclusive to social media marketing. Word-of-mouth, referral marketing, and involving influencers in the marketing strategy are tactics that have been existing longer than the Internet itself.
What has changed, however, is the amount of digital and social media channels and tools, that people can use to inform themselves, often based on the advice of peers and influencers. It’s obvious that with the rise of social media, the focus on influencer marketing has skyrocketed.
We know that people nowadays seek advice from others in their purchasing decisions more than they used to and that marketing messages and businesses are less regarded as good and trustworthy information sources. We also know that it’s mostly friends and family members who play an important role in the information gathering and even purchasing decision stages of the customer buying journey.
Finally, we know that there is a shift from selling to buying and the buying journey is increasingly happening online.
Identifying the influencers: looking beyond the obvious
Of course, there’s more than just the purchasing aspect. The most important question for marketers and businesses is: what thrives people to get into touch with them, and – ultimately – to become a customer? Several steps lie between getting in the influence sphere of a business or brand and the actual purchase of a product or service.
So the identification of influencers should happen in all of these stadia. On top of that, this identification should go beyond the obvious. Let me give you an example from the viewpoint of an integrated social media and e-mail marketing strategy.
Smart e-mail marketers have already discovered that e-mail marketing and social media marketing go hand-in-hand. These marketers monitor who spreads their content the most, and which ones of their subscribers influence the highest number of people (for example through social media sharing tools or through ‘send to a friend’ functions).
The best ones, however, go way beyond that. They for instance analyze which subscribers have the most ‘connections’ that further spread what they have spread and the influencers with the most ‘influencing’ relationships. So it’s not only about immediate sharing and influencing and certainly not about the simple numbers. You can take it much further.
Segmenting the influencers
Another question is: how do you decide just what exactly an influencer is to you?
To find that out, you’ll have to divide all of the influencers into different segments that are linked to your marketing goals as well as the customer’s buying journey.
A simple example: someone whose influence leads to a substantial spreading of your content is not the same as someone whose influence strengthens your brand reputation.
And that person is in turn not the same as an influencer who seems to have a huge referral or recommendation impact that makes others buy your product or service.
Remember that people mostly trust persons they know, like family and friends, experts, bloggers, and other influencers with a solid reputation are often being trusted as well. And this leads to a last remark.
Become an influencer yourself
Influence and trust go hand-in-hand. Therefore, influence is not a matter of the amount of followers on Twitter, or the amount of forwards, or whatever.
Most of all, it’s a matter of trust. And when do people trust others? If they know that they listen to them, provide good advice, talk to them, are authentic and understand what they want.
Naturally, the ‘historical’ bond plays a role as well.
But after reading the above, you will agree with me that there’s absolutely no reason why you as a company, or – better put – as an individual working for a company, can’t be a trustworthy partner, and therefore an influencer.
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