The Many Faces of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is all about reaching out to a select group of targeted bloggers, journalists, industry experts, and trade magazines so that you can join forces to market with and through them.

Think of it as identifying and encouraging brand champions to spread the word about your company or product. Once you know who those influencers are (and who they impact), you can think about marketing to, through, and with them.

But you can’t skip that step.

 Identifying the right influencers is just as important as the relationship you eventually develop with them. After all, if you haven’t identified the right influencers, then how are those brand advocates supposed to have an impact on your target customers?

So how can you get started with influencer marketing?

Last year, I blogged about TippingPoint Labs’ approach to influencer marketing, which lays out a fantastic approach to help your brand create a solid content marketing strategy by determining exactly who influences whom.

According to TippingPoint, there are four types of influencers:

The Digital Influencer

This group tends to be small (about 1 percent of your market), but they can be incredibly powerful. Digital Influencers can include bloggers or members of the press, and they are some of the most fervent digesters of your content. Why? Because they have to keep up in order to stay credible and up-to-date with their readers.

As Heidi Sullivan writes at Social Fresh, gaining traction and building a relationship with the key Digital Influencers in your market is quickly becoming the Holy Grail of online marketing.

The Prosumer

Slightly bigger — yet slightly less influential — than Digital Influencers, Prosumers represent about 7 percent of your market and are what TippingPoint refers to as “Seeds.” They are a little less active and tend to generate content on third-party platforms, rather than through their own medium.

That may include posts on forums and message boards, letters to the editor, reviews, and comments on blog posts. The best place to find them is on the Digital Influencers’ sites. They aren’t quite as powerful as Digital Influencers, but they certainly have a voice in the marketplace.

Michael Fassnacht, the president of communications firm Draftfcb’s Chicago office, details the uprising of the Prosumer on his blog, providing a few examples of companies that have successfully marketed with and through them.

The Consumer

This category represents the bulk of your marketplace. But consumers will only digest your content when it’s convenient for them or if they’re preparing to make a purchase. They research information provided by both Digital Influencers and Prosumers and will, when they find it valuable, consume content produced directly by you.

Generally speaking, consumers digest content, they don’t create it. If they do write a review or comment on your company or product, they then transition to the Prosumer category.

The Brand Journalist

You may have a great relationship with all of the groups above, but if you’re not able to produce compelling content that’s relevant to them (and gives them a reason to care), then you won’t be able to develop that a true circle of influence.

Brand Journalists sit atop TippingPoint’s Influence Pyramid, largely because they are the ones that ultimately deliver frequent, relevant, high-quality content to the marketplace. A couple of years ago, marketing guru and content marketing evangelist David Meerman Scott wrote a post on his blog that detailed the convergence of traditional journalism and brand influence, signaling a change in the way businesses needed to speak to their influencers and consumers.

The old days of boring, contrite press releases are quickly disappearing and the content companies submit to their influencers needs to be compelling and, according to PitchEngine founder Jason Kintzler, much more conversational.

By marketing that content effectively to your Brand Journalists (i.e. the most influential targets within your space), you will ultimately be marketing to the rest of your influencers and target markets.

So can you group your influencers into each of those four categories?

Because those groups of influencers digest and respond to content in different ways, it’s important to make sure you’re interacting with each of them appropriately. TippingPoint Labs’ triangle is a perfect illustration of how you can customize your content marketing strategy to best market to (and through) each tier.

If you can keep up with your influencers’ demand for great content, they’ll reward you with the exposure you need in the marketplace.

Amanda Maksymiw is a mar­ket­ing asso­ciate at Open­View Labs, respon­si­ble for con­tent cre­ation and strat­egy for Open­View and its port­fo­lio com­pa­nies. You can fol­low her on Twit­ter @AmandaMaks.