What is Influencer Marketing?

Editor’s note: This post is a part of a series that was created to help you define and build the practice of influencer marketing into your company. This series will walk you through the process, necessary roles, and best practices to get started with influencer marketing quickly and effectively.

You can also download a the complete series in the form of our free eBook, The Value of Influence: The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing.

Influencer marketing is a practice where you focus on targeting and building relationships with key individuals that have influence over your target segment ­— and ideally your target buyers.

Individuals targeted through this program can include key influencers (e.g., writers for major publications, industry analysts, industry thought leaders, and senior managers of key organizations), where the contacts are made by phone or in person, requiring significant senior management time. Contact with other target influencers (e.g., bloggers and trade journal writers) can most often take place through e-mail and social media channels, requiring less senior management time.

Influencer marketing can be a highly effective and cost-effective way to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Establish and/or enhance your thought leadership position
• Drive more traffic to your website
• Generate more sales leads
• Increase your deal close rate and reduce sales cycle time
• Ultimately, impact the bottom line.

Influencer marketing typically falls under the responsibility of a “senior sponsor” – the senior most person in the organization responsible for marketing, such as the marketing VP. For earlier stage companies, the senior sponsor is often the CEO. The senior sponsor then appoints one or more people to serve as “influencer relations specialist” to develop the program and manage the daily and weekly activities. In many cases, the influencer relations specialist can be a part-time role/part of another employee’s overall responsibilities.

To get started with influencer marketing, the specialist develops a list of influencers; develops influencer personas to identify the best ways to communicate with influencer segments; prioritizes the names into a narrow set of targets; begins reaching out to build relationships, deliver your messages, and get insights from the influencers; and adjusts and improves the program over time. Most of the activities are free, requiring little more than time. The investment is small compared to the reach that can be achieved through the influencers’ “influence.”

The overarching goal for the program is to get people who influence your target buyers to write and talk about you in a way that generates buyer interest and enthusiasm for your products and services.

Next week, I’ll share one company’s story with influencer marketing.