Marketing’s Dark Year Brightened by Influencers
This has been a helluva year for marketing. Literally nothing works. The passage of GDPR in Europe has confused the bejesus out of anyone who was trying to use customer data, and 25% of the digital audience runs ad blockers. Customers seem to be running away from marketers at full speed.
The Millennials don’t even own a cord, and the older generations have cut it and escaped to Netflix, Hulu, and DirectTV Now. The few print magazines that still exist can only make money by turning their covers over to Beyonce and giving her complete editorial control of the entire magazine in return for the favor. Conde Nast is for sale.
And that’s on the supply side. On the demand side, there’s an equivalent struggle. CPG is losing its luster, and e-commerce, beyond Amazon, is struggling. There’s no such thing as brand loyalty, only convenience, which is why J.Crew has decided to sell its preppy clothes on Amazon. Even end caps in supermarkets are not effective with certain cohorts, because younger and upscale consumers don’t visit the supermarket anymore — they order online and have it shopped by a stranger and delivered to the house. The supermarket, which used to be the one place you could find the consumer, has only Instacart shoppers.
Believe me, this is a sea change. Yes, it was predicted two decades ago when the internet became readily available, but everybody looked the other way. Now it’s here affecting everyone from small business to big brands.
As I write this, 24,000 marketers are at Inbound, the 8th annual Hubspot user conference. They’re hoping content marketing will save them, but who has the time to consume all the content that will be generated by users of martech software like Hubspot and Marketo and Infusionsoft? How many white papers can anyone read? Content marketing could have been useful five or ten years ago, but it’s a commoditized tactic today.
What breaks through the noise? Very little. On the consumer side, Nike’s $48 million deal with deal with Colin Kaepernick, while controversial among old white people, garnered $43 million worth of earned media on day one. But here’s the thing: Kaepernick is an influencer of the primo kind. He believes in something and he acts on it. He’s authentic. Nike’s demographic is young, black, Hispanic, and bi-racial. He’s got credibility with that group.
If you have ever been in b2b tech marketing, you know that it’s also all based on authenticity, knowledge, and credibility. While there are few individual “stars” like Kaepernick, there are many people and communities with influence that can help a brand stand out.
Apple has always had a strong influencer community for its iMac and MacBook Pro products, favored by designers and developers. Matthew Holt, co-founder of the Health 2.0 conference, is an influencer in health tech, and Bryan Kramer and Ann Handley are influencers in tech marketing.
For b2b marketers right now, influence marketing is almost all there is. And we have to learn how to do it correctly so we get a return on our investment. We have to build communities of influence and communities of practice because that’s the only way to get customer attention.
