What Do Influence Marketers Do?
You’re at a cocktail party. Someone asks you what you do, and you say, I’m in charge of my company’s influence marketing program. Chances are they don’t have a clue what that means. In the B2B world especially, it involves professional relationships and knowledge — a different set of drivers than in consumer space.
What it means, however, gets to the core of any company’s strategy, which almost always includes acquiring and keeping customers. So you need to practice saying, “I manage the most important part of our marketing program.”
Because keeping customers and making them into advocates is the most important part of the marketing program. Without that, the famous funnel is little more than a sieve. We talk so much of the customer journey, but do we pay enough attention to the fact that it should not end when the customer is “acquired”?
The “acquiring customers” piece is well-studied and understood. But that’s only the beginning. To keep the customer is much more difficult, and becomes even more so now that everyone is online and information about competitors or substitutes is at their fingertips (literally).
Keeping customers is about building relationships and collaborating with an ecosystem. The ecosystem could consist of a set of influencers you’re leveraging for their ability to influence an audience, because they have attention and reach and authority and engagement — that drives action. And maybe the brand itself doesn’t have that. Or it does, and the influencer community magnifies the brand’s own reach.
So here’s what our IMC members have told us they do at work.
1)They work toward a business outcome with either self-selected influencers or carefully chosen outside advocates. They do it by creating relationships between company employees and external influencers. This could be through conferences, online communities, user groups, Meetup groups, or company-led events.
In the old days, companies had a PR program that consisted of placing stories facilitated by relationship with journalists. The metric was a placement. In the new environment, we barely need journalists as intermediaries, although they’re still nice to have. But influencers can be many more than just journalists now: anyone with a platform and distribution, many of them not part of large institutions, can be an influencer.
Interestingly, many of these business outcomes still involve content, much like public relations and analyst relations did traditionally.
2)They support the efforts of people who are already influencers and advocates for the company, whether these are customers, employees, analysts or simply fans. In fact, they help people who are already advocates become more influential, and they help people who are already influencer move toward affinity and advocacy with the company.
If you think any of this is easy, you’re living in a dream. As I’ve said before, B2B influencer marketing is not just paying Kim Kardashian an enormous sum of money to Insta post about a lipstick. In fact, it’s more like not paying her anything, and being such an innovative, ethical, and authentic company that she will do it anyway.
Like I said, “the most important part of marketing.”
