Influencer marketing, is a form of marketing in which the focus is put on specific key individuals rather than the target market as a whole.
What it does is identify those individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and positions its marketing tactics around these influencers
There are different definitions of what an influencer is. Some say it’s a third party who significantly shapes the prospect’s decision to buy, but may never actually be accountable for it. Others have defined it as a person who has an above average impact and reach through word of mouth in a marketplace. Characteristics of influencers are that they tend to be trendsetters, are well-connected, have active minds, and make an impressionable impact.
Companies are honed in on identifying and engaging with influencers. Targeting influencers is seen as a means of amplifying marketing messages, in order to counteract the growing tendency of prospective customers to ignore marketing. Voy Media Youtube Marketing Agency offers the best message to the subscribers of the channel. The meeting of the business requirements is excellent to increase the profits for the business people. The use of the skills and expertise helps in the availability of the best marketing. The conveying of the best brand messages is beneficial for the people.
Good marketing and PR encompasses far more than making lists of your top influencers. When all is said and done, successful PR is all about building relationships, person to person, not person to score.
Influencer marketing is about changing a radom-shot approach into a rifle-shot targeted one. In other words, you target specific influencers, not generic prospective customers
The key is that influencers are both visible and connected to those you want to be influenced. So if you want to influence small business owners you need to identify those who are trusted, visible and connected with this group. However identifying “influentials” will not always be easy.
Influencers are interested in engaging in a two-way dialogue with brands, so they might already be known to you; they complain, they join user groups, they are those people who will participate in whatever is happening.
Influencers naturally populate online communities; so you can locate them by monitoring these and engaging with them.
Influencers are service and segment specific and likely come from all walks of life. They are not always professionals, but rather, are often your peers
In business, the reason why specific professions are influential is:
1)because they are vocal, an
2) because of the number of people who read or access their work, whereas those who write blogs on their social media become mini celebrities
Influencers also like to help others connect with other people and tend to have had a genuine experience of the services that they are talking about.
A good advocate or influencer is typically someone who has had a genuine experience of the product or service (or has been told about it by someone they know or trust) and whose opinion is trusted by at least one other person. To make a difference on a large scale a strategy needs to plan to:
Bring them together in one place.
Create more opportunities for them to influence the more easily influenced
Types of data can be used to find credible users: 1. Reciprocity data: The best way to find credible users is to use data on what others say about them in the particular domain of interest. Online, this is found in rating data. One example could be if a user answered some questions in a support community, did he get a good rating for his answers? What percentage of his answers was marked helpful? If the user has a blog how many people tweeted his articles, how many hyperlinks linked to his blog, what was the blog’s PageRank? 2. Reputation data: Reputation engines often summarize this data and assign a reputation score, or rank, to the user. 3. Self-proclaimed data: This is data that users assign to themselves in their user profile. It can be their career experience on LinkedIn, or any professional or non-professional groups they joined.
Since these data are mostly self-proclaimed and are not validated, they are less reliable. However, for very specialized and niche domains where reciprocity and reputation data is not available, self-proclaimed data with some validation from an independent third party does come in handy for identifying credible users. 4. Social graph data: Although social network analysis (SNA) on a social graph can be used to identify credible users, how the graph is constructed is of key importance as well as what kind of relationship is captured in the edges of the graph. A social graph of following/followers relationship on Twitter is also not suitable for finding the credible users. Unless we can remove the part of the graph that is irrelevant to the domain of interest, these social graphs will only give you the high bandwidth users, which are not necessarily the same as the credible users. Your campaign should really be multi-channel, but when leveraging influence you need to be laser focused, so consider funneling information into “separate compartments” for each service you are using.
You must pick the right person to start with. People follow because they are interested in specific information, so be sure to find someone who’s already actively promoting similar content.
Find the “hobbyist”, instead of just looking for the “celebrity”.
As a PR professional or marketer, it’s your responsibility to find out what truly matters to those that matter to your market. In other words, you’ve got to understand what your influencers actually care about. Dig into their previous blog posts and articles. Skim through their information. See where they’ve been cited and interviewed. What are they talking about? What are they saying? What were they interested in last month; what do they care about this week?
The rapid growth of social media has warped our concept of influence and too many have mistakenly confused influence with popularity. Audience size (readers, fans, friends, followers, etc.) cannot be an accurate determination of one’s authority and ability.
However, what is new today is the sheer volume of voices that one needs to track in order to determine who the real influencers are. Today’s media world is more crowded than ever before. As a result, the challenge of finding those influencers who really matter has grown tremendously and the industry is desperately trying to find new ways to identify influencers.
Web services can be used to crawl social media sites for users that exert influence in their respective communities. Exactly how much is the user engaging the online community?
Critics of this online-only approach argue that only researching online sources misses critical influential individuals and inputs, noting that a lot of influential exchange of information occurs in the offline world, and is therefore not captured in online media. The majority of consumer interactions occurs face-to-face, not in an online environment, so be sure to maintain good online and offline relationships with influencers, as well.
