Given the enormous power of influencers, influencer marketing needs to be an integral part of your business development process and marketing strategy. In the B-to-B world, influencers are people who can affect the outcome of a sale but who do not typically make the buying decision. The influencer may hold a position of credibility or influence that can sway the decision maker toward or against a particular solution. A McKinsey study found that word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.  This study revealed that marketing-inspired word-of-mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, and these customers have a 37% higher retention rate.

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One Important Area to Include Influencer Marketing

We are often asked whether you should develop separate Marketing initiatives around influencers.  Definitely! We encourage you to develop initiatives specifically designed to build credibility with the influencers (the focus of many PR programs). Securing the influencers buy-in and support are key to the buying process.

Influencers can be both inside the target company (such as the actual user, accounting, legal), as well as external to the company (such as the press, industry experts and analysts). Identifying who these people and the role they play is a critical aspect of influencer marketing.

While most marketers tend to build their journey and experience maps around decision makers, given the enormous power of influencers we believe customer joureny mapping is an often overlooked area that can benefit from influencer marketing. When influencers are part of the process,  they help serve as external references and recommenders for the purpose of helping overcome objections earlier. For this approach to work you need to match influencers to the busing and customer exeprience stage. Start with these 3 steps.

1.  Inventory your influencers. We suggest you define the various types of influencers and where they participate in your customers buying and experience journey.

2. Match influencers with content and stages. For each stage of the journey identify the content needed to engage the customer at that point in the process and the influencers who provide the expertise or thought leadership for that content. You will also want to understand what role the influencer plays in that stage and what content they need from you and can provide.

3. It is a multidirectional process.  To make this approach work you need it to be a win-win-win.  All three parties – the customer, the influencer, and your organization need to win in this process. Give the influencers the stage or whatever they need to benefit from being a part of the customer journey.  Give your customers meaningful and relevant content from people they know, respect and trust.

While you may never be able to attach a deal directly to an influencer activity, we strongly suggest that you include fields in your database for referred from or referred to as a way to begin to understand the influencers impact. By adding these fields, you will be able to learn who influenced which sale, the number of sales the influencer participated in and the size of each sale. This will be especially important for external influencers.

Tailoring your database to incorporate influencers enables you to employ Marketing activities to meet the influencers needs which goes a long way toward creating a valuable relationship with that influencer. Let’s have a conversation about how we work together as you build your Marketing plan.

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