Building an Influencer Marketing Program
For those of you who missed the MCForum B2B Insights conference last week, a quick recap of my presentation about influencers (full deck below). You need to approach influencer marketing with the same seriousness as any other marketing program – it needs a budget, people to do the work, and clear cut goals.
It also can take a significant amount of time. In the case of one startup where I headed marketing, it took us four years (!) of steady work to get into the visionary quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. That steady work included regular briefings with the relevant analysts, face-to-face where possible, plus getting our customers and prospects to ask the analysts about us. Even if in the beginning the answers were “who?”, by the third or fourth customer inquiry about us, the analysts realized they better educate themselves, and started looking into our solutions. By the seventh or eighth inquiry, they started thinking “wow, these guys are really gaining traction.”
While you’re building your influencer program, try to think of unique things you can offer that are of value to your influencers. This may be a single slide or infographic (once at an analyst conference, I saw that the analyst presenter’s slide deck included a slide from a vendor… now that was a slide that was of value to the influencer!). In some cases the valuable thing might be your executive’s point of view on an industry trend; or a peek into your upcoming product roadmap; or access to your client base to hear directly from them; or even some last minute content to fill a hole in a report or newsletter they have going out that day – this happened to me just the other day and I was happy to help the editor, and now he knows he can count on me & my client for high quality content in a pinch whenever he needs. Guess who he’ll be calling for his next article?
There’s lots more in the slide deck. And video to come, soon. Enjoy!
Follow Us