Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a new approach to marketing, important because sales forces both understand and support it. It directly addresses the most common sales barriers within prospective customers and focuses attention on those individuals who advise decision-makers. We call these people influencers, and they are as crucial to the sales process as the prospects themselves.

The Circle Of Influence

You and your competitors are trying to target the same few decision-makers. Those people are trying to avoid you.

They prefer to take their information from the influencers, creating an ecosystem of advisors, made from individuals belonging to up to 25 different categories (in the diagram we've simplified it to show just ten).

You need to initiate relationships with them.

The Wave Of Influence

Influencers influence purchase decisions at one or more stages of the decision-making process. Exactly when an influencer influences has a significant effect on to what degree they impact the decision.

Why Influencers Are Important

An influencer is a third-party individual who significantly shapes the customer's purchasing decision, but may not ever be accountable for it.

Influencers are people, not companies or associations. Individuals make decisions, and they use other people - influencers - to inform and steer them. Because influencers are third-parties they don't buy from you. In fact, there is one major attribute of influencers that all marketers need to be acutely aware of.

Influencers don't care about you, your products, or (least of all) your marketing messages.

Influencer Marketing Aligns Marketing with Sales

Influencer Marketing directly impacts your ability to source leads, counter sales objections and win deals and is measured primarily by its impact on the bottom line. Influencer Marketing can be divided into five streams of work:

• Identifying and ranking influencers (Select)
• Marketing to influencers (Focus)
• Marketing through influencers (Engage)
• Marketing with influencers (Recruit)
• Measuring success (Evaluate)

These streams are embedded within our proprietary methodology - our SFERE Process

Who Might Be Your Influencers?

Influencers come from a variety of sources. These include, but are not limited to: