Influencer Marketing (And How You Can Use It)

The pressure points of influence are effective to craft your stories in a way that can encourage your target audience to respond quickly.

1) Reciprocation. People give back to you the kind of treatment that they have received from you.
2) Exclusivity. People will try to seize the opportunities that you offer them especially when they have a high status and are scarce.
3) Authority. People will be most persuaded by you when they see you as having knowledge and credibility on the topic.
4) Commitment. People will feel a need to comply with your request if it is consistent with what they have publicly committed themselves to in your presence.
5) Liking. People prefer to say yes to your request to the degree that they know and like you. No surprise there.
6) Consensus. People will be likely to say yes to your request if you give them evidence that people just like them have been saying yes to it.

Link to full interview on influence on Guy Kawasaki's blog.

Knowing your target market is hard. When you think you understand your customer's needs, they may evolve. REI, a recreational co-op nationwide in the US, has a solid example of how they were able to adjust to their target market (although the results of these campaigns is hard to identify from their balance sheets alone). In the late 90s, they targeted the young professional single with some extra money to spend. Most recently this year, their campaigns show a different story, as their customer changed and grew a little bit older and more mature: young couples that enjoy the outdoors and have little kids.

It is always necessary to keep a pulse on the interests of your market. If you have the luxury to do surveys, there are three easy questions you can ask, as defined by Avinash Kaushik, a guru of web analytics and understanding your customer:
- Why did you come here? (to our store or our website)
- Did you find what you were looking for?
- If not, why and how can we make things better?

Choosing your influencers can only happen once you understand your audience and you may find that understanding both is less of a science and is rather a craft that takes a keen eye for observation.

It requires that you become intimately familiar with the dynamic relationship between the influencer and the influenced by a) understanding their needs and how you can stay relevant and b) monitoring the stories and conversations on the web that are happening around the particular subject.

For example, I once had a web 2.0 client that owned a really great product to improve enterprise workflow and reduce e-mail, but it was unclear who they wanted to sell it to. Of course, they wanted the top Fortune 500 companies.

We did a needs assessment of these companies to find out the problems and concerns they had around collaborative productivity platforms. Some of these questions included security and running information on non-company servers, confusion surrounding the new technology, and simple ideas on how to use it.

Once we knew this, we scouted out journalists and analyst that would be asking the same types of questions or were riding the waves of current trends, such as concerns with collaborating information or the basics of the product itself.

You can easily tell a good storyteller from a bad one. A good storyteller knows their subject matter well, has told this story many times and knows exactly at which points to build your interest. Good stories are believable and they are either intellectually or emotionally important to the listeners of the story.

I once interviewed a very intelligent Director of a large company for a guest blogpost and his company was coming out with so many features, he simply read off each of the slides that I was emailed in advance. This happens fairly often with many intelligent people and it's a myopic view of your company and product, using the slides as a handicap.

Take a step back from all the features and think back to the pressure points of your target markets and influencers. Is there anything that you are doing which would be emotionally compelling? Carmine Gallo, a communications coach and former journalist, often emphasizes the importance of stories to journalists. They write news so give the benefit of a unique perspective that matters most to their readers.