Getting Started with Influencer Marketing - for Startups
Influencer marketing has been around for a long time. It’s only been in the last ten years that it has emerged as its own channel in marketing. It’s expanded beyond analyst or press relations to include other methods that could influence a target audience’s consideration or buying behavior. When observing B2C, it's easy to identify the influencers in any given market because it’s typically a group of individuals who are touting different products on their social channels. It’s an entire business and a large part of a B2C’s business strategy.
In B2B, the scope of influencers is more broad. They typically fall into a few sub-categories, of which we’ll discuss in this blog: analysts, podcasts, and press.
Influencer marketing is an imperative to any business that's starting out because its people who are buying your solutions for their company. These people are influenced by external forces in the market. They are influenced to be made aware of a problem, to seek out a solution, to consider certain vendors as the providers of those solutions. It could be an article, a market report, an interview they listened to.
In reality, it will be the totality of the things that they observe that will have them seeking out your information to become more informed. For much of B2B, solution consideration is centered around trusting individuals and trusting those individuals to give you the information that they need. These, again, fall to analysts and press and podcasts because more and more people are embracing these types of channels to get their information.
Podcasts
Podcasts are still undervalued as an influencing channel. There are so many in the marketplace right now, basically one for any topic that you’re looking for, which can make it difficult to identify the ones that should be a focus. For B2B, podcasts have risen in popularity and many companies are beginning their own in order to tell their stories in a more personal way.
It can be difficult to attribute the power of podcasts when tracking brand awareness, unless you’re asking every individual that reaches out to you where they heard about you, either verbally or via a form. However, companies that embrace podcasts as part of their marketing strategy, and track this information, will see an uptick in the number of people reaching out because of this activity.
Podcasts allow you to connect with your audience in a more casual and natural way. They are typically conducted as Q&A sessions or are conversational in nature. It allows time for your true personality to emerge, to allow the listener to connect with you and your message because it feels so personal. A podcast also allows you to break down what your business does in very simple terms for the audience, introducing them to the concept of what you're offering the market. It's a great way to educate your audience and educating someone without expecting something in return is how people develop trust in you.
While you should talk about your solution and the technology, you should also talk about yourself, what you're doing with your company, how you are changing the face of the whatever niche you're in, or product category or service category. You get to really explain that in a personal level that you wouldn't be able to necessarily in a written document or even in a very short video, and people tune in to hear these conversations.
Tips:
Start with free: Look for podcasts that are free. You will want to start with free to test to see if your audience is receptive to it.
Continue a cadence: You don't want to be one and done. Try to do different podcasts at least a couple of times a year. If you have the bandwidth, ideally shoot for 6 – 10 a year.
Startup stories: There are plenty of podcasts out there that focus on telling the startup story. These are great for talking about how you are starting to build your business, how it's growing, the strategies you’re using. These are very human-focused and it is stuff that people will eat up.
Technology topic: Other podcasts focus on discussing the technology side of the business. These will allow you to dive deep into the problem you’re seeking to solve and how you’re doing it.
Analysts
Analysts have a significant influence on the market. They talk to not only your target audience and your competitors, but they're writing reports and documents that are going to be scrutinized by these same individuals and used for planning purposes. If you're named in a report that is important to the market, that visibility will be important to building brand affinity.
As you grow, you'll need to put more of an emphasis on the analyst community and briefing them to let them know about any new technology advancements, new partnerships, new customers, and new use cases. At the very minimum, it’s recommended that you reach out to some of the bigger analyst firms or the ones that cover your specific area and ask for a briefing. You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take, so ask for the briefing.
If you're not a paying client, you will not get as many briefings as you may want. When you're a paying customer, you will have a lot of access to the analysts in your plan. When you’re not a paying client, expect to brief them once or twice a year.
If you are net new to this audience, you want to make yourself known with these analysts because startups are usually the ones that are on the cusp of trends and are more nimble in being able to take advantage of them. Analysts want to know about the trends that are happening out in the market.
Press
The press have a very influential role with your target audience. While social media is emerging as the primary way that people stay up to date on trends, the press feeds most of this information. They typically are looking for the most newsworthy topic and story to write about, they work on short deadlines, and they are driven by the number of people who read their articles. In this way, they stay close to their readers, providing information that they want to hear about.
It is very important to develop relationships with the press community because as you're putting out news or you have new product releases or partner announcements, you want to be able to feed this information to the press community because they'll be able to amplify your story.
To get started, make a list of the reporters that cover your space at the publications your target audience frequents. When you have a piece of news to share, reach out to them and ask them if they’d like to cover it. Provide high-level points so that they can make a decision about whether or not to cover it. In your outreach, personalize the message to each reporter rather than an email blast because they’ll be able to tell that you sent it to a distribution list and will know that there is a likelihood that their story won’t stand out from others covering it.
If you have a very important piece of news, offer a reporter an exclusive. If you offer an exclusive to one, make sure they are the only one and don't offer it to anybody else until that reporter has declined. Make sure you're feeding the press newsworthy information so that they feel as if they're in the know and they're going to be putting something out there that nobody else is putting out there.
Once you develop these relationships, keep them updated on the things that are happening within your business. These bites could be: Did you get a new round of funding? Did you sign a very significant partner? Did you sign a significant customer? Did it help someone significantly?
The press wants to know about these types of news and they want to document them.
Consistency and Collection
There are two keys to the strategy of developing an influencers marketing strategy: Consistency and Collection.
Consistency: You can’t turn this off and on. Continuous information to all three of these categories (the analysts, the press, and the podcasters) will start to really change the tide for your business.
Collection: This refers to collecting data over a long period of time. To do this, add a field to the forms on your website that ask “how did you hear about us?” Make it free type field, not a drop down with choices. When your sales team or your business development people talk to a new contact, they should ask the same question and record the answer in a designated field in your CRM. This information is gold as you continue to build your business because it will tell you what is working and what isn’t.
If you have any questions, please email me at rosa@rosalear.com and I will be happy to answer them. Have a great day!
