These are trying times for marketers. Diminished budgets mean they must do more with less, while at the same time facing burgeoning competition from new channels. Consumers, meantime, have become exceptionally savvy at ferreting out their own third-party information on products.
Against this noisy backdrop of new technologies and competition, where does a marketer go to engage the shopper?
Meet the influencer, someone who can extend the reach of your brand through the innate quality of talkability, or word of mouth. Now, reaching the influencer is not a channel-specific or demographic-specific task. Rather, to reach the influencer, marketers must locate those people who have a unique attitude and behavior: They like to talk about certain categories.
This makes sense when considering one’s own group of friends. The people you may go to for information on computers versus fashion versus home care products are all different. Each one is passionate about a certain category, enjoys taking about it to friends and likes to share his or her knowledge.
While marketers have for some time had a general understanding of these potential brand backers, the influencer may be more complex than assumed. For instance:
* Consumers are influencers strictly within product categories, not across them all. She may care passionately about diapers, but not think at all about shampoo. This is a departure from common thinking.
* Few commonalities exist within influencer demographics, they cross gender, age, income levels and channels.
* Influencers have a tendency to do their talking in person – at the kitchen table, in the grocery aisle or on the phone. But opportunities exist to take their message to new realms, such as social media.
What unites all influencers is their tendency to discuss with authority topics they care about. Based on ICOM’s study of almost 3,900 consumers (from which the above characteristics are drawn), 45% of influencers say they always recommend products they like. And about 90% of the time these discussions occur face-to-face or on the phone, according to a 2008 Keller Fay Study.
As for connecting with them, that is more a matter of delivery than channel. Influencers simply are not committed to a specific media. While they tend to share information via email more than the average shopper, they are not more prone to using blogs or other social media. For example, influencers spend an average of five hours per week on Facebook, compared with 4.5 hours for non-influencers.
This means that it is critical to use multiple touch points, and specifically offline components, when engaging influencers. Consider that influencers are more likely than non-influencers to receive coupons or samples by direct mail (72% compared with 64%). Likewise, they are more prone to tell others about these offerings.
Similarly, influencers tend to enter contests and sweepstakes that are not online.
So how does one capture the influencers’ interests across all of these channels? It helps to first engage them with a message that is familiar and conversational. Influencers enjoy sharing their brand experience with authority. They really get a kick out of convincing others to try new products – 88% said they often talk about products or services they really like (compared with 81% of non-influencers).
As a result, influencers are sought out for their opinions.
While finding and reaching influencers is a start, marketers must remember that if the message delivered is not compelling, genuine and interesting, they are no further ahead. To truly engage influencers on an ongoing basis, brands need to have a unique message. Standard marketing approaches and brand sell will not work. ICOM’s pre-program message research has revealed that brands that reach out to influencers and give them an opportunity to provide direct feedback about products, ideas or even marketing concepts have the most impact and generate the most conversations.
Again, our research outcomes are in many ways contrary to what has been the traditional thinking about influencers. But they also show how a marketer can use influencer behavior as its map toward engagement. Once targeted based on their behavior, influencers can be engaged with a tailored message across multiple channels, and ideally become ambassadors for the brand.
The pay-off is the exponential quality of the influencer’s message, since they spread the word about the brands and products that matter to them to a trusting network of family and friends. These consumers, in turn, ferry the message out to people within their own circles. And so on.
In an environment where marketers must do more with less, this exposure could be a brand’s brass ring, and the halo effect on sales will keep it polished.
Gillian MacPherson is senior director of product marketing and insight at ICOM, a division of Epsilon Targeting.
