If you’re like most direct marketers, you think your job is to find prospects and turn them into sales leads. But if you’re aiming your messages exclusively at buyers, you’re missing an opportunity to impact your company’s sales in broader ways as well as the chance to raise your own visibility as a marketing strategist.
That opportunity is “influencers.” They’re the people who drive sales without ever signing a check. They are the one American in 10 who, as one popular 2003 book pointed out, direct the other nine on decisions that range from which political candidate to support to which fast-food joint to pig out at. Too often, though, these tastemakers are as ignored by marketers as they are influential on consumers.
Influencers often don’t buy a product — but they usually know so much about it that they have won over the ears of prospective buyers. They’re the people who customers turn to when it’s time to make a decision.
You probably think you already know who the influencers are, but chances are you don’t. Many experts assert that most marketers know fewer than 20 percent of the people who affect sales. Marketers too often assume that they should go after the media or the top-tier industry analysts. But in doing so, they miss the point entirely. Those sources can be influential, sure, but they usually have little impact on the final purchase decision.
No, marketers need to be exploring the real universe of influencers, whose ranks include channel players and venture capitalists and government agencies and systems integrators. In most cases, influencers are trusted resources who tell buyers what are the safe choices to make, or who define the environment for making that choice. Recruit them to your side and you’ve made the sales job a whole lot easier.
Of course, you have to first realize that enlisting them is indeed part of your job, that your goal is to foster ties between them and your brand by engaging the influencers about issues that matter to your mutual customers and them. Unfortunately, most direct marketers don’t get involved in this kind of relationship-building at all. That’s where your opportunity is.
I suggest that you start by collaborating with your senior sales and marketing managers to identify a group of influencers — management consultants, for example — whom you aren’t currently targeting. Prepare a personalized letter inviting them to an intimate dinner with a few of your senior executives. Get your CEO to sign it. Send the package Express Mail, along with a small gift. Then follow up personally by phone.
And by all means, own the relationship.
Follow up with more targeted mailings and more get-togethers. Send them your direct marketing materials and ask their comments. You probably won’t work magic in the first meeting, but if you’re persistent and consistent, over the next 12 to 18 months you’ll build a relationship. That will pay off handsomely when prospects start calling up your sales staff asking about products that the influencer recommended to them.
What’s more, you may well find that, in your office, your efforts have created a new influencer: you.
Paul Gillin is the principal of Paul Gillin Communications, in Framingham, Mass. His is also author of The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Media.
Large Business, Medium Business, Opinion, Small Business, Targeting
