At the beginning of this year, Judi Samuels, working for Our Kids Media, asked me to provide an overview of influence marketing for a group of business owners who were seeking to better leverage their online community to grow their business.

What exactly is influence marketing? Why has it become such a hot topic for business owners? Below is a clip from that interview.

The business of influence marketing is evolving before our eyes. It’s no longer defined by social influence scoring platforms but the ability to sway the beliefs or actions of a business’s target audience.

When experimenting with influence marketing campaigns and researching methodologies for our book, Influence Marketing, we discovered that to exert influence, a business must commence with a better understanding of their audience, where they are in the purchase life cycle, and how they make decision.

In short, make the customer the center of your influence marketing strategy, not so called influencers.

New services such as InNetwork, a blogger-outreach platform, is one example of new players in the game that look beyond influencers. Instead of matching a business with a popular blogger, they match up a business’s audience with the audience of bloggers.  It’s a subtle but powerful shift.

Other platforms such as Traackr, who are helping to build relationships with a brand’s influencers instead of scoring them, understand the value of a customer-centric approach. Earlier this year they announced a partnership with Nimble, a social relationship management platform, that will assist Nimble user better understand how influence intersects with customer relationships and sales conversions.

Focusing on the customer, it’s the future of influence marketing.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego