Creating new routes to market :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

Influencer marketing provides new routes to market. Or it provides
routes into new markets, whichever is most constraining your sales.
A great example of this is Case Study H, in which the firm has begun to
pre-launch its handsets with influencers before public release. If you are
moving into a new geography or vertical market it makes sense to find out
who the primary influencers are before spending too much time and effort
in the wrong areas.

Influencer marketing also helps with repositioning your firm in your
marketplace. Firms often start selling their products to middle managers
and operational executives. Sooner or later they outgrow this market and
want to gain access to C-level management. There they can sell a broader
value proposition and increase sales per customer organisation. The trouble
is that having spent time in the middle management layer, that’s where
the C-levels assume you should be. How do you get your new target
audience out of this mindset?

Similarly, selling business solutions to business people rather than
products to support staff is an oft-cited shift in strategy, yet in practice it
is extraordinarily hard. This is because you have to shift perceptions. ‘I’m a
business person: why are you talking to me? My technical people are over
there . . .’. An approach that works is to identify influencers in the new
target audience, and then get them to carry your message. And you use
influencer-led collateral to support your legitimacy in the market. The ROI
from this activity is easy to measure: do you successfully penetrate the
market or not?

Success is not always down to having a great plan though, so make sure
you invest in the implementation and execution elements. Influencer
marketing may tell you the most influential people in the market, but
your salespeople may not be trained talking to C-level executives or business
managers, or whatever your new target audience is. One of our early
mistakes was to assume that client firms knew how to engage with their
market, and just needed us to point them in the right direction. Not so, and
we had to develop sales training courses to bridge the gap in skills.