Influencer message development :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

If you were developing a set of messages for your prospects, you’d want to
understand their needs first. Then you’d develop a set of propositions that
mapped onto those needs, demonstrating how your offering delivered
value on those propositions. Marketing to influencers is no different. They
do, however, have different needs. Remember that influencers don’t buy
from you, so they don’t care what you’re selling. What is a very important
detail for a prospect, who’s comparing one competitor with another, is
irrelevant to an influencer. But they do care about their own agendas.

For example, journalists care about creating copy. They have deadlines
and column inches to fill. Their primary goal is to fill those inches. In a
Maslow-like hierarchy of needs, journalists can think about higher orders
of fulfilment, such as imparting insight or opinion, only if the quantity is
present. So give them content, not spoon-fed (most journalists are too
savvy for that) but through 1-to-1 contacts with your senior executives.

Journalists love a scoop, or insider information. Because you know your
journalist influencers you can target them specifically, and build a relationship
between them and your spokespeople. Your message to journalists is:
‘‘We have some great insight on xyz product category, and we’re only
going to brief you and two other influential journalists on this.’’
Note that we said that you should build a relationship between journalists
and your spokespeople, not with your PR operation. A key measurement
of success is the degree to which influencers external to your firm
interact with influential people inside it. You will have, or will need to
create, influential individuals working for you. Get them connected with
the wider influencer community. We’d hope that it goes without saying,
but we often hear of bad examples. So, for the record, don’t send your
most influential journalists standard press releases. Why would they read
them? They don’t care about you, any more than they care about the 200
other firms that also send them releases.

You do need to ensure that you are speaking in the appropriate language
to influencers. Each influencer category has its own vocabulary, and you need
to articulate your messages using the right dictionary. Just as vertical industries
have their own jargon, influencer categories have their preferred terms.
So when you’re talking to channel partners for example, make sure you are
talking bundles, ASPs and attach rates.1 Again, you need to develop a specific
set of messages for channel partners. The message might be something like:
‘‘You’re one of the most influential partners we have and we’re going to give
you special treatment. We want to be a preferred supplier for you.’’
Other messages you might use include:

& To analyst influencers: ‘We’d like to get your thoughts on our newvision’.
& To regulatory influencers: ‘You’re important and we’re listening’.
& To standards body influencers: ‘We want to contribute’.
& To venture capitalists and financier influencers: ‘We can direct you to
the next big thing’.

To academia influencers: ‘We want to commission a research project’.
& To competitor influencers: ‘If you join us we can further your career’.
And so on. Ideally, you’ll create not one but a series of messages, a
curriculum that educates (or re-educates) each influencer or influencer
type. As the term curriculum infers, influencer marketing requires a longterm
commitment from you, because that’s what you want from your
influencers.
There are two special cases to be treated even more carefully than
‘normal’ influencers. These are the influencers within customers and
groups or clubs of customers. We’ve said this before, but the most significant
type of influencer is a customer, preferably though not necessarily
one of your own customers. A variant on this type of influencer is the
collective, such as buyers groups, purchasing lists and procurement
authorities.

It’s tempting to create messages for these types of influencer
that are based on, or are copies of, your standard sales pitches. This is a bad
idea: influential customers will respond even less favourably to your
pitches than most prospects. This is because they are influential for a
reason, because they are early adopters or market leaders, or whatever.
The best message to a customer influencer is ‘‘We want to learn from you’’.
Humility is a rare thing in sales and marketing, and if your approach is
genuine you will get their attention.