Influence Marketing

Book excerpt: Identify and Manage the Influence Paths That Convert Brand Awareness to Customer Acquisition! Today, you face a brutally tough, maddeningly elusive new competitor: the “wisdom of crowds.” Social media gives consumers 24x7 access to the attitudes and recommendations of their most engaged peers. These are the views that shape buying decisions. These are the views you must shape and use. Influence Marketing won’t just help you identify and enlist key influencers: it will help you manage the influence paths that lead consumers to buy. By sharing empirical evidence of hard-won lessons from pioneering influence marketers, Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella provide a blueprint that moves influence marketing beyond simple brand awareness and into sales acquisition and customer life time value measurement. They integrate new tools and techniques into a complete methodology for generating more and better leads—and converting them faster, at higher margins. • Put the customer—not the influencer—at the center, and plan influence marketing accordingly • Recognize where each prospect stands in the purchase life cycle right now • Clarify how your consumers move from brand preference to purchase • Identify key micro-influencers who impact decisions at every stage • Gain indispensable insights into the context of online relationships • Recognize situational factors that derail social media brand recommendations • Understand social influence scoring models and overcome their limitations • Re-engineer and predict influence paths to generate measurable action • Master the “4 Ms” of influence marketing: make, manage, monitor, measure • Transform influence marketing from a “nice-to-have” exercise into a powerful strategy Additional online resources can be found at www.influencemarketingbook.com