Influencer Marketing: What You Need to Know to Get Started

Does your company work with influencers?

Want to incorporate influencers into your marketing?

To discover what you need to know about influencer marketing, I interview Lee Odden.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Lee Odden, an influencer marketing expert. He's the author of Optimize, the CEO of TopRank Marketing, and his company produces TopRankBlog.com.

Lee explores influencer marketing and what you need to know to do it well.

You'll discover how to work with influencers.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Influencer Marketing
What is influencer marketing?

Lee says the roots of influencer marketing are in advocacy and public relations organizations. You're essentially working with people who are really famous in an industry. The idea is to create an affinity for the brand for however that celebrity is known, and to reach the audience that celebrity has been able to attract.

Lee adds that people still have the idea that if they convince famous people to talk about their company, then they'll be famous too.

The reality is that, today, especially in the world of social media, people are empowered to follow their passions to create, curate, connect with others, and attract a following. This allows people to create their own influence. Everyone is influential about something, Lee says.

Not just famous people can be part of your influencer marketing program. An influencer can be an employee like "Ted in engineering," who has a blog with 5,000 subscribers. Or, it could be that person with a million followers. It could even be customers who are advocating for you every chance they get. When you work with people who have subject matter expertise and an active network, you can advance your brand goals in some really powerful ways.

On platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat, there's a whole category of people called creators. They have various levels of celebrity, influence, or network size, and have anointed themselves as experts. There are marketplaces where brands can go and literally shop for a tweet, an Instagram image, product placement in a YouTube video, etc. For companies in the business of paying to play, it's a good fit.

There are also brands that want to develop relationships with people who are truly thought leaders in their industry, or up-and-comers. They want to develop relationships, because they have an affinity for each other and have things their common audiences care about. There's no right or wrong, but it's important when setting expectations to know what you're going to get out of it.

What is the distinction between a celebrity and a thought leader? Lee brought up an expression he borrowed from Scott Monty, "brandividual." This is someone truly invested in developing his or her own brand, except they're an individual. These professional influencers write books, give keynotes, and do all sorts of amazing things.

Lee adds it's an important distinction to make between someone who is exclusively focused on being well-known and someone who is a true thought leader. He's not saying a brandividual can't be a thought leader. A thought leader is someone expressing original thought. They're creating content based on intelligence, experimentation, and observations.

Brian Solis is a great example of a thought leader, Lee says. In addition to being really good at promoting himself, Brian is constantly experimenting. He does research. He interviews. And then collects, analyzes, and interprets the data. His experiments and experiences help form the thought leader con...