Influencer Impact #9: Another Way to Categorize Influencers and Developing a Private Community Playbook

Oh hai, friend! ??

Welcome to the ninth edition of Influencer Impact!

After taking a break during the holidays and dealing with several things in my personal life, it’s time to get back in the saddle to provide value for you (I hope!).

Another way to categorize influencers

On a recent episode of the Influencer Impact podcast, Ashley Zeckman and I dove into the various types of influencers a B2B brand should be working with.

While many of us know by now the industry categories, Ashley had a different take on how we should consider the creators that brands choose to build relationships with and activate during campaigns:

• Professional influencers: these are the creators that are recognizable and well-known. They have built credibility with a large audience over a period of time. They may be successful authors, speakers, have popular blogs and/or newsletters.
• Up-and-comers: these are creators that are successfully building an audience and are on track to becoming a professional influencers. They may be a nano or macro creator that has built up with a specific niche.
• Niche experts: as Ashley describes these creators: “they have that really deep expertise that sometimes we as marketers, despite our best efforts, cannot write content, based on who our target audience is truly right. If you're a marketer trying to write for engineers or scientists, it can be hard, right?”
• Social amplifiers: these creators have some expertise and they are able to help you cast a wider net as part of your campaign.
• Internal experts: so often we focus on external influencers but don’t consider the credible SMEs that we have within our companies. Working with these folks, not only are they able to build their personal brand but they also provide credibility for your brand.
• Finally, customers and prospects: both prospects and customers love feeling as though they can offer something of value and the brand can help to amplify these voices. As Ashley suggests, “what better way to get in front of your prospects than including them as an expert? They love feeling like they have something to offer, and then other customers, help your target audience see themselves in the content.”

As you build out your next influencer campaign, instead of thinking of the creators that you’re going to engage as niche, micro, macro, etc, try thinking of them in the categories that Ashley suggests.

Developing a private community playbook

As private communities continue to rapidly grow and take on increasing importance in B2B, we’ll begin to see organizations ask team members to take responsibility for their overall strategy (like I do).

While this is excellent to see, it doesn’t scale so a playbook can help team members understand how they can successfully be active community members. Not only does this allow them to showcase their expertise when done correctly, it helps to bring increased brand awareness.

Here are a few tips that should be in your playbook:

1.With the endless number of communities available, guide your team to join 2-3 initially to begin focusing on. I’d suggest one paid one and a couple of free options. A list of communities to consider includes:

Pavilion: Pavilion is one of the most well-known communities there is. There are two membership levels, Executive and Associate, both of which are paid. What differentiates Pavillion from the other communities on this list is Pavilion University. In his year-end wrap-up, founder and CEO, Sam Jacobs said that there had been 12,000 enrollments.

Peak: Peak is an invite-only paid community for marketers whose focus is “on creating 10 CEOs and 50 CMOs by 2025 and getting 1% better every day.” (let me know if you’d like one)

RevGenius: RevGenius is a free Slack community that boasts a strong membership community with nearly 33,000 members, including a wide range of members from sales, marketing, RevOps, and more.

MoPros: Marketing Ops Professionals (MoPros) is a free Slack focused on those, you guessed it, in marketing ops roles. It’s a strong and community with thousands of members.

Revenue Circle: Revenue Circle is an invite-only community for VPs and above in Sales and Marketing roles. It’s powered by Demandbase and managed by yours truly.

If you’re in sales, our team at Demandbase put together a list of sales communities that will help to level up your career.

2. Setting up alerts: As you join more communities it will become increasingly harder to manage all conversations. An easy way to assist with this is to utilize keyword notifications within Slack.

3. Elevate customer voices: If someone is inquiring about how your product differs from your competition, whom do you think they’ll trust more – an employee or a customer? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. One strategy that’s been successful for us is working with our customer marketing team to build an advocacy program where we monitor for threads that are impactful to our brand. Not only does it help with brand awareness but it assists our customers with increasingly building their personal brands.

4. Utilize bit.ly links and promo codes for easy tracking: It’s not a surprise that you’ll want to measure your efforts. While not everything can be measured, you can create custom bit.ly links and/or promo codes that’ll help.

5. How to be an active member – right and wrong ways: While this could be a newsletter in itself, you need to provide guidance on how to be a good community member. For example: don’t pimp yourself, how to properly represent your company, how to reply to prospect/customer inquires, etc.

?? ?? Where you can find me online

LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram | Website

?? Where I’ll be speaking

Are you looking for a speaker with expertise in B2B influencer marketing or private communities, drop me a line.

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I’ll see you at the same time, same place next week!

- Justin