Key influencers are the people who can actually drive sales and awareness. While in consumer spending, members of peer group or reference group act as influencers and in business to business (or organizational) buying, internal employees (engineers, managers, purchasers) or external consultants act as influencers. Thus, we can term those individuals who have the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of their (real or perceived) authority, knowledge, position, or relationship are referred to as Key Influencers.
On a smaller scale writers, bloggers, photographers, videographers, social media personalities, and other content publishers will have positive or negative impact on your exposure, engagement, and, most importantly, bottom line, too.
In order to device a better business strategy toward bringing your business to the forefront, we need to know what the steps to be taken. Here, we describe three terms – Research, Explore and Contact, in detail.
Research
It is good practice to start researching on key influencer before reaching out to people around your business. Obviously, this process is time consuming but you can end up with better result. As a first step, start with industry specific research to meet the objectives. One can start by compiling popular publications, social media personalities, and media personalities in your industry. This will lead to pin point those influence your target audience.
Explore
Next step would be to know your key influencers even more. Now, you can perform a deep research into their histories from blogs, websites and other publicly available media. Also, try to identify general guidelines, if any, while contacting them. Some will have very specific guidelines and you need to know what those guidelines before contacting them
Contact
Once you know how your key influencers prefer to be contacted, you then need to get in direct contact with them. You can make yourself familiar with them by making them know that you had made a few efforts to know about them before and have prepared well for the meeting. Make it a point to keep it straight that you are meeting them for a real purpose and not wasting either of your time. You can then move on to make your proposal, so that they will now be able to decide to endorse your product/services. It also becomes vital to be ever ready for making a presentation before them, if they need to know more about your business, products or services.
