Influencer Marketing – why should you consider peer review sites?

27/03/2020

Influencer Marketing blog

Time to read: 2 minutes

Marc Duke, head of influencer engagement, takes an in-depth look at why even in B2B circles peer review sites matter.

Influencer Marketing, as the name suggests, is about influencing the various people, groups and organisations that are trusted by the buyer or decision maker when making a decision to purchase products or services. One such group are Peer Review websites, where customers leave reviews of recent purchases, and their importance is growing all of the time.

A couple of statistics to back this up:

  • Nearly 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase (Spiegel Research Center, 2017)
  • 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review (G2 and Heinz Marketing, 2017).

While you may have read a tale or two about fake Amazon reviews and getting friends and family to write about a holiday chalet on TripAdvisor, when it comes to B2B peer review sites things are  much more regulated and the process of working with influencer sites is a lot clearer.

To give some context here, peer review sites are most relevant to software providers that are targeting businesses. For example, the adoption of cloud software has increased beyond all recognition in last decade. The Software as Service (or SaaS) market has become mainstream and with it the importance of reading and relying upon peer reviews to inform purchasing decisions has also risen. The reason for this is simple; it’s great to get a free trial of a piece of software but even better if you can read about the experiences (positive and negative) of your peers.

So what peer reviews sites are we actually talking about? Four major sites are:

Before you start to target peer review sites, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

  • What categories do they cover?
  • Are my competitors listed?
  • Are my markets covered?
  • Do the sites just generate traffic or also provide leads?
  • Do I have the resources to create accurate product and company profiles?
  • Do I have the resources to handle negative reviews?
  • Does my marketing process enable me to maximise positive reviews/endorsements?

Assuming you can answer all of these questions, you are then in a position to look at working with Peer Review sites. The first thing that needs to be done is create a profile of your company and product/s, which doesn’t cost a penny. Once you have a company and product profile the next step is sourcing customer reviews. If you have happy customers it’s a case of asking them to provide a review of your product in much the same way you would ask a connection to endorse you on LinkedIn. If you don’t have a large bank of customers, you might find that some users will discover your profile.

You also have the option of contacting the account management staff at these sites who will be happy to discuss how to run a reviews programme (how to get reviews on your product page) and ways in which to generate branded collateral with reviews left by your customers to help with your sales process. You will need budget for this, so you have to weigh up the benefits compared to the costs. Just remember that all of these sites want to cover every vendor in the market. so Getting set up will just cost you some time and information so even a start-up should consider peer review sites.

The main benefits of working with peer review sites include:

  • Traffic – people can click from the review page to your site or landing page
  • Endorsement – some reviewers are happy to be referenced and to be used in customer reference programmes
  • Leads – some sites offer ‘click to trial’ so a prospect reading a review can request a demo
  • Insight – there is a lot you can learn about your competition.

One thing is for certain – businesses can’t ignore peer review sites as they are increasingly becoming a decision making tool of choice for some customers, and a positive review can help move a prospect from the top of funnel to the bottom. However you look to engage with peer review sites, they are certainly worth considering as part of your marketing strategy.

Share

Influencer Marketing in B2B – Covering all your bases

20/08/2019
Time to read: 2 minutes

Marc Duke explains the science of influencer marketing: 

Influencer marketing blogI am a sports fan, so any sporting metaphor works for me. When I thought about Influencer Marketing this classic baseball reference sums it up and here’s why:

Influencer marketing is about making sure the people who influence your target customer know about your offering. The idea of covering all your bases means you have ‘influenced’ all those stakeholders who influence the purchasing decision, and can endorse or advise in favour of your company over the competition. When you communicate directly with your customer or prospect, you are then pushing on an open door as they have already been positively influenced and are already open to dialogue.

Which bases do we cover?

1) Identifying your influencers

So that’s the theory, but who are the people influencing your customers? Much will depend on whether your business sells direct to the customer or through the channel. Either way, the first job is to map out a set of discrete groups that influence the purchasing decision. Let’s take the example of a company that produces environmentally-friendly and energy-efficient office lighting.

Influencers that make the cut will include:

  •  Journalists – who write about office environments.
  •  Industry analysts/consultants – who write about the market and provide ‘behind closed doors’ advice to decision makers
  •  Academics – who teach about ergonomics and design and need to be aware of   the latest trends
  •  Industry associations – who represent the trade and bring together people who work in in the industry
  •  Industry gurus – who blog, write and speak about the latest trends
  •  Existing customers – who use the product/service and can endorse its use
  •  Competition – who’d rather your target customer used their solution!
  •  Partners – who you work with to your mutual benefit
  •  Investors – who have invested in your business
  •  Charities – supporting greener initiatives

I could go on but by now you should have noticed a couple of things. Firstly, this is a long list (one client I worked with identified SIXTEEN separate influencer groups) and secondly, other parts of your marketing activity already address some of these groups e.g. journalists will be handled by PR and industry analysts will be looked after by the Analyst Relations team.

2) Scoring your influencers

For this example let’s just focus our influencer efforts on the industry gurus. How do we identify them and how do we work out the weight of their influence? Not as simple as you might think, and there is a need for some smart metrics that can evaluate the following:

  • Reach – how big a following does this guru have on twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc? Does this person have blogs or articles in local publications or globally?
  • Relevance – how engaged is this influencer socially e.g. how popular is the content that this person has shared?
  • Expertise – from their public activity how is this influencer perceived? For example, have you noticed that they are giving keynotes at major industry events?

Each influencer will need a numeric score from 1 – 10 for each category. Ultimately, we will come up with a final influence score. The idea here is that there must be some measure of influence, even if arbitrary, that enables us to track and decide who indeed is an influencer of our target customer base.

3) Engaging your influencers

Assuming we have done our homework, we will probably have anything between 20 to 50 gurus that we have scored and ranked. But how will we work with them? This is where you need to be totally clear that working with an influencer is about education – NOT selling. It’s about informing – NOT persuading and it’s also about recognising that this influencer is rightly lauded because they might have a better understanding of the market than you, they have more experience than you or they just might be really, really smart!

The sorts of questions you need to think about:

  • Is there information you can share that they will value and find of interest such as a white paper on an issue they care about?
  • Are there things they can actually help with e.g. taking part in a podcast, speaking at one of your events?
  • Do you have people in your company credible enough to establish and maintain proper relationships with your halloed influencers rather than just sell at them?

If you have big ticks to all the above then you are ready to go out there and influence those influencers.

Share