#AskAshleyFaus: Should we hire an influencer or a thought leader? #AshleyFausAnswers: It depends! I used my 4-pillar framework to assess three potential content creators: influencers, subject matter experts, and thought leaders. The assessment pillars include: Credibility Profile Prolific Depth of Ideas To be clear: ALL three are valuable! The "best" one depends on your needs 😀 A short summary of how each type of creator helps: Influencers tend to help you reach a new audience. The key here is that you need to build a long-term partnership, not a short-term advertisement. The reason these people have credibility with your ideal audience is because they DON'T sell. If you want a spokesperson who follows a script, you're running an ad campaign, not an influencer program (and that's awesome, ads with the right spokesperson can be great!). Influencers can help drive short-term awareness goals and long-term sales goals. Subject matter experts tend to help you explain how to solve problems, troubleshoot, and educate on existing solutions. In many cases, they focus primarily on internal employees, existing customers/users, and the existing audience (ie: presenting at a company-sponsored user conference or writing on the company blog). They can have influence externally, but two big differentiators for SMEs vs. thought leaders is the size of their external audience and depth of ideas (SMEs are focused on existing knowledge, thought leaders are developing new ideas). SMEs can help drive medium- and long-term usage goals. Thought leaders focus on new ideas in the market. They drive the conversation about what's next, and they help the audience think in a new way. They have credibility and influence with internal and external audiences, including audiences outside of the existing user base. They're talking about new problems, new solutions, and new strategies and tactics. Thought leaders tend to help educate the market and build trust for the company, and can help drive long-term impact for sales, partnerships, recruiting, investing, and affinity goals. There's A LOT to unpack with each of these content creators, so companies need to think holistically about their strategy. Which type of creator(s) are you using? #thoughtleadership #marketingstrategy #socialmedia
I am not sure i understand the diagrams. Is there a legend to explain different colors and what does the arrows or flow diagram mean. Its a good short presentation but maybe a document to go with it would clarify a bit...
Great post Ashley and nice framework. 👍 I am a big fan of creating content with an industry expert (SME / thought leader) as well as an influencer to bring deep expertise and extend promotion. Also adding in analysts / customers into the mix.
Using them all Ashley Faus, and partnering them. Connecting influencers with SMEs enables relationships to form and the SME to benefit from the reach and scale of an influencer to spark their community building and then reciprocally with the influencer - SME relationship it becomes easier to engage the influencer into more pieces of content, events etc as trust starts to form as fhe relationships take hold.
I'm curious to see where you go with this
THIS is going STRAIGHT to SAVED. 🫶
Breaking down into categories is a good starting point and eye-opener for many GTM teams. I've seen folks use influencer, affiliate, thought leader and other terms loosely without realizing the nuances between them. Who you need will depend on your goals. Good post!
I have long loved the #Influencer model you share here Ashley - it illustrates the differences so clearly and when one is more suitable than the other.
Brilliant. I love it Ashley. So clear and so helpful.
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1yIf I'm self evaluating, I think I need to boost my depth of ideas pillar. Marketers will raise eyebrows when I say this but I'm not a fan of nicheing down. I look at my content pillars as sales/talent strategy/DEI/marketing/technology. If I truly niche down, I'm at the intersection of all of those things (which is where my personal brand sits). However, my content tends to either stand on a single pillar or intersect across multiple pillars while rarely intersecting all of them. That's probably why the depth of ideas element is lagging.