A native Londoner with poise and a twinkle in his eye, Hayes, 46, launched Influencer50 in the UK in 2003, expanding to his current home, San Francisco, in 2005. This gutsy move was not the family-man’s first venture after getting a taste for the industry as a marketing executive at EDS and managing the Microsoft account for technology PR company Text 100, Hayes cut his entrepreneurial teeth founding PR agency Noiseworks. The agency climbed in status and in territory, spreading over nine European countries to represent clients from HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems to BT and Sybase. He also founded NewEconomyPartners.net, an international agency network comprising of agencies in 17 countries, and most recently authored Influencer marketing Who really influences your customers? (Elsevier 2008).
I got blank looks every time I talked about influencer marketing, says Hayes, adding he wrote the book to explain the influencer concept.
Moving Influencer50 to the States was not quite the shock Hayes was expecting the company was received rather well, and he jokes the hardest thing to get used to was the language discrepancies. Expecting to find the American marketing industry leagues ahead of the UK, he was surprised to find that most of the sector was on a close par. They were in many ways as innocent in this marketplace as anybody in Europe was, he says. Beyond that, he found US companies far more open to the new ideas of European companies than he had expected, and that the larger budgets of American companies meant that it was easier to work there.
Hayes’ integration into the world of influencer marketing began back in his Noiseworks days, he explains, when he encountered difficulty persuading sales directors of the value of PR or indeed any other advertising channels. It was then that he began to investigate the barriers they perceived, and discovered that many sales directors felt potential clients lost interest when they left the sales meeting room, while they had seemed utterly convinced during the meeting. This led Hayes to begin questioning what it is that influences people’s decision-making once they were out of the presence of the sellers.
We began to take more interest in what exactly the pressures are to make that buying decision, he explains. There was really very little understanding of what makes a purchasing decision-maker tick, or how they approach the decision-making process.
One discovery was that influencers were far more varied than merely the media and analysts, contrary to popular perception. We try to get our clients to understand that influence comes from a much broader range of segments than simply the traditional and well-understood ones, he says. What we’re trying to do is talk to companies about how they can reorient their marketing around the current realities of how decisions are made rather than the traditionally held beliefs of 10, 20 years ago.
To implement the strategy, the first step is to understand what it’s like to be a buyer, says Hayes. This means ignoring what you’re trying to promote, and consider instead what it’s like to buy, he explains. The next step is to go about identifying who your influencers are. Finally, create a one-to-one relationship with these people. There won’t be very many of these people who are massively influential, and they’re worth the resource of creating the relationship. At this time, marketers must listen and find out what made those people influential, and how those people exert their influence, advises Hayes.
Implementing influencer marketing into your mix doesn’t have to be a cut and dry revolution, he stresses you can slipstream pilot programmes into existing marketing campaigns. They can make it an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary one, he says.
Hayes thinks influencer marketing has overcome the hurdle of persuading the industry of its value, and sees the next challenge as learning how to measure the impact and effect of this tool. Now that everybody acknowledges the importance of influencers, everybody will be moving to ‘how do you measure the success of that new strategy?’
One way Hayes recommends is through the Net Promoter score, which evaluates how likely someone is to go forward and recommend a company.
In many ways, we’re like the alternative medicine of marketing, says Hayes, suggesting influencer as the solution people turn to when they just can’t tighten their belts any more. I think people are absolutely aware now that they need to change fundamentally how they do marketing, rather than do their traditional marketing on a smaller budget.
