Do you know who your allies and foes are? Does your marketing and sales team know who's on their side and who's working against them? If they don't, it's going to be difficult to target customers.
A lot of time is wasted when companies market to everybody, everywhere, hoping the law averages gets them 5 sales out of 100 contacts.
By finding the right people, your allies, advocates, you can figure out where the most valuable influence marketing is taking place and who's doing it.
Once your sales and marketing team has this information, they can put together a focused and detailed strategy aimed at influencing consumer behavior to your benefit.
In order for you to understand your client, you must know who influences them.
Most of your clients rely on more than just your ads and previous clients' references to make their decisions.
With the age of information overload at their fingertips, they can reach out to a number of 3rd parties who can give them advice and information they need to make their decisions.
The important thing is getting a 3rd party who is objective and can give quality feedback to clients.
The references people supply to others are never ones that are going to paint an unattractive picture of them, so it's important for clients to find unbiased information.
In the future, we can expect to see more tools that enable clients to find objective information on the internet that are relevant to the decisions they are trying to make.
Your role, as a business leader, is to figure out who is advocating for you and who's putting you down.
If you can do that, you can make effective use of your social media marketing investments.