If You Think Influencers Are Cringe, You’re Out of Touch

A common sentiment I hear from colleagues is essentially that influencers are embarrassing (“cringe” in the parlance of our times). 

There are a few understandable reasons for this, but I’m here to persuade you that the objections to influencers reflect an outmoded worldview. And if you want to market yourself and your company to achieve maximum prosperity, you need to get with the times — because cultivating influence via content creation is one of the three pillars of modern B2B marketing.

The Arguments Against Influencers Are Half-Baked

Here are three reasons people dislike influencers and why they don’t stand up to scrutiny:

1) They associate influencers with content creators on social channels who hawk dubious products that they themselves don’t believe in — for example, ineffective supplements. 

But this is a silly objection to influencers as a whole. This would be like saying you hate media companies as an entire category because you disagree with the content of a single tabloid. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

There’s nothing wrong with building an audience by providing value to them and then promoting legitimate products and services. And that’s what cultivating influence as a marketing strategy is all about. 

You teach agencies about how to get the most out of their CTV ad buys, and they want to partner with you on their CTV ad buys. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just good marketing. 

2) They dislike the ability of people without gatekeeper-certified credentials to wield influence and stake out positions of thought leadership. 

For example, it’s annoying to a lot of people who have spent decades building marketing careers that content creators like 18-year-old Jenny Hoyos will probably make millions of dollars teaching brands how to go viral on YouTube and TikTok. 

I sympathize with this position insofar as there genuinely are people out there promoting stupid ideas to large audiences. But, again, you can’t dismiss the entire category that is influencers because some of them are hucksters, and you can’t turn back the clock. The ability to build an engaged online audience is critical to modern marketing. 

So, if people with online audiences and far less experience annoy you, don’t get mad. Get even. Leverage your wisdom to compete for that audience. 

In fact, this is how most business content is created. You look at what other people are doing wrong and tell your audience about it. Then, they come to trust you. So, to beat the bad influencers … become an influencer.

3) They think it’s embarrassing or unprofessional to mix the personal and the professional. So, when people build audiences and influence by creating content that sometimes includes aspects of their personality or personal life, traditionalists are put off by the blurring of conventional boundaries. 

I think there’s some merit to this critique — for example, controversies that don’t serve the audience don’t belong in a marketing program. I’m not a “Bring your whole self to work” proponent. 

But you also have to accept that your boring white paper is competing with entertaining short-form videos and deeply personal podcasts for your audience’s attention. And the audience is going to gravitate toward the entertaining and relatable option. 

So, again, don’t get mad; get even. If being personable, funny, and entertaining is part of what it takes to build an audience and a reputation in modern marketing, you should be recruiting for those skills just as you’ve always recruited for people who can write a captivating email or persuasive white paper.

Influence Is Critical to Modern Marketing

Influencers are not new. There have always been influencers in any given industry, and if you had an influencer at the helm of your company, they would boost your awareness and help generate new business (the task of B2B marketing). 

What’s new about influencers in 2024 is the medium they use to build and wield influence. It used to be that the press and industry event circuit were the gatekeepers of influence. If you were an adtech CEO or marketer and wanted to build a profile for yourself and your company, you carefully cultivated relationships with a couple dozen journalists who covered your industry, and you also spoke at industry events. The two fed each other because a profile in AdWeek might beget a speaking spot at an industry event and vice versa.

None of that has gone away! PR and events remain critical to modern marketing. But there is a third pillar of modern B2B marketing, and that’s the sort of content that we associate with influencers: social, audio, email. Nowadays, you don’t need two decades of experience or pricey event speaking slots to build an audience that can dramatically benefit your career and your company. You just need to do good tweets.

Most adtech companies don’t allocate enough resources to cultivating influence. They are not creating content consistently enough, their content is too tied to their product (which not enough people care about), and their distribution strategy is outdated. The result is they miss out on a huge opportunity to do the core work of B2B marketing: building their reputation and relationships, both with customers and ancillary stakeholders who will foster growth.

Don’t Take My Word for It

I often cite people in the industry who actively cultivate and wield influence because they help me convince adtech business leaders that cultivating influence via content creation matters. A prime example of an adtech influencer is former Beeswax CEO and current Marketecture CEO Ari Paparo. 

Ari tweets and posts on LinkedIn, he’s got a podcast (which is actually part of a whole media company), and he writes a newsletter. All this content performs better because of his business success, but the content itself also fosters that success. And if you go to Ari’s Twitter bio, what will you see? That he calls himself, without embarrassment, an “Ad Tech influencer.” 

So, you tell me. What’s so cringe about cultivating influence?