Influencers are powerful people, in some cases they can even make or break businesses. These two entrepreneurs learned the power of targeting the right influencers to market their products and gain traction. Here’s how they did it.
##Targeting Influencers Personally
Nana Agyeman Prempeh is the CEO of Asoriba, a mobile app designed to help churches run themselves. He knew from the start that the success of his business was going to depend on getting the right pastors to back him and use his product.
“It’s like start with the people you know, that’s what I see. Always start with the people you know.”
-Nana Agyeman Prempeh, CEO of Asoriba
So his way to target influential church pastors was to begin with those he knew. Nana leveraged his own connections as the son of a pastor to build credibility for his product and mission.
“Let me give you an example. We went to this man’s house and present the product to him that this is what it does and we think it’s of great value and hear what he had to say. In there he then referred us to that meeting, that okay, we have this meeting, come and show it to all the pastors. We really had strong benefits from our initial connections, something that till date has been very relevant.”
-Nana Agyeman Prempeh, CEO of Asoriba
But to make his efforts more effective, Nana also tried to focus on developing relationships with the most influential pastors. As a result, he’s managed to develop his business into a real success story with plenty of credibility among Ghanian churches.
##Targeting Influencers Without Personal Connections
Suba is a photo sharing app developed in Accra. But its goal was to build itself in the US market. The company couldn’t afford a full marketing campaign in the US, so they had to find just the right influencers and get them interested.
“For instance, there is this guy in Ghana… He’s sort of a tech blogger, doesn’t write so much about apps but about social media, those kinds of things, so we felt it was going to be a good fit… So really targeting the right kind of people. You’d be surprised that it’s not really that hard, not really that hard… You just need a good person.”
-Nelson Klutse, Co-Fouder of Suba, MEST Incubator
So they used precise targeting in order to maximize the effect of their efforts much in the same way Nana did. But they also developed a system to identify, sort, and reach out to these influencers.
“You can’t go to the BBC History Department to write about Suba, right? Ideally, it has to be the tech guys. So we identified all the sectors with all these companies that we think would be interested in writing about this, put them in a huge doc, and then sent out the press release. Some of them didn’t respond. I think because everyone was sending emails with regards to, you know, what’s going on with Suba, if there’s been an update. And then if one… if you get featured on this blog, then you send out a press release to the other people telling them that you’ve been featured on this.”
-Eric Hackman, Co-Fouder of Suba, MEST Incubator
This system made it even easier to create and reach out to large numbers of influential tech bloggers. It was also designed to overcome the classic problem of reaching out to influencers you don’t have a connection to: low response rates. By using a single successful connection as a reason to reach out again the system specifically targets that weakness of the strategy.
Overall, both companies have found success with their strategies. They’re both now endorsed by influential figures in their respective areas and are growing. The ability to precisely target influencers was critical in this success.