The Age of Influence: The Power of Influencers to Elevate Your Brand

by Neal Schaffer Narrated by Stu Gray

Overview

The Age of Influence*is an essential guide for marketing professionals and business owners who want to create and implement a highly effective, sustainable influencer marketing plan in order for their brands to succeed.

We are amid an unprecedented digital transformation and tapping into this change is vital to any brand in today's climate. Social media has democratized authority and influence, and information is created and consumed in ways that are constantly evolving.

Internationally-recognized social media marketing expert Neal Schaffer explains how that shift plays a significant role in online marketing in the Influencer Era. Influencer marketing is about establishing relationships, turning fans into influencers, and leveraging that influence to share your message in a credible and authentic way.

In*The Age of Influence, Schaffer teaches entrepreneurs, marketing executives, and cutting-edge agencies how to:

• Identify,?approach, and engage the right influencers for their brand or product.
• Determine?what resources to put behind influencer campaigns.
• Manage the business side of influencer marketing, including tools that will help?measure ROI.
• Develop?their brand's social media voice to become an influencer in its own right.

This book is the definitive guide to addressing the issues disrupting marketing trends, including declining television viewership, growing social media audiences, effectively spreading their message digitally, and increasing usage of ad-blocking technology.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

'Every business creates vast amounts of content. Each one needs to spend significant resources to market and distribute their content. Perhaps the best way to do this is through an influencer strategy...and this book is the new influencer handbook.' -Joe Pulizzi, Author, Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

'Neal has written the manifesto for influencer marketing. If you're trying to figure out how your business can IGNITE from the explosion of digital influencers, look no further.' -John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneurs on Fire

'Trust is essential for the modern marketer. Working with trusted influencers is the lever that can break open opportunity. Neal Schaffer shows you precisely how to unleash influence so you can rapidly accomplish your marketing goals,' -Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and Social Media Marketing World

'Whether you want to become an influencer or influence an influencer Neal's book is such a smart, important read' -John Jantsch, author of The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur and Duct Tape Marketing

''The Age of Influence' is a great book exploring the world's most desired marketing discipline. Few get it more than Neal Schaffer who unlocks the key to creation of truly powerful influencer campaigns. 'The Age of Influence' is a highly informative book - and powerful addition to your marketing library.' -Martin Lindstrom, New York Times best-selling author of Buyology and Small Data

'On time and on-target, The Age of Influence is the ultimate guide to the most important customer acquisition technique of the 2020s. If you don't read it, your competition will.' -Jay Baer founder of Convince and & Convert and co-author of Talk Triggers

Kirkus Reviews

2020-09-14
A practical handbook for those looking to leverage the power of social media influencers to advance their brands.

According to Schaffer, an instructor at Rutgers Business School, the marketing power of influencers is a natural consequence of the world’s “digital transformation.” The barriers to content creation and its publication and distribution have never been lower, which has resulted in an unprecedented democratization of the online marketplace. Influencers, he notes, often possess more power than celebrities and brands, as they convey an “authenticity and human touch” and “emotional resonance” that’s difficult to replicate. The author explains that extraordinary opportunities exist if one knows how to leverage the power of influencers with not only a targeted advertising campaign, but also the deep engagement with an online community: “This concept of community…underlies a fundamental mind-set shift,” he writes. “Building a community is a longer-lasting way to gather people around your brand or product. Once you’ve established a community, any campaign you launch has a foundation to start with and a cumulative effect to follow.” To that end, Schaffer provides an impressively thorough tour of the influencer’s cosmos; he describes, in lucid but granular detail, the various kinds of influencers, the most effective ways to find and contact them, and 16 different strategies for collaborating with them. The book’s orientation is relentlessly practical throughout, and the author provides actionable counsel on influencer discovery tools and marketplaces, the use of agencies, and the most effective ways to measure one’s returns. Nevertheless, for all the analytical minutiae, the author remains focused, sometimes to the point of redundancy, on the big picture—the “grand scheme of your social media strategy to holistically understand the layout of the landscape and where influencers fit in.”Schaffer has considerable experience as a marketing educator, consultant, and influencer in his own right, and his tone over the course of this book radiates the reasonable self-assurance of expertise. Despite the brevity of the work, it still manages to be astonishingly thorough, and it’s written in an informal, accessible style that doesn’t assume any special knowledge on the part of the reader. The work could be even shorter, in fact, as the author has a tendency to belabor points at times. Nevertheless, it offers everything that a reader could possibly want in an introductory primer: an overview of the relevant field and its history, prognostication about its future, and a step-by-step commentary explaining how to take advantage of trends. Also, the author makes a powerfully convincing case that no viable business can afford to neglect the potential of social media—and that one must be hands-on when it comes to strategy: “If you’re not engaged in social media, then you miss your chance to connect with this generation. Basically stated: To have any pull in media, you have to be seen on social media….[Y]ou will still need to be involved in social media yourself to some extent.”

A comprehensive resource for anyone who’s looking to capitalize on the gathering strength of social media.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172747663
Publisher:	HarperCollins Leadership
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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