What Happens When You Run Out of Influencers?

How would you climb a mountain?

That's the fundamental question facing every business asks when they walk through the door of an agency. The best agencies act as sherpas for clients. We know the terrain, understand the dangers and benefits of each trail and shoulder the load for our client. It can be grunt work, but we love every minute of it.

Social strategy is no different in this sense. The choices that clients make at the base of the mountain are though.

Tough Choices

Clients usually have two choices: A naked Bear Grylls (a PR/Social Agency) or a well equipped Betty White (Traditional Advertising Agency).  Most companies go with Bear Grylls simply for the fact that he may not be as well equipped (or funded) but do you think Betty White really knows how to navigate through the wilderness?

Organic outreach and relationship building is essential to creating a base on which to build your marketing efforts. Especially at the initial stages.

What happens when Bear gets to Base Camp though? Should he continue on or should he equip himself for the much harder ascent?

Finite Influence

That's the stumbling block pure social/PR firms run into: Organic social media and community is finite. Influencers are influencers for a reason (there aren't very many of them). In order to scale up, you need to put serious money behind marketing efforts to catch the attention of the larger crowd.

This is where the advertising agency is better equipped to handle engagement and communication with your customer base. On that same token? This will become worthless if influencers and organic conversation strategy start to become ignored.

Teamwork

We've constructed much of our thinking at Mullen around the concept of "mountain climbing". We realize that different branches of the agency are better equipped then others at various points during the ascent. Our approach consists of: targeting, conversation strategy, creative execution and paid support to amplify the effects of each.

Integrated Approach

We're an integrated agency in the purest sense and approach marketing with the understanding that different tools are required for different problems. The same understanding is applied into building a more complete plan for execution; the more tools we have to use? The better our chances for success.

Influencers are finite. Scale requires the masses and new strategy.

Photo Credit: ilker

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