The first step in influencer marketing is to identify influencers. Influencers are specific to discrete market segments, and are used as conduits to the entire target segment. While there are lists of generic influencers (such as the Time 100) they have limited use 

In marketing programmes targeted at specific segments. 

You can use social media tools to find influencers based on keywords or those that belong to specific industry verticals.

Additionally, market research techniques can be used to identify influencers, 

Using pre-defined criteria to determine the extent and type of influence. 

For example, Keller and Berry propose five attributes of influencers: 

• Activists: influencers get involved, with their communities, political movements, charities and so on.

• Connected: influencers have large social networks

• Authoritative: influencers are looked up to and are trusted by others

• Active minds: influencers have multiple and diverse interests

• Trendsetters: influencers tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in markets

Influencer marketing tends to be broken into two sub-practices: earned influencer marketing and paid influencer marketing. Earned marketing stems from unpaid or preexisting relationships with influencers or third party content that is promoted by the influencer to further their own personal social growth. Paid influencer marketing campaigns can take the form of sponsorship, pre-roll advertising or testimonial messaging and can appear at any point in the content. Budgets vary widely and are usually based on audience reach.

In order to achieve the purpose of the business clients, Influencer should deliver a change in attitude towards the client’s brand or product. The change of the attitude from the viewer takes places from the contents that influencer produces. The change itself is believed as a psychological process in human mind. The psychological process can be explained under the RACE model. RACE stands for reach, act convert and engage. These four steps are designed to help brands engage with their customers throughout the customer lifecycle. 

1.Reach: This step is about finding the available influencer and accessing the information distribution channel. Influencer has his or her own expertise, which their followers value a lot. And these followers trust recommendations from a third party more often than a brand itself. So endorsements from related influencer would function as a review of the product rather than a simple advertisement, which most followers regards as little or no credibility. In general, people who followed the influencer share their field of interest. Therefore, they are more likely to purchase the product. Landing on a proper influencer will support the brand to lock in their target customer group.     

2. Act: Act means encouraging participation by creating a secondary marketing campaign to generate greater awareness to reach a larger scale of target consumers.  In this case, it means encouraging target customers to share their opinions on social media in order to participate in the subject. Taking this idea into practice, influencers usually share their honest review of the product or demonstrate the function of the product in real life cases in terms of solving a problem or improving the current condition. The influencer should start a discussion that leads target customers' attention onto the subject and present the solution with the product. Target customers would engage in the discussion so that they can develop their own understanding of the product value.

3. Convert: In this step, influencers should convert their followers into customers of the product. After forming the understanding of the product, it is time to make a purchase decision. Influencer marketing is believed as a powerful tool to generate sales since a study by McKinsey showed that “marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising.” And of those that were acquired through word-of-mouth had a 37 percent higher retention rate.  The trigger is often in the format of coupon, which is only valid for a short period of time. The coupon would push the target customer to buy the product right now rather than later. Because not only they will forget about it, but also they will lose the desire for the product.

4. Engage: As for this stage, building customer relationship is the key point. Influencers should turn the first time customer into a loyal customer of the product. A foundational element to unwavering loyalty that is often overlooked is a consumer’s loyalty to themselves. Brands seek people that naturally fit their desired persona and let their authentic passion shine through.  In this way, customer loyalty is built through the engagement made by the influencers.

In his study of what traits are associated with the top influencers, Barry found 4 archetypes of influencers 

• Educators – Thrive on helpfulness and insightfulness

• Coaches – Thrive on helpfulness and engagement

• Entertainers – Thrive on engagement and inspiration

• Charismatics – Thrive on insightfulness and inspiration

Gladwell (2000)

notes that “the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts”. Gladwell (2000) identified 3 different types of influencer:

• Connectors
• Mavens
• Salesmen

Connectors network across a variety of people, and thus have a wide reach. They are essential for word of mouth communication (Brown and Hayes, 2008).

Mavens look to consume information and share it with others, they are extremely insightful with regards to trends (Brown and Hayes 2008).

Finally, Salesmen are ‘charismatic persuaders’. There source of influence leans towards the tendency of others to attempt to imitate their behaviour. These 3 groups according to Gladwell (2000) are responsible for the ‘generation, communication and adoption’ of messages.  

Most of the literature on influencers focuses on consumer markets. There is less insight into business-to-business influencers. A key distinction between consumer and business markets is that most of the focus in consumer markets is on consumer influencers themselves. This is because word of mouthcommunication is prevalent in consumer environments.

 In business marketing, influencers are people that affect a sale, but are typically removed from the actual purchase decision. Consultants, analysts, journalists, academics, regulators, standards bodies are examples of business influencers.

Web services can be used to trawl social media sites for users that exert influence in their respective communities. The social influencer marketing firm then asks those influencers to try client products or services and discuss them on their respective social networks. Clients can then observe, through an enhanced digital dashboard, with metrics that measure the dissemination of brand mentions across numerous web platforms.

There are at least 70 companies offering online influence measurement. Advocates of this online-only approach claim that online activity reflects (or pre-empts) the trends in offline transactions. For example, Razorfish released one of the first social influencer marketing reports, entitled Fluent.  The report discusses many theories surrounding social marketing, including the importance of the push/pull dynamic and online consumer empowerment, authenticity and importance of buzz marketing.

In addition, online activity can be a core part of offline decision making, as consumers research products and review sites-