An influencer is not necessarily someone with thousands of followers on Twitter or YouTube. Bloggers, vloggers and artists have the reach, but it’s regular consumers – the everyday influencers – that pose the real opportunity for brands. A recommendation from someone you know is still the most trusted form of advertising. Consumers who actively want to be involved with your brand will be happy to recommend products they love to their friends, distribute product samples, or share behind-the-scenes information that creates social currency or a feeling of being ‘in the know’ about a brand. Using their influence among their friends and peers – your future customers – they have a direct impact on the success of your business.

Smart brands are using branded communities to identify and connect with thousands of these everyday influencers who can spread the word about their products, or provide valuable insights into product development, or even share ideas for new products. Interactions on an owned platform means the brand will own the data, and can feed that back into a CRM system, to build the relationship with each influential consumer even further. To do this effectively, marketers must make genuine connections with their consumers. This takes human interaction – people talk to people, after all – and a brand to genuinely care about what their users think. This is not a one-way street. Build a meaningful relationship with your consumers, and they will naturally use their influence to benefit your brand.

The most important thing to understand about influencer marketing is that it’s not just celebrity endorsement for the social media age. While influencers can put your brand in front of huge audiences, the rules of marketing in the age of the consumer still apply – if brands don’t deliver value, they’ll be ignored. Influencer marketing might be a novelty at the moment, but as it grows audiences will become accustomed to being sold to, and switch off.

Influencer marketing isn’t necessarily right for every brand, and even those who could benefit need a carefully tailored strategy. They need find the right influencers (not necessarily the biggest ones) for their brand, build relationships with them in the right way and then conduct the right activities to provide value to their audience. Working collaboratively with influencers to develop campaigns or messages is key to achieving this in an authentic way.

While influencer marketing isn’t as simple as it might seem, the good news is that the right approach opens up a whole host of benefits, not least from the influencers themselves. Outside of brand exposure and trust building, influencers have the potential to provide unique insight into your audience and its needs, as well as a fresh perspective on new products or developments within your brand, providing value far beyond simple product placement.

Twenty years ago, an ‘influencer’ would have been Kate Moss in a paparazzi photo with a brand’s latest handbag on her arm in the ‘red tops’. Then along came social media and stretched this influence beyond all previous recognition. I think the traditional definition of ‘influence’ for a brand still stands at a basic level – the right people saying the right things about your products.

It’s just that the ways to access this group have now exploded. As marketers, influencers are one powerful weapon in our armoury. With instant access to celebrities touting every kind of product imaginable, added to the mass of ‘regular Janes and Joes’ who count themselves as bloggers and vloggers, everyone’s an influencer. The powerful effect of vloggers and bloggers can be seen when you look at the huge audiences they attract.

Two vloggers that can’t be ignored (even if you are firmly in the Generation X camp) are Zoella and her boyfriend Alfie Deyes – between them they have 11 million subscribers on YouTube – that’s almost one sixth of the UK population. At the end of the day, customers build your brand reputation – you can put a shape in place, get your product range right, get a top TV ad spot and excel at CX, but ultimately customers are going to fill this structure with their own influential opinion.

With the growing importance of paid influencer outreach and advertorial content, it’s easy to focus on the new kids on the block and forget about the real core of who influencers are: word-of-mouth advocates for your brand or service. So more than just those who will accept some cash to showcase your products in an Instagram picture or a blog post, your brand’s influencer network is significantly wider than that. It includes people who tweet praise about your brand, leave negative online reviews, or (perhaps terrifyingly for data-driven marketers) talk about it down the pub on a Friday night. These organic influencers may not have as large a reach as paid influencers, but they have drastically more impact on their individual networks. I don’t need to rehash the statistics, but word of mouth (in its various guises) is still by far the most powerful method for increasing the reach of your marketing activity. So how do we optimise for that? By making sure that we focus on creating quality products and services that are (to borrow a line from Seth Godin) remarkable. If we take the time to make and promote things that are worth engaging with, worth raving about, and worth sharing, you’ll see influencers suddenly become the channel that pushes your marketing activity further than any other. It’s a model we’ve seen work for all kinds of business – from venerable streetwear brands like Palace and Supreme, through to massively-scaled startups like Uber or Dropbox. By focusing on product and communications quality, we can create advocates at every brand touchpoint – rather than just those that we have to pay for.