Influencer marketing means creating mutually beneficial relationships with a select group of individuals — such as journalists, bloggers, consultants, or industry analysts — who influence your buyers’ decisions. Read this guide to get a better grip on how to be successful at Influencer Marketing.
Influencers:
Influencers create content that is relevant to your brand and are able to reach, engage with and the mobilize opinions of an audience valuable to your brand, and have a large audience or base of followers
Ways you can use influencers to grow your brand:
- Ask influencers to create content for you: Ask influencers to write articles for you, record videos and podcasts, or contribute quotes and ideas to your eBooks, reports or blog.
- By virtue of the fact that these influencers are choosing to publish content on your site, they are effectively signaling their approval of your brand. Chances are that if industry influencers think you’re worth checking out, your target audience will too.
- Each of your influencers share their content with their diverse groups of followers, we get people coming to the site who probably otherwise wouldn’t.
- Sway influencers to share a single campaign or piece of branded content
- Entice influencers to follow your social accounts and regularly support and share brand content
Finding Influencers:
- Search keywords that are relevant to your brand on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google (If you have access tools like Cision, VocusPoint or Simply Measured, these are even better at helping narrow down the relevant results).
- To find blogger influencers, use tools like Google Blogger and Technorati.
- Prioritize influencers based on who you think will have the most impact.
- Start building relationships with the influencers by engaging with them on social media, re-tweeting them, quoting them, linking to them, etc.
- After you have engaged with them on social media, send an email and introduce yourself and your business (think elevator pitch).
- Whatever you are asking them to do, make it as easy as possible for them. Provide them with content and information about your company and your products.
- Remember to thank them and send them a link to the content so they can share it!
