Making influencers outreach part of your marketing plans has become nowadays one of the winning digital marketing tools. If used effectively, it is likely to bring great results and generate benefits for your business. In addition to content promotion, the influencer strategy can also be part of your branding approaches.
Every industry and niche has some leading people that affect what is trending and how the industry is operating. Those people are considered the experts of that industry. Their opinion really matters and it is guiding the audience. In non digital terms, they can simply be called the leaders of that industry, and in online world they are known as influencers.
Before asking those experts to help you grow your business, you should first reach them. Reaching and connecting with people is always an art. And networking with influencers needs a lot more of care. Actually it requires a mixture of public relation and a bunch of communicational skills. Of course, nothing is impossible and as long as we breathe we can learn everything.
A recommendation from one those influencers can bring awareness to your business and polish your reputation and gain credibility. If they share your content, you can get a respectable numbers of traffic to your website. Ultimately, they can raise your sales. Simply, It’s a beneficial relationship that worth investing.
People may come across your content or brand several times while surfing, but they may not have enough curiosity to fetch in. But, when your business or content is recommended by someone they know, they will right away check it and are likely to take action. This is where lays strength of word of mouth (WOM) which is famous in marketing. Now, it is a kind of electronic word of mouth (eWOM).
The influencers outreach is networking with people that will tell others about you. Relationships with influencers are human relationship, they can’t always be what I call mono-benefit; means beneficial only for one side. Every relationship is necessarily beneficial for all its parts, in a way or another.
In the end, what makes a digital relationship different from one in physical world is channels of communication. So, if you want to build strong online presence, treat your digital relationships as seriously as your physical relationship. Be transparent, be clear, and be yourself, and respect others.
What I want to say is that, when you build a relationship with an influencer, they can do a favor for your business for free. But, it won’t always be that way. Sometimes, influencers need compensation. It might be link back to their content, it might be a social media share, or simply to pay them.
Now you believe in the power of influencers and how they can bring awareness to your business and connect you with a large audience. The challenge then is to find those influencers. You know they are out there in social media including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and over the web.
How to Find Influencers
Before starting to invest your time and energy to build relationship with an influencer, you should first find where is locating. Then, you sift all the noise to reach real influencers. For that purpose, there are different ways to get you there.
Search Engines
One of the first and important places where to find an influencer is search engines. People fight hard to get their content rank well in search engines. The latter in turn has improved a lot to rank only high quality content. So, when you search for a certain topic, you’re likely to find content of influencers and experts of the industry. Sometimes, it may not be the case, but mostly it is.
Social media
Today, social media is an easy and fast way to find someone including influencers. Without any doubt, influencers have profiles in social media. So, you can start by searching main social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ using your relevant topic.
When you find people that share a lot of content related to your industry, then you have come the half way. Then, move on to investigate those people’s audience and how much followers they have. After that, comes the most important of all this - engagement.
What you want is a real person whose voice is heard and attracts engagement among the audience. When you locate those profiles, the approach is not to send your press releases and wait to get them published. There’s a high percentage they won’t.
What you need is to build a relationship with these influencers and be part of their fans. So, follow them and get your nose in conversations. If you have no idea where to start, you can simply ask true questions and get knowledge you are missing. You can go deeper and search what those influencers are following and the network will get wider.
When you search these social media profiles, go deeper in their profiles and check if they have posted only few relevant pieces of content, or they have shared a lot of content that worth being noticed.
Through their social media profiles, you can reach these influencers’ websites and blogs. Make sure that you are active there as well and make part of the engaging people through commenting and sharing the influencer’s content.
Tools
Buzzsummo is one of the most used tools to effectively search for influencers in your niche.
As you can see on the picture, we have performed a search using the term online marketing. But make sure that you click influencers above. You will get a list of 10 influencers profiles that are ranked based on different criterions including page authority, domain authority…etc. If you want to get a broader list, you need to go Pro by choosing one of these pricing plans.
Instead of directly searching for influencers, you can perform search of top content. You’ll get a list of content that performed well in the web and ranked based on social media shares. A content that did well in the web might be backed by an inspiring influencer.
To keep performing and getting results, you need to register your free account. You may use the website for few searches, but you’ll need to register.
You can also check this post that offers Some Tools to Discover Influencers.
Finding someone with big numbers following is good when it comes to traffic. Sometimes you may come across automated social media accounts that have thousands of followers, so you may confuse them to real influencers. Yet, this isn’t bad and something to ignore. If your objective is to get traffic or an advocacy, you may still keep these accounts among your followers and get in touch with them for an advocacy. This all depends on your business and what are your priorities.
Yet, if you think marketing strategy and all the benefits of the influencer marketing outreach including raising awareness, credibility and branding this isn’t the right path. You need to continue sifting the noise and invest only in true influencers.
When you start finding the influencers, make a list and sort them as high, medium, and low rank. Make the list more informative by listing their website or blog and social media profile. Put them under your radar, and keep an eye whom they talk to and follow their reach and influence.
Along the way, you will need to get some profiles out of your list and new ones.
That’s a lot of work, but when you start building relationship with real influencers, you can get incredible results.
When you have filtered your list to keep only influencers that are relevant for your business, you can move on to the next stage. After you have been active on their blogs and social media profiles, you can now move on to the next step.
You can send them direct emails telling them that you are a fan of them for a while now. Then introduce yourself, your business, and what you are doing. Influencers are busy people and their time is precious, so make sure to go right away to the point. Be transparent and tell them why you are contacting them.
Investing in influencer marketing outreach is a great way to take your marketing efforts to another stage. While building your marketing strategies, always be professional and results will pay off.
What are you interested when thinking about influencers, is it advocacy or branding and sales? If you have any opinion concerning the article please share it below in the comments.
I'm here to help you reach success with your online business. I can help with content marketing, social media, SEO, and email marketing. I provide tips you can follow to build a succesful online business.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment