Does your business need to promote its content?
Then perhaps you have been considering the use of influencer marketing outreach.
In this article, we will look at influencer marketing outreach, its effectiveness, and ways to connect with influencers to promote your content and gain links.
Why use influencer marketing outreach?
BuzzSumo in researching over a 100 million articles found that the number of influencers who share content has a compounding effect on the total number of shares.
On average they found that articles shared by one influencer resulted in 31.8% more social shares.
A survey by Tomoson found that marketers rated influencer marketing as the fastest-growing means of online customer acquisition, beating out organic search, email marketing, and paid search.
How to engage in influencer outreach
To engage in influencer outreach, you need a framework with which to operate. The process however always needs to start with defining your audience and working out who these people trust. Then identify the right influencers and extract insights that help you reach out to and get them involved in your brand stories. Finally, to ensure that you perform well consistently you need to measure and refine the process.
The 5 step action plan (courtesy of Traackr) as outlined below and the infographic below provides more of an insight into the overall process of influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing outreach action plan:
- Define your online audience: Influencer outreach starts by identifying the audience and customers you wish to target. Understand, who impacts how they discover, evaluate, decide and buy.
- Discover the right influencers: Influence is contextual so you will need to find people who produce and share content that can impact your business or your buyer’s decision-making process.
- Monitor influencers for opportunities: Listen to your influencers and monitor their content. Ask yourself: What topics do they write about? What do they share? What questions does their audience ask?
- Take action and engage: start building a relationship with simple actions (follow, share, link). Get to know them, build trust, and then plan initiatives that will let your work together.
- Measure your results: Keep track of the relationships you are building and how they translate into tangible events (visits, introductions, mentions, leads). Learn and iterate.
The following infographic is based on the influencer outreach process that Andrew Gale uses and synchs well with the framework described above.
So how can you boost content marketing and link building with influencer outreach?
The best place to start with influencer marketing outreach is with some fundamentals.
Start with why
Joe Pulizzi says –
Have an influencer strategy. I would say 99% pf businesses that say they want to partner with influencers actually have no strategy. Start with why you are engaging with influencers (what it is going to do for the business).
Understand your customers
You will not be able to reach anyone with content marketing unless you have identified your customer personas. Understanding who they are, where they go to for information, and their challenges are just some of the critical insights required to make your marketing efforts worthwhile.
Understand online influence
It is important to understand online influence and the types of influencer personas. This will then allow for better influencer engagement. The infographic below provides insights into the different persona types. Source
