How to Boost Content Marketing with Influencer Outreach

Content Marketing Strategies and Influencer Outreach

Source: TopRank

However, long-term sustainability has continued to be a challenge since very many brands are continuing to create more and more content every day. This article is going to help you to break free from the noisy crowd and offer your clients more value. One of the most effective solutions is influencer outreach solution.

Who is an influencer?

Today, word of mouth recommendations (and criticism)  spread through the social media as fast as fire in a dry field. The Influencers are individuals who are always active on blogs and social media and often act as niche promoters and brands advocates. These individuals have hundreds of thousands of followers meaning that they have the ability to spread the word about your brand easily. Their tweet or post will drive a lot of leads and customers. These are highly respected authority figures that are leaders in their respective industries.

How can influencer outreach help you to boost your content?

The influencer outreach strategy helps in relationship developments, content promotion, and link building. This strategy will also help your company to exchange valuable information with your readers while still increasing your awareness of future trend. One important thing you need to note here is that this process needs your time and energy for you to get results. You will need to be patient, so don’t get discouraged if you cannot get results within a few days.

A study conducted by Tomson study show that the Influencer outreach is one of the fastest growing customer acquisition channels which is even better than email marketing, paid search and even beating organic search.

Why your branding needs influencers:

Most customers will much more trust recommendations from third parties than when you give the information to them directly perhaps via an advertisement. This makes sense especially if you reflect it in a personal situation.

For example, a local hotel commercial can air on your television for months without taking notice. However, if your friend comes and brags about how she had a good time in the hotel, I’m sure you will be much more eager to check it out as soon as possible. An influencer is a mutual friend that will connect your company with the target consumers.

The influencers will not only allow you to reach their audience but also bring their audience’s network as well. Because of the allegiance of their audience, the influencers will help to drive traffic to your brand, increase your social media coverage and still help you to sell your products or services through their advice.

How can you engage in influencer outreach?

If you want to engage in influencer outreach, you will need a framework with which to operate.

The first step is defining your audience and working out with individuals that you can trust.

The second step is to identify the best influencers and get insights that will help you to get the audience get involved in your brand stories.

Influencer outreach strategy

As previously mentioned, for you to be successful in this marketing, you will need to identify individuals who can help you to deliver important content to your target audience.

The key here is to build a healthy relationship with the influencers. Create a relationship that is mutually beneficial, a relationship that will help you to grow while you provide the influencer with something in return.

7 Effective Strategies to Increase Your Success in Your Influencer Outreach

7 Effective Strategies to Increase Your Success in Your Influencer OutreachClick To Tweet

1. Create good relationships

The very first step is to ensure that you find the best influencers and create win-win relationships. One of the best sites to use to build a strategy to find the key influencers that are relevant to your brand is NinjaOutreach.com.

The best influencers should be involved in your field so that their followers can be interested in the information that they provide to them regarding your brand.

Getting an influencer that has an audience that is not concerned about your niche is a waste of time so do proper research and find people who will be useful to you.

2. Build a connection with the influencer

After establishing who are the best people to work with, start talking to them. You can do this by getting on their radar by following them on Twitter, liking their posts, commenting or taking part in discussions on their blog. Most of the influencers are very active in other social media, and you can find them on Facebook and other social media. Make sure you follow them on all the social media sites for them to notice. Following them in different social media will also help you to discover what interests them and this will help you when you comment effectively, it will help you get noticed. Although it may take time, to build a healthy relation, your patience and persistence will eventually pay off.

3. Talk to the influencers

After making the connections, it is now the right time to contact the influencers. The best way to do this is to tailor a personal message. Here you must be creative, as hundreds of thousands if not millions of people try to get in touch with the influencers daily. Ensure you draft a message that will make them feel special and let them that you have chosen them for a reason. Do proper research and learn how to engage in a discussion that piques their interest in order to boost your chances of getting a quick response.

4. Be straightforward

Don’t try to beat around the bush or try to impress the influencers. Make sure that you are straightforward in your conversation and make sure they understand what you want. Remember, most influencers are busy individuals and have a ton of people trying to do the same thing. Additionally, they know that you are not contacting them to become just friends, so let them know what you want from the start. Also, it’s good to create a relationship that not only focuses on helping you but can also help the influencer. Make sure that you also offer something in return that can also benefit them.

5. Find your influencer’s influencers and start creating great content

Remember the main reason why influencer marketing works greatly are because they have a lot of people who trust them. If you manage to get into a good relationship with your influencers, they can also introduce to their influencing friends that are in the same niche. This means that you will also have other influencers with thousands of followers and this is imperative, as you will reach more leads and customers. The next step is to create great content that is easy to share. Remember you are creating the image of your brand so try to make something that is unique and relevant.

Source: TopRank Blog

6. Segment and impress your influencers

Developing the same approach may turn off some influencers. You need to come up with different approaches that are tailor-made to meet the needs of each of your influencers. The best thing to do here is to do your research and know what motivates and what does not work out well with them. Additionally, their interest, reach, and industry expertise can help you to group the list of influencers. Other data such as location, gender, and age will assist you in grading them.

As mentioned earlier, when you are asking the influencer to devote his/her time you must give them something in return. Depending on what you are selling a product or service, the first thing you should do is to let the influencer try for free. You also need to create that one-on-one contact as this will deepen your relation and build trust. Some influencers may require monetary compensation so in case someone asks for it, you should be open-minded. However, here you must be careful and understand that some influencers that may take advantage of this.

Personally, I use Ninja Outreach to find the best influencers.  This tool works really well, and others I know that have used it have also experienced great success. Ninja Outreach can help you FIND influencers, engage and build relationship with them, and track your results.  Doing this without such software can take endless hours and get truly complicated.

7. Nurture your influencer relationship

One of the mistake that most company owners are to ditch the influencers when they have achieved what you wanted. Make sure that you nurture your relationship, as the influencers are indispensable tools to continue increasing your brand awareness. Ensure that you were happy with their service and you truly value what they did for you. You can keep in touch with them by inviting them every time you are launching new products or treat them to lunches or dinners. You never know, you may end up creating a friend too.

How to compensate your influencers

If you have someone who is ready to spread a good word about your good and services, you need to recompense them. Compensation will make the influencer to feel rewarded, important and loved. Although it does not have to be financial, you must look for some compensation. Although I had mentioned something to do with compensation, I feel that I need to be clear as there are very many people who are confused on what to offer the influencers after doing their great work. Here are some of the ways that you can compensate your influencers.

1. Commissions

If you have influencers who are actively inserting themselves into a conversation about the products or services that you offer, bringing you big sales, it is a good idea to give them some sort of split on the commissions or sales revenues.

2. Product giveaways

Giving free samples to the influences will give them firsthand experience with the product or service they are promoting. They will have a personal touch with the product, and this may make them keep talking about you, as long as your product is great. This is commonly referred to as a “review copy”.

3. Shout outs

When you share a post, they wrote about you on social media helps their sites to gain more traffic and this makes them feel important too. You should also be creative in recognizing them in a way that they feel special and appreciated.

4. Financially

This is something you need to proceed with caution. You should only pay if you feel that the influencers will bring big sales that will take your business to the next level. Most of the influencers would really appreciate this gesture though you need also to make sure that it benefits your business.

Some of the things to avoid in your content marketing with influencer outreach

Using the above tips will assist you to find a reliable influencer who will walk with you and help you to reach thousands of customers, which will be an addition to your organization. However, there are some simple tweaks that you may be avoiding making your campaign to be less effective.

Here are some of the common mistakes to avoid when trying to build a good relationship with the influencers:

• Lack of selecting the right platform and influence

As previously mentioned it is crucial to select influencers who deal in the same line of goods and services that you are providing. If you fail to do this, you may end selecting an influencer who has audiences who are not interested in the goods or services that you are offering. Additionally, you need to choose the right platform. The best social media networks that can help you to get thousands of buyers overnight include Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram.

• Writing very long messages

Your message should hit the nail on the head. You do not need to go into lengthy details. Remember your main aim here is to get the influencers attention and you can communicate the other details in subsequent emails.

• Asking without giving

This is why I have insistent on incentives that you should give your influencers. No one likes to feel used. You need to come up with a good compensation strategy that makes the influencers feel them appreciated and loved. Even if you are not offering tangible products, you can also give them recognition by mentioning them in your blog or sharing news about them to your followers.

Content Marketing Strategies and Influencer Outreach Conclusion

Now that you have learned all the ropes of how to find great influencers that can help you in your content marketing efforts, you can now start looking for them and start your outreach campaign. Use the tips, and you will build a healthy relationship with the influencers that you can both benefit. I understand that the influencer outreach can be a daunting task, but once you follow this guide, you will really find it easy. Additionally, avoid the mistakes that we have explained, and I am sure that your content marketing with influencer outreach will be a success.