Reaching Out to Influencers: Marketing Best Practices
One of the greatest strategies for promoting your content and increasing traffic coming to your site is by reaching out to the influencers in your niche. Make sure you also do everything possible to turn those influencers into your brand advocates for even better results.
What is Influencer Outreach?
Once you create some informative, relevant and high-quality content, it’s time to share it with the world. One of the best ways of sharing your content is through influencer outreach. Influencer outreach is the act of reaching out to popular social media authors (influencers) within your niche and getting them to share your content. Influencers should have followers which can benefit from your content and will hopefully re-share it as well. It’s important to note that having a lot of followers does not mean that a person is an influencer!
A good social media influencer for your company is an author that has established themselves as a trusted advisor within your niche. They tend to write a lot of content on your company's "core" subject and they are knowledgeable on the matter. Furthermore, they have a wide audience within their social network(s) that they can share their content with. When this author shares content on one of their channels, the likelihood of it reaching a broad audience is extremely high and it seems more authentic to their viewers.
How Can Your Business Benefit From Reaching Out to Influencers?
Many of the influencers may ask for some type of compensation for sharing your content; however, your business can benefit by using influencers because their audience tends to trust them more than traditional advertising. By using influencers, you will reach a more targeted audience that is more receptive to your promotion.
By connecting with influencers, you ought to see an increase in traffic, specifically from their base of followers. Furthermore, if their audience finds what you offer to be relevant and valuable, you should earn backlinks from their relevant and high-quality sites, as well.
Keep in mind, the best strategy for influencer marketing is an influencer that is also your brand’s advocate. Research has shown that influencers have the power to persuade their base, but by using an influencer that is also an advocate, it should cost you less and they'll be more authentic about their recommendation. This will translate into more conversions from their followers and boost your online visibility.
Identifying the right social Influencers for your brand
Whether you’re doing influencer outreach on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, it all starts with identifying a social influencer that is suitable for your campaign. The influencers you choose should be relevant to your brand. They can be experts in your industry or role models whose actions people want to follow.
The key to picking the right one for your campaign is looking at different metrics:
- size of the audience
- type of content they typically produce
- type of content their followers like and share
- the level of engagement by their followers
- the sentiment and demographic of their followers
Identifying influencers and those metrics is really easy with social media monitoring tools. We would recommend trying it Unamo Social Media and monitoring influencer profiles to better understand their audience.
Your goal should be to build long-lasting relationships. You can start by connecting with them on their social media channels and being active in their community by sharing or commenting on their posts. Another step would be to reach out to them personally via email or social media message (as with anything in online marketing, try A/B testing to see what works better for you here). Remember to refer to the influencer as an expert in the industry.
Attracting Influencers & Gaining Their Awareness for Free
Once you've established who the influencers are in your niche, you will want them to begin promoting your brand/product. However, if you aren't willing to pay... that can be complicated. To have an influencer to want to do something for you for free, they need to either truly love your brand or feel the need to reciprocate something special that was being done for them.
To begin building these relationships and to get the ball rolling, it is your job to make the first step by reaching out to them. Before doing any form of outreach, research the influencer - understand their daily needs and struggles, find what seems to be important to them, and try to also grasp their follower persona, i.e. what a typical member of their audience loves and hates and what their pain points are. Make the influencer feel special, but also don’t waver from the main goal; get straight to the point about why you’re contacting them.
When building great relationships, it’s important to focus on the other person and not yourself, so think more about how you can help a person, instead of how he or she can help you. Most influencers do expect some form of compensation for connecting their audience with you. A common idea is to give them your product or service to test. Once they know and fall in love with the product, they’ll be also more credible in their viewers’ eyes. If you can’t give them your product, a different, but thoughtful gift will work wonders. Just remember about making it as tailored and personal as possible.
Measuring Your Influencer Outreach
You can measure your influencer outreach by doing an Estimated Ad Equivalent. This is the amount of money you would have had to pay for advertising to get the same result from a post as you did through organic social media. It is an algorithm that takes into account the number of followers a profile has then sets the multiplier of reach, and then it also takes into consideration different interactions separately. If you aren't sure how to do it, there is premium feature in Unamo Social Media that can do it for you. The Estimated Ad Equivalent is a good metric to show your team once you've done some influencer marketing!
Revolutionary Influencer Marketing
Successful influencer outreach starts with providing value to your potential audience; as with everything: quality always beats quantity. Influencers really respect themselves and respect their audience, so the content you ask them to share has to be top-notch. If what you offer is really good, you are bound to be really successful in your attempts. Just don’t forget to nurture your relationships continuously; you want this to be a continuous process of gaining organic brand awareness.