Content has quickly become an integral part of any inbound marketing strategy. Consumers no longer want advertisements, but instead demand content that entertains and informs. This is great news for marketers, since the shift to content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, and generates three times as many leads.
The difficult part isn’t creating content, but rather cultivating an audience who cares about your voice. Consumers today are fickle with their trust, and rightly so. If we said our company is the best digital marketing company in the world, would you believe us?
This predicament is exactly why implementing influencer marketing into your 2017 marketing strategy is so important: Harnessing the voice of bloggers, social media advocates and other influential individuals allows companies to influence brand opinion and awareness using third party content. However, good influencers can be difficult to find, and often expensive to bring on board.
In 2016, we created influencer marketing strategies that attracted over one million impressions, 300,000 visitors, and hundreds of thousands in revenue for our jewelry brand. We leveraged social contests, influencer outreach and an ongoing ambassador program. To help get you started, we’re breaking down our insider strategies for finding and utilizing influencers in 2017:
Build A Blogger Program
Blogging programs are your first step in the world of influencer marketing. They provide bloggers with information needed to make informed decisions about your company’s products and your relationship with influencers. Nike, for example, is a leading brand that maintains an influencer recruiting program.
Implementing these types of programs is all about deciding on your incentive and waiting for marketers to find your company. At my company, we run a private blogger program that is invite-only: This allows us to maintain control over the quality of the influencers and creates prestige around our brand. Once we review and approve influencer applicants, we send them specs which include brand messaging, incentives, social images, etc.
Try Influencer Platforms
Influencer platforms are the opposite of blogger platforms: Instead of waiting for influencers to find your website, influencer programs provide your company with a database of influencers to reach out to.
These platforms will typically provide companies with a database of influencers, searchable by price, reach, website traffic and other criteria. This allows businesses to target influencers who best suit their needs. Brands can typically also create company profiles, detailing campaign goals and exactly what they’re looking for from an influencer. Your criteria can vary from product reviews to social media campaigns.
The freelance nature of these platforms gives your company the freedom to invite different individuals for different campaigns. Some quality influencer platforms we like to use include BrandBacker, Content BLVD, FameBit and Revfluence. Quick interactions and compatibility checks help save businesses and influencers time, money and headaches when compared to open-ended negotiations.
Reach Out To Influencers
Influencer marketing isn’t new, and the competition is always growing. Always keep your eyes open for influencers within your niche that are attracting large audiences. If you find someone you’d like to work with, reach out.
Direct outreach to influencers is always beneficial: These people are usually happy to gain another money-making opportunity. Who knows, you might even become an influencer’s first customer. Direct lines of communication also help balance your campaign expectations with the influencer’s ability. This sentiment applies to any and all influencers that you’re working with.
Make sure to frequently communicate with your influencers, as their ability to market your product depends directly on the ever-fluctuating world of online content. For example, a simple Google algorithm change could make their blog more SEO friendly, and therefore more efficient, than their Instagram or YouTube account.
Retarget Your Influencers' Visitors
Now that we’ve found influencers, we need to retarget their audience. Work with your influencers to push their traffic toward your website.
Have an influencer share media content that links back to your website; for example, a Facebook post that links back to your products page, or a blog post that links to your own content. From here, you can target other content toward the consumer or attempt to close the sale. If that doesn’t work, you can start retargeting to them through Facebook or Google. Once they land on your site, they immediately become potential customers through retargeting.
Leverage Influencer Audiences
Influencer-driven traffic is already endeared to your brand, so capitalize on it! Our favorite way to transform influencer traffic into long-term customers, and maybe even influencers themselves, is through the use of email marketing. Have your influencer backlink to your email marketing landing page: Posting simple messages like, “Be sure to sign up for special discounts” will do the trick.
It sounds crazy, but email campaigns have better click-through rates than Twitter. In fact, you’re six times more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign versus Twitter. The repeat customers can drive new traffic, increase SEO, and of course, buy your products. Email marketing can turn your influencer traffic into organic traffic, and then the cycle repeats itself.
Finding and utilizing influencers isn’t an issue if you structure your 2017 marketing plan with influencer marketing in mind. Remember, influencers need you as much as you need them. It’s important to cultivate a symbiotic relationship where both parties benefit.
The more popular content becomes, the more easily it will spread. Influencer marketing, when done correctly, can help your brand increase its reach and build authority in your space.
