What is Influencer Marketing?
When people talk about “outreach” and “influencer marketing” most businesses don’t seem to know what is really involved in the process.
Simply put, outreach is the action taken to reach out to those individuals with a large and loyal community of readers, fans or followers, whether they are a blogger, on social media or in closed community networks such as forums. “Influencer Marketing” is the name given to this type of marketing where businesses and brands use influencers to promote their service. In today’s world of digital marketing, this technique is getting a lot of support from businesses universally.
In reality this is no different to the pre-digital age influencer marketing, for example using celebrities to be spokespersons for a product, or using their endorsements to sell a brand, products or services.
There are normally three ways of using influencers (there are more of course, but these are the most common ones):
- For SEO (link building)
- For PR (creating and maintaining awareness)
- For Conversion and Selling (affiliates and super affiliates as well as endorsements)
How do I get influencers to promote me?
The process for reaching out to influencers is pretty straightforward; the main issue here is the time it takes to run the whole process. You could essentially break it down into:
Research
Although self-explanatory, research is extremely important. Getting the wrong influencers to market your services may not have the desired effect. The first step as such is to collect or shortlist as many possible individuals as possible.
Review
Once you have your shortlist ready, we would suggest making sure that you really understand each one of the individuals you would consider as part of your influencer campaign. Narrow them down by your desired metrics, whether its reach, authority, style or any other.
Reach Out
The next step in the process would be to reach out to these individuals to find out whether they do promote businesses and brands, how they work on those campaigns and understand costs if any.
Reward
The key success to a good influencer campaign is to really make it worth the influencers’ while – this doesn’t necessarily have to be money or goods; sometimes building very good content for their site, or for their audience works really well. The main thing here is to make sure that the influencer walks away happy, and would be willing to work with you again if you choose to do so.
Repeat
Once you have achieved your campaign objective, it’s always worth staring the process over again with a fresh set of eyes and different metrics, this would ensure that you have a wide and varied audience to get your business in front of.
As you can see, the steps and the action themselves are fairly easy to understand and follow. As we highlighted earlier, the biggest issue here is the time that it takes to complete the process. Of course, there are other problems, from cost of the process to making sure you are picking the right types of influencers.
If you are ever stuck and need a hand at jump starting your influencer marketing, let us know – we may be able to help.