How to Improve Your Content Strategy with Influencer Marketing

Influencer. It’s a powerful word, isn’t it? It conveys authority, respect, and expertise. An influencer has the power to affect the decisions of other people, who accept or perceive this person’s authority. People from all walks of life can act as influencers, but at this point, we are concerned about the influencers in the online world, and the way you can use them to boost your content marketing strategy.

Influencer marketing uses key leaders in the specific industry to promote a brand’s message to a large audience. Instead of promoting your content directly to the target readers, you use the influencers as mediators, who inspire other people to check out your words without feeling like they are being pushed towards your website.

Influencer campaigns usually carry the content element. This can go in two directions:

• You create content for the influencer’s blog or website, or
• The influencer creates content that promotes your brand or website.

What makes influencer marketing better than the word-of-mouth strategy? These individuals share their opinions and recommendations with a huge audience, and they have the power to influence their actions.

You get the picture: influencer marketing is an extremely important element of content promotion. The only question is: how do you do it? We have some tips that will help you develop your campaign,

1. Identify the influencers

Before you can develop an influencer marketing campaign, you need to identify who influences the opinions, decisions, and actions of your target audience. This step will involve some detective work. Talk to people interested in the niche you’re part of. Then, search for influential blogs, Instagram profiles, Twitter users, Facebook pages, and LinkedIn resumes.

Once you identify few names, create a list of priorities, putting the influencers with the greatest authority at the top.

2. Start making connections

Follow the social media pages of all influencers you identified. Then, focus on few at a time and do your best to build a relationship with them. You can achieve that goal by commenting on their posts on blogs and social media, but don’t be too aggressive. Comment on the blog for the first week, proceed by following and responding to Twitter updates during the second week, and make progress towards the Facebook page later on.

This should be a very natural connection, although it will have a marketing purpose in the background. Before you can get an influencer to promote your brand, you need to become recognizable for them.

3. Write for influencers

Search through the most influential blogs in your niche and see which ones accept guest posts. Follow the guidelines very carefully and start writing high-quality guest posts for their sites. This content marketing strategy will take tons of commitment, but the results will be worth the effort. If you have trouble getting content ideas and maintaining the quality levels high, you can get help from content writing services like  BestEssayTips.

When you write a great guest post for an influential blog, you get free promotion in front of a huge target audience. If these people like your content, they will visit your own blog to see what else you can offer.

4. Build a great blog/website. Then, ask influencers to write for you!

This is the most challenging aspect of influencer marketing. First of all, you need an absolutely awesome website, and you need to make it popular through different marketing techniques. Remember the good old rule: content is the key to success. You need to create unique, high-quality articles that solve the problems and answer the questions of your audience.

It may take you years to get to the point when you can attract influencers to write free articles for you, but who said developing a brand was easy? Once you get there, you can start inviting influencers to write posts, record podcasts and videos, or contribute to your website with eBooks. At the end of the day, you get great content and visits from the influencer’s audience, they get a chance to showcase their expertise, and the audience gets awesome tips. Everyone wins.

Yoga Journal is a great example of a website that harnesses the power of influencers. It’s a very popular online resource, so popular teachers from all over the world are willing to write for it.

Here’s an excellent resource on Key Internet Statistics to Know in 2021.

5. Ask influencers to write reviews for you

This method is similar to the one described above, but there’s a slight difference. You still need to develop a recognizable brand before proceeding to this step, so the influencers will be willing to accept your offer. This time, you offer a package of products or services for free, and you ask them to write an honest review for their audience.

Here’s an example: you’ll find reviews of Vitamix and OmniBlend all over Instagram, YouTube, blogs, and other online resources. These are established brands and influencers from the healthy food industry are already using them, but the principle is the same: the audience gets honest recommendations, tips, and recipes from influencers.

Content is all over the Internet. Every single industry is busy, so it will take you lots of effort to differentiate yourself from the crowd. When you enrich your content marketing strategy with influencer outreach, they will do the marketing for you!

Lucy Benton is a high skilled editor, proofreader, she enjoys sharing tips and stories. She studied Creative and Professional Writing at the Maharishi University of Management. Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on FaceBook.