Influencer Marketing: Get Them to Share Your Content

Everyone who has a business has the same problem: how to get more customers and revenue. If your business is exclusively online, the fact that there are more than a billion websites on the Internet poses two great challenges: first, how to get more people to know you and visit your website, and second, how to get those visitors to become leads and customers.

You’ll find lots articles, ebooks, books, videos, and tools that can help you in this battle. Actually, you’ll probably find so much information that you’ll be overwhelmed. You might even get the feeling that others seem to know how to do all this better than you and get better results. But the reality is that we all suffer from the same war and it is difficult for all of us to achieve those business objectives. There aren’t shortcuts or magic formulas here…

Consider, for example, our marketing tool Nelio A/B Testing. We analyzed the A/B testing experiments carried out by our customers and the conversion improvements they got, hoping that we’d be able to find some insights that you can apply in your own website. But as I just told you, there isn’t a single recipe to success, and the only conclusion we reached was that those who carry out many experiments are the ones who achieve the best results. In other words, online marketing is nothing like a sprint—it’s more like an ultramarathon where you have to work hard.

Content Marketing

Looking back at the challenge of how to increase traffic you’ll find many interesting articles such as the “7 Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic by 206%” by Neil Patel, “25 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website” by Dan Shewan, or “10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website” by Karen Asprey, among others. I recommend you read them all, but in the end they reach the same conclusion I already shared: it’s all about defining a good content marketing strategy where the key is always to create that content that will be really valuable for your reader. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense, right?

What difficulties do you have when you put yourself to work? First, to know your potential or current client and understand their problems or needs. We talked about this before when we discussed how to define our buyer persona within our marketing plan.

Then, assuming that you’ve been able to identify what really adds value to your potential customers, the next great job is to generate all the content that will help them solve all their problems and turn them into your loyal readers. This content can include rankings, lists of tools or resources, infographics with professional images, guides or complete manuals, case studies, video tutorials, etc. As you can see, it’s quick and easy to say but generating this quality content requires a lot of hours and resources.

And we’re not done here! Once you’ve created the content, you still have to promote it in order to increase traffic to your website. All this, just for the challenge of increasing traffic to your website.

Well, don’t worry about it. I’ve told you before that this is an ultramarathon, so it’s a matter of going step by step and, above all, automating as many steps as you can to save time.

Influencer Marketing

A marketing strategy that complements content marketing and that will help you to get more visits is the one known as influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is when brands partner with social media “influencers” — people with a large following on one or more major social media platforms — to promote their products or services. These influencers may be actual celebrities (such as actors or professional athletes), or they may simply be popular figures within their social media platform of choice (such as YouTube stars or Instagram models).

Source: 2018: Year of the Influencer or year of the influencer marketing implosion?

How do you define an influencer marketing campaign? I’ll tell you how we did it:

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#1. Find Your Influencers

First you must identify the most relevant influencers for your product. One option is to ask your buyer persona who they follow or where they get the information from. Another option is to Google your product’s keywords and find out who generates the most valuable content related to those keywords. You can also search for your product keywords on Twitter and see who are the ones that have the most followers and whether they fit the profile of your buyer persona. And of course, take a good look at your customers—maybe one of them can be a good influencer and, hey, they already know your product very well!

#2. Define What Kind of Collaboration You Want to Establish With Them

What do you want to get from your influencers and what can you offer them in return for a win-win relationship? We all want the influencers to talk about us and our products, but you also have to think what’s in there for them.

Some ideas you can use:

• Can you offer your product to them for free?
• What about an affiliate program so they can make money when they talk about you?
• And a collaboration proposal with an attractive budget so that they’ll become very interested in talking about you?

Keep in mind that an influencer will work with you if the agreement benefits both parties.

#3. Contact to Influencers

Watch out! Before contacting an influencer, read their articles and, if possible, comment on their posts. Follow them on social networks and retweet, comment, or like hat your readers like. Assist, if possible, to an event where influencers give a talk and you have the chance to greet them. And LinkedIn is also a very good professional network for a first contact. That is, make sure your first approach is warm and natural.

With a little luck, the first time you contact them directly to talk about your “collaboration proposal”, they’ll have heard something about you and they won’t only have the perception that “the salesman on duty” is calling them. For example, Eugene Mota told “How I Got An 80% Response Rate For My Top Influencers Outreach Campaign“.

#4. Create Compelling Content for Influencers

If you don’t have something attractive to offer, it’s more difficult to contact them directly without being ignored. So, make sure that whatever it is that you write about is something that’s of their interest. I know it sounds complicated, but it’s actually very easy—just focus on what they publish and refer their content in your own. If you do so, you’ll be able to catch their attention on social media. After all, you’re adding up to their opinions and promoting them too!

#5. Mention Influencers in Social Networks

Therefore, once you created a content in which you reference any article of an influencer, the next step will be to mention them explicitly in social networks. This point is particularly important, because if you mention someone, it’s more likely that they won’t miss your tweet or social message.

Let me give you an example. Recently the Call for Speakers of WordCamp Madrid was published and Fernando Tellado, one of the organizers behind WordCamp Madrid, published a post in which he explicitly encouraged women to participate as speakers. Do you know what he did right after publishing that post? Exactly—he also posted a Twitter message explicitly mentioning a group of women to let us know they want us to participate. This tweet showed up as a notification in my cell and I submitted two talk proposals for the WordCamp. ? Easy peasy!

Disclaimer: I would like to take this opportunity to say that I’m against positive discrimination. So, please, if I am selected to present either of them, I hope it is because of the content of the proposal, not my gender ?.

Anyway, I think I made my point clear—if you explicitly mention someone in your tweets, it’s more likely they’ll hear what you say and echo it to their own followers. The only problem is, as always, this takes some time.

#6 Automate as Much as You Can

Our motto is to automate as many tasks as you can. This is why we created Nelio Content, a plugin that helps you get your job done.

For instance, Nelio Content monitors all the references you include in a post and automatically pulls all their meta information, including the author’s Twitter (if possible), making it easier to mention other authors because you don’t have to look for their Twitter handlers:

You can also highlight the sentences you’d like to share on social media, so you don’t have to think what to tweet about:

And finally, once you’ve done all these, Nelio Content with Social Automations can automatically create tall the social messages with explicit references to third-party authors with just one click:

That’s cool, huh? And if you’re thinking “well, sure, but I had to tell Nelio which sentences I wanted to share”… well, note that Nelio is able to analyze the content of your post and extract the most relevant phrases it contains, even if you haven’t marked them and use those instead. Moreover, it’s also able to use the social templates that Nelio includes by default, along with the templates you’ve defined. The results are just amazing:

As you can see, a message has automatically been generated and will be published on Twitter in which we mention a very interesting article by Neil Patel, which also includes his Twiter so that he can receive a notification that he has been mentioned.

Obviously, I don’t have any guarantee that he will or won’t retweet it or make a like on my tweet, but my job has been exclusively to select those references that add value to my post. I haven’t wasted a second searching for Neil’s Twitter handler (@neilpatel) or typing the tweet. And with the peace of mind that if I had written this tweet manually, I wouldn’t have done any better, don’t you think?

Conclusion

We are well aware that any strategy of content or influencer marketing involves work. In the end, all your readers end up reading your articles because you bring them some value. Our advice? Automate everything you can, without losing quality or authenticity in the result.

Featured Image by Lilly Rum on Unsplash.