Influencers play an important part in your content marketing. They are the ones who often promote your content, share your links and talk about your products and services to their friends, families and colleagues. They take interest in your insights, reach out to you and talk to other influencers in your niche. If you want your content to go viral on the Internet, you need a big team of influencers constantly engaging you and paying attention to your blog and social media updates. A big part of content marketing is attracting as many influencers to your business as possible and then keeping them engaged.
Decide who are your influencers from the onset of content marketing itself
As described above, influencers are people who would be interested in hearing from you and spreading your message voluntarily. They don’t always have to be your customers and clients. Even if they never buy from you or do business with you, they can be highly beneficial to your content marketing strategy. They are like evangelists, but unlike evangelists, they may not always use your products and services.
So who might be your influencers?
- People who have an active social media presence
- People who have lots of followers, connections and readers
- People who show interest in your updates and what you have to say
- People who write blog posts and articles in a field that relates to your business interests
The main attributes should be their unwavering interest in your own field of interest, their ability to communicate convincingly and regularly and their reach. These are the people that you have to target through your content marketing.
Targeted content marketing for your influencers
You need to publish content that caters to the interest of your influencers and then use the channels that enable you to broadcast your content to your influencers.
Decide your channels first because you will be creating and publishing content based on the dynamics of your distribution channels. For example, the content that you publish on Twitter will be totally different from content that you publish on Facebook and the same goes for LinkedIn. On Pinterest you will be posting visual content. On SlideShare you upload slides. There is a website where you can upload PDF documents. On YouTube you upload videos. So define your strategy that reaches out to your influencers according to the publishing and broadcasting channel that you’re going to use, and then start creating content.
Creating content for influencers
In order to target influencers, you need to create content that is entertaining, captivating and useful. Remember that influencers not only go through your content, they react to it, which is very important. People who simply consume your content are not your influences. Your influencers leave comments on your blog. They write blog posts in response to your blog posts and articles. They respond to your social media updates. They post links to your blog posts and articles on their own timelines. They broadcast your videos and images using mobile apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. So you must create and publish content that interests them and makes them feel that sharing your content would be useful to their family and friends and even if not useful, it will be cool to share it.
Most of your influencers are high-performers and this is why they are influencers. They themselves influence people. People pay attention to them. They become influencers because when they talk about you, people pay attention. This is why it is important you create high-quality, relevant content that they can appreciate. Remember that they will pay attention to your content only if it suits their purpose – it provides value to their audience. They don’t necessarily have to agree with you. Even if one of your influencers publishes a blog post as a rebuttal to what you have written it is going to benefit you (unless you have written something totally crappy). Your content must move them to take an action. You should create and distribute content that is
- Original
- Thought-provoking
- Relevant
- Packed with information
- Helpful
- Well-written
- Uses references from highly reputed sources
- Created/written in a friendly tone
- Easily shareable
Finally, there is no hard and fast rule – you just need to be regular, persistent and quality conscious. It will take some time before your influencers begin to notice you. You need to interact with them as and when opportunity strikes (don’t just butt-in for the sake of it). Write them an email if you have something genuine to say. Connect with them on Twitter and Facebook (or whatever channel you are influencers prefer). And once again, persistence is the key. Most content marketers fail here.