What You Need To Know About Marketing With Influencers

Content marketing is all about your audience. Selling stuff is certainly a good thing, but in content marketing it’s almost a residual effect: The real driver of content marketing is to attract and engage the right audience.

Building an audience usually takes time, but there is one proven shortcut to building an audience – work with influencers.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of relationship building; you develop rapport with the people who can create visibility for your product or service. Unlike other marketing approaches that focus on “masses,” this approach focuses on the individual influencers, who can range from niche bloggers to well-known celebrities.

Why focus on just one person? That  person can influence many, many people far better than any advertising or content marketing you could ever produce. Influencers can give you access to an audience you’d never reach on your own , and that audience sees them a trusted source of information. If you and the influencer are a good fit, some of his/her people might join your audience as well.

Here’s how it works:

1) You identify influential people in your niche or industry.

2) You make a short list of the influencers most complementary to your business in terms of audience, reach, and tone.

3) You build a connection with them.

4) You partner with them to create content, promote content, or to endorse your product or services.

Does it work?

You bet. Influencer marketing works extremely well. That’s probably why heavyweights like Lee Odden, author of “Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing,” named influencer marketing (specifically influencer content co-creation) as one of his top predictions for content marketing in 2016.

Marketers as a whole appear to be getting great results with influencer marketing, though their success depends on what their objectives are for it. Augure’s 2015 "State of Influencer Engagement" report broke out how the marketers they surveyed are doing based on their influencer marketing objectives.

Influencer marketing works for many reasons. First, it works because it cuts through all the noise of advertising. There are no ad blockers to worry about. Your marketing messages are too well woven into the influencer’s content.

To give you an idea of what influencer marketing is and isn’t, understand that buying ad space on an influencer’s website is not influencer marketing. It’s just advertising, and as we’ve seen over the last several years, consumers have become blind to it.  Here are a few tactics that are influencer marketing:

• Writing a guest post for the influencer’s blog or website. This allows you to showcase your expertise, product or service directly in front of the influencer’s audience.
• Interviewing the influencer for your own content. Their audience is likely to come to your site to see/read that content, and the influencer is also likely to promote it by sharing the URL with his/her followers.
• Asking the influencer to include your product or service in a tutorial. For example, if your business sells auto supplies, you’d ask a car repair blogger  to mention or link to your specific oil filters when doing a tutorial on oil changes.
• Asking an influencer to review your product or service. If he/she is happy with your product or service, you gain a great endorsement that’s shared with his/her followers.

It comes down to trust

Another reason influencer marketing works is that it conveys trust. Influencers become influencers because people trust them. In this sense, influencer marketing is just a re-invention of word-of-mouth marketing, but influencers are a bit different.

Unlike the friend who refers you to a good restaurant, influencers are particularly adept at creating and promoting their content. They know how to build an audience and how to build trust. When you partner with an influencer, some of that trust rubs off on you and your product.

Of course, this can also be a challenge. Influencers know very well that their audiences must trust them. Because of that, they won’t just jump into a partnership with any company who simply waves money in their face. They have to genuinely like and trust a company to endorse or promote them.

If you’re lucky enough to have a likable and trustworthy company, this is great. If you’re not,  you’ve got bigger things than influencer marketing to worry about.

How to get started

If you want to move forward with influencer marketing, the first thing to decide is what you want out of it. Do you want leads, or is just amplifying your content enough? Do you want website visits, a larger email list, or more awareness about your brand? Figure all that out first.

The next thing is to identify anywhere from five to 20 influencers who could help you achieve your goals. Pay particular attention to where influencers are most influential. “Vloggers” or video bloggers probably rule on YouTube. Other influencers may have a popular blog or a podcast. Still others might speak at conferences a lot. Pick your influencers based on their sphere of influence, and make sure that lines up with your goals.

You can speed up the process by first using any one of these online tools to find them:

• Klout
• Kred
• FollowerWonk
• NinjaOutreach
• BuzzSumo
• LittleBird

Once you’ve identified whom you want to partner with, start building the relationship. Share their content. Re-share what they post. Comment on their content – their blog posts, their Facebook posts, and their books (if they’ve published one).

After a few weeks of this, they’ll probably recognize your name and brand. Then it might be time to ask about that blog post or  invite them to do some small content co-creation project. An alternative is to include them in a round-up post or in a “Top 20 Influencers in the X Industry” type post. Those two blog post formats can be terrific tools for capturing influencers’ attention, but be careful, influencers can spot insincerity a mile away.

Once you get their attention and commitment, expect to spend at least 20 hours of  your time working with two or three influencers on co-creating content for a campaign.  That’s just the baseline. 

You'll Need A Budget

To give you an idea of how money fits into influencer marketing partnerships, check this graph from Augure’s  "State of Influencer Engagement Report". Sixty-nine percent of brands “rarely” or “never” pay their influencers. That's not good business.

While most marketers do not compensate influencers,  there is growing debate in public relations and marketing circles that influencers deserve to be paid for their efforts.  Many say influencers should not be expected to work for free and deserve to be compensated because they spend significant time doing things such  as writing blog posts and launching social media on behalf of businesses and brands.

As an advocate for small business, I’m inclined to agree. While there are some highly successful (and wealthy) influencers out there, most are small business owners themselves who’ve worked hard to build the audiences we need, and they deserve to be compensated for their time, work and influence because it has value to them and to us.

If you find an influencer who’ll partner with you for free, thank them and run with it. I always recommend setting aside a little money for working with influencers, even when your marketing budget is tight.   A partnership with a celebrity-level influencer will cost thousands of dollars, but many micro-influencers work with brands and businesses at hourly or project rates. Check their websites for a rate card or media card, which specifically outlines their fees.

It’s also important to note that influencers can’t do everything and anything we ask them to. The Federal Trade Commission has some pretty strict rules about disclosure that require all influencers to publicly state in every piece of content if they receive ANY kind of benefit from working with your business or brand. That includes free samples for a product review, discounts, giveaway items, travel, quid pro quo deals, or financial compensation.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing can be very effective. Do your due dilligence to build trust and mutually beneficial relationships with influencers because they have the public trust, skills and audience that can help bring your business to the next level.