What is Influence Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead inspire / hire / pay influencers to get out the word for you.
Key Benefits
- Influence marketing can be a standalone effort, or an effective way to amplify other marketing efforts.
- Build trust.
- Increase brand awareness
Searching for Influencers
Our Influence Marketing directory has a few built in filters to help narrow the results:
- Type = Filter by Bloggers, Influencers and Journalist.
- Location = Filter results by Location. Keep in mind that the location is not uniform. For example some Influencers may have California as their location while others may have CA or Cali, so we suggest trying different options.
- Keyword = Narrow down results to certain topic or niche.
- Audience Size = Filter results by the amount of followers the influencers have.
Building Influencer Relationships
An effective influence marketing strategy relies on relationships with influencers, it may be time consuming but very well worth it.
Here a few steps to building relationships with influencers:
- Get to know the influencer well: read what they write and what’s been written about them, understand their background and experience.
- Understand their attitude towards brands, products and services – within and outside of your industry or market.
- Engage with influencers over time: read their blog or follow them on Twitter, comment on, retweet or share their work.
- Send an introductory communication: say hello via Twitter, just to introduce yourself (no pitching!)
- Never mass-pitch influencers. Every communication must be individualized and focused; you’ll lose credibility with them if you treat them like a group.
- Always be respectful, professional, and humble. Never assume they will want to work with you – over time, help them believe it will be great to work with you.
Tips
- Use the icon to save possible candidates to your Favorites for later access.
- Begin to nurture a relationship before you ask them for anything.