If you’re looking to ramp up your digital marketing efforts and expose your brand to a broader audience, it’s time you enlisted the help of a social media influencer.
Influencer marketing can have a powerful effect on your business’ success if you find the right person to promote your brand to the right type of audience. After all, they can help generate sales, create content about your brand, help build brand awareness, and are a trusted source for people looking for recommendations about what to buy.
Not to mention, finding and connecting with a reliable social media influencer in your industry has the potential to build strong relationships between their own followers and your brand by communicating and interacting with your target audience. According to an infographic from Grin, Iceland Foods garnered a 59% retention rate on YouTube – as well as a 55% rate on Facebook – with the help of influencer-created videos.
So, how do you go about finding social media influencers, and then working with them? Here’s some tips for finding the right influencer for your business, so you see an increase in traffic, conversions, and sales.
Create killer content
Remember that strong, keyword-rich content is one of the most effective ways to ensure your content is authentic. After all, if you use the right keywords in your content, it’ll appear in relevant search results and have an increased likelihood of being clicked on. Plus, it will actually be helpful to those that read it since it will have keywords they are searching for.
If you’re just starting out, or find yourself stuck with what to write about, start looking for questions that your audience might be having about your niche.
You can use a free online tool like Answer the Public to come up with the questions. The queries that pop up after entering your keyword are actual searches people are putting into the Google search bar.
This means real people are eager to learn about the answers to the questions listed. Of course, the more questions you answer, the more value-packed the content becomes for your readers.
Once you’ve established to the influencer that you have quality content to share with their audience, they’ll be ready to send traffic your way. Remember that in addition to creating great content for site visitors to read, you have to focus on the user experience too. This means your website should load fast and function properly for anyone that arrives on your site.
One of the best ways to increase your page speed is to use a CDN – CDNs are made up of multiple servers spanning the globe, each with a copy of your site’s files on them. Then, when a site visitor clicks on your website to view it, the server nearest them geographically delivers your site’s content instantly.
A reliable CDN reduces latency and improves the user experience, and since 40% of people will abandon your site if it fails to load within 3 seconds or less, no matter what you have to offer, it’s a good idea to use a CDN to speed up your website.
Spy on your competition
There are so many influencers out there to pick from, it can be overwhelming to say the least when you decide you want to work with one.
To help you create a list of potential influencers, and make your job a lot easier, try checking out what your competition is doing first. Using a tool like SEMrush, you can see the types of backlinks your biggest competition is getting.
By doing this, you’ll see which authoritative sites find your competition valuable enough to link to in their own content for their own site visitors.
Any of those authorities are worth considering as an influencer for your brand. All you have to do is show them why you’re better than the competition and get them to work with you instead.
Use an influencer tool
Once you have a list of possible influencers, it’s time to research how ‘influential’ they really are on their social media platforms.
Phlanx is a great way to see how many followers a prospective influencer has, how many comments and likes they have, and how engaged their audience is. After all, you need to find a social media influencer who has enough reach to expose your brand to a broader audience, and enough interaction with that audience to boost your traffic and conversions. You can test platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch and Twitter with this tool.
Want another easy way to find influencers in your industry? Check out AllTop. This content aggregation website accumulates all the most influential blogs in each of their categories, along with their most recent blog posts for your viewing. Created by actual people looking for the most influential blogs per category, rather than an algorithm, your chances of finding an influencer in your niche here are high.
Contact your influencer
Once you’ve decided on a few influencers, it’s time to reach out to them and see if they’re willing to work for you.
You can use an affordable email marketing service such as MailChimp to send out several emails at once and streamline the process. Pick from any of the pre-made templates they have to get you started or create your own.
Just make sure you personalise the influencer outreach email, so it doesn’t seem like a complete cut and paste. You want to come across as sincere and honest in your outreach emails, not spammy.
Influencers, especially highly sought after ones, probably receive a ton of cold emails a day from people wanting their help. It’s best to have a good reason why you want to work with them and why your business is deserving of their audience base before you start asking them to represent you.
Finding trustworthy influencers that are willing to recommend your brand to their audience, promote your products and services, and help you make money are not always easy to come by.
It takes time and research to find out who will be the best fit for your brand and your target audience. However, once you have a small list of potential influencers, and a good reason why your company is better than anyone else’s, you’ll be well on your way to having someone who will market your brand for you.
Author bio:
Jimmy Rodela is a freelance writer and contributor to top-tier business websites such as Business.com, SearchEnginePeople, and Social Media Today. He’s also the founder of Guild of Bloggers.
