- A unique way to promote your content
is by leveraging influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing
that identifies and targets individuals
with influence over potential buyers.
So how does this help your content?
Including influencers in your content
adds some oomph
to both your content and your promotion.
Send influencers early releases of your content,
asking them to share and blog
and distribute out to their network.
So where do you find influencers?
You can find your relevant influencers
by scouring social media,
and you can do this by making lists,
by tracking hashtags, by doing searches.
You can also find influencers at conferences
that are relevant to your industry.
Network, make those connections,
especially with the people that are speaking
at those conferences.
Industry bloggers are great.
Surely, hopefully, you have a list
of bloggers that you follow on a daily basis.
Reach out to those folks.
And then there's various software solutions
that actually track influencers and tell you
specifically who is influential in your market.
So let's see some influencer marketing
and content marketing in action.
This is an example of a thought leader interview
included in one of Marketo's content assets.
The thought leader was asked to appear in the e-book
by answering a series of questions
that were relevant to the topic.
Once the e-book was published,
the thought leader promoted it out
to his network.
The key thing here is to make sure
that you're choosing the right influencers
for your particular topic,
and then to send them questions
that they're interested in answering.
You can do the same thing by including
thought leader blog posts on either your blog
or in your content assets.
This is an example of a content piece
created by LinkedIn that features 10 blog posts
from marketing influencers.
LinkedIn also created fun snowman avatars
for each influencer to further increase
the chances of influencer promotion
and blogging about the company and the asset.
Once you have included influencers in your content,
ask them to share it from their social channels.
So here's an example of an influencer company
sharing content after they were featured.
This is great because it gets your content
out there from additional networks of your influencers.
Asking an influencer to blog about your content
or hoping she will, anyways, is a great way
to increase reach for your content assets.
In this example from Marketo's
"Definitive Guide to Lead Generation,"
Ann Handley, a content influencer,
blogged about the visual style of the e-book.
You can see that this blog post
generated 718 shares on Twitter,
90 shares on Facebook and 130 shares on LinkedIn,
so this is fantastic for additional visibility.
So let's go over some tips for influencer marketing.
First of all, be aware of your asks.
You don't wanna always be asking the same people
the same things all the time.
So it's important to know what's in the pipeline already
and who you've asked favors of.
Influencer marketing is a two-way street.
So make sure that they're getting something
out of the relationship, as well.
Show them the WIIFM, the what's in it for them.
Make sure they know that helping you
is beneficial for their personal brand, as well.
And then, always show your appreciation
when an influencer participates in
or shares your content.
You can do this by simply saying thank you
or never underestimate the value of sending cupcakes.
So don't forget to include influencer marketing
in the promotion of your content.
In fact, you should think about influencer marketing
before your content is even created
so that you can get creative
on how to include your influencers.
Once an asset has published, ask your influencers
to share, but make sure that you are
creating valuable in a two-way relationship
with them over time.