Working with Influencers: More than Just a Leap of Faith

The following is a guest blog post from Dani Finkelstein, co-founder of BlogsRelease and one of the key sponsors of the 2015 ASCEND Digital Marketing Summit in Philadelphia, October 18-20.

And any good digital innovator knows that influencer marketing is becoming more and more popular. And why wouldn’t it? After all, there are over 100 million active blogs on the web and 77% of all internet users read them.

Some marketers are reluctant to work with bloggers simply because they don’t know where to start. Of course, just finding a list of blogs, sending some emails, and choosing the first bloggers who respond is unlikely to yield the quality results you seek. This is why working with influencers isn’t about taking a leap of faith; it’s about building a business partnership.

Approach selecting influencers like selecting business partners and have a solid plan of what you want to accomplish with your blogger campaign. Here are four tips to start you off:

Determine your target market

All great campaigns start with research. Learn to listen and observe prior to engaging. What this means practically is to regularly check what your audience is saying, with whom they are talking, and how they are doing it. Is your audience very active on Twitter? Facebook? Pinterest?

What about the bloggers you’re considering? Let’s say you’re a brand that is interested in marketing a new line of affordable women’s shoes and you come across a couture fashion blogger with many followers on Twitter.

Even if the blogger agrees to review your shoes, don’t let the numbers blind you – people in your target market may be more interested in reading a review by, for example, a popular thriftshop blogger. Their following may be smaller, but it is likely to translate into more sales.

Perfect your pitch


Let’s say you check Twitter and see that people often tweet about how uncomfortable heels are. Surely then your pitch to bloggers should be all about how comfortable your shoes are, right?

Well, hold on. What if you determined that your target audience overwhelmingly prefers to hang out on Instagram and people there are more interested in how trendy the shoes are?

Your target audience is more likely to be interested in your product so, although you shouldn’t be too specific, you need to write your pitch first and foremost with them in mind.

Find the right tools


Don’t waste time trying to find bloggers manually when there are countless tools and platforms available for that very purpose. BlogsRelease is one example, as it’s a great PR marketplace for brands to connect with influencers by posting blogger review campaigns for products, events and news.

Promote, promote, promote


Don’t expect bloggers to do all your work for you. First, you must be very clear about what you expect from them. Tell them which hashtags you want them to use, how many photographs they need to feature, and what you want them to include in the post.

It’s up to the blogger to deliver the quality post and promote it on their own social media channels as per your agreement. However, don’t hesitate to use your own social channels as well.

Analyze

Now it’s time to measure your ROI, SEO and all that fun stuff to see if you reached your goals. Keep in mind that influencer marketing isn’t always an exact science. People may discover a particular blog post weeks after your campaign has ended and cause a huge surge in visits to your site.

Don’t expect instant results. That said, once you’re ready to measure the impact, take a detail-oriented approach. What can you learn for future campaigns? It could be that having more photos increases the likelihood of clicks. Maybe a share on Tumblr unexpectedly received many likes. Note which posts worked better and which didn’t see any traffic increase.

The more you analyze, the more factors you’ll be able to control and predict for future campaigns. If you follow these steps you’ll be on your way to success with influencer marketing in no time.


How have you engaged influencers to help your business grow? Tell us in the comments below!

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