Communicators know how important it is to build long term trust.
Trust traditionally came from quality marketing material and the effective sales teams; now it comes from third party influencers that sales teams never meet.
According to one study, having a good influencer relationship plan is the goal for at least 84 percent of all marketing pros. Who exactly are these influencers? They may be opinion leading journalists, industry analysts, heads of consultancy practices or just a public figure with a large social media following. No matter who they are, influencers share a common trait—an authoritative voice capable of grabbing the attention of potential customers for your business.
Here are six essential steps for creating a successful influencer marketing campaign:
1. Identify influencer personas.
Influencers come in many forms, including industry figures at conferences, web based-peer groups, opinion-leading journalists, analysts and even bloggers. Ask yourself what influence they have over your audience and if they will be receptive to your messaging.
[RELATED: Craft messages that resonate with internal and external audiences and moves them to act.]
Depending on their industry role, this will vary. This initial research will be the first stage in identifying and prioritizing the most relevant partners for your organization.
2. Build your “A-list.”
Finding industry figures isn’t a challenge; the difficulty is whittling down your list to establish a top-quality influencer “A-list.” At this stage you should decide if a possible influencer is involved in the relevant market segments; they should be identifiable as prominent in the field and have visibility among your target demographic.
This can be determined by implementing your own method of influencer weights, taking into account the four R’s: regularity, reach, relevance and resonance.
A word of caution: quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. It’s important to investigate an influencer’s following to see if it contains the people you’re looking to target. If they aren’t there, it won’t matter how eye-popping the engagement stats are; your audience is somewhere else.
3. Identify hot topics and industry themes.
Invest time in identifying what ties your business and a potential influencer together. What are the current industry hot topics they are talking about? How can they be married to your sales themes to give you something interesting to say? This top-down approach to identifying content themes allows you to engage with influencers on mutual topics of interest.
4. Make contact.
This is where most campaigns fail. A poor first contact can result in an enduring poor reputation among key influencers. As such, every influencer contacted must be dealt with individually, in a personalized fashion. By sharing relevant content, a marketer can demonstrate the benefit of a partnership to the influencer.
Plus, the personal approach shows influencers that you are willing to engage on a one-to-one basis rather than trawling for interest. Make sure you have concrete benefits to offer the influencer before making contact.
5. Cement the relationship
Once successful first contact has been made, the goal shifts to maintaining this relationship through creating conversation and sharing content. A team should build an asset library as part of a centralized hub to effectively curate and repurpose existing material so that there is always relevant content to promote. By safeguarding the quality of the content, you can maintain relationships with influencers and ensure they will then share your material with their audience.
6. Turn your influencers into evangelists
After securing the relationship with quality content, you can begin to reap tangible ROI through third-party endorsements, greater positive exposure to targeted audiences and increased market credibility for your company and solutions.
However, this is more than a simple lead generation program—it is a two-way street; therefore, it is important to maintain the content relationship rather than letting it fall off when the benefits begin to arrive.
By investing time and resources into developing a mutual content relationship, you can reach the end goal of turning influencers into evangelists of your business and messages.
How are you using influencers to share your messages, PR Daily readers?
Simon Woolley is an engagement specialist at IBA International, a PR agency.
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