When you run a business/service, the marketing part is essential to make sure that you reach out to the maximum audience.
But, how can you do that?
There are many ways but a strong marketing strategy is essential to ensure it.
Most business runs a website to let people know about their product and services. They handle this with the help of bloggers who can create strong content for them.
Bloggers and social media influencers are an essential part of internet marketing and they can make your business popular too.
These bloggers and social media influencers are people who can influence their followers. They will have a lot of followers across various social media platforms.
They have the power to engage and convince the audience to use a product/service through their writing.
So how can you find bloggers and influencers for your business?
This is not an easy task. You need to research well about various popular influencers in your niche who have got the power to attract so many people. These influencers must have the following qualities
Actionability:
Influencers are people who can drive actionability by their audience. They are not forcing anyone to follow them.
The audience follows these influencers by attracting to their blogs. When you find some good social influencer, he should possess this quality.
Reach:
Next quality is to have a good reach. A good blogger or social influencer should have a good number of followers on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.
Contextual:
A good social influencer should fit into any context. When you pick somebody to promote your product/service, make sure to choose the best person from your own niche.
That is the first and foremost thing to note.
How can a person without any knowledge about your product, promote a business?
Why reach out to bloggers and influencers?
You can understand their power by reading the advantages they can bring to your business.
Here are some reasons behind picking social influencers and internet marketers
1. Improves brand awareness:
When an influencer promotes a product/service, it will help to improve its reach. More people know about your brand and will start to search for it.
2. Trust building:
Promoting your business using an influencer improves trust in your product.
When somebody who is very popular promotes your business, then people respect their recommendations and get more attention from them
3. Best content strategy:
According to expert marketers, this is one of the best content marketing strategies that most business can use. It is also a proven technique to improve sales and get an identity to the business.
4. Good partnership:
A good partnership can build through influencer marketing. This can help to connect with your audience well which improves the strength of your brand.
Now you may have got a very good idea about the changes that can bring through social influencer and blogger marketing strategy.
Now how can you approach a blogger?
There are some steps you need to follow before using this as your marketing strategy. Researching about it is the key to the success of using this strategy.
Steps to reach out to bloggers and social media influencers
1. Be ready to do some research:
If you want to find someone best in your niche, you need to research well about various popular people on your niche. You can reach out to them and make a list of popular people who has many followers on various social media platforms.
In this short list, you can add their name, contact information, and popularity on various platforms. You can use various tools to find perfect bloggers. Some popular tools are Alltop, Technorati, followerwonk, etc.
Google search is another source you can use to find out the best influencer bloggers. There you can see by entering keywords related to your niche and find out trending articles. Google trend will be useful for this.
After making some bloggers shortlist, you can check each of them. If you are handling a unique niche then the number will be less. If your topic is popular like marketing, you will get a long list.
2. Review your list:
After making this primary list you need to reduce the number further by removing some of the names.
Other than their popularity and number of followers, you can consider some other factors too. Include some more factors like social authority, domain authority, blog comments, etc on to the list.
Social authority measures the influence this person has got on his followers. You cannot find it using any tools. You will get it by checking their websites.
Next factor is domain authority which means they can influence their followers more.
You can check Domain authority using open site explorer. Higher the domain authority better will be the result you will get from this marketing strategy.
Finally, you can check their blog comments. By measuring user’s participation, you can easily find out the response from users and the influence that he can create on users.
Now add them on your list and check each of the bloggers.
Remove bloggers with low domain authority and social influence from the list. This can help you to reduce the list and pick the best influencers from them.
3. The real plan:
After shortlisting bloggers and social influencers, the next thing you have to do is to follow their blogs. Start to build a relationship with them using the following ways.
Share their content:
You can follow their blog and share their content within your contacts. You can share it on various social media account of yours.
When you share it frequently they will start to notice you.
If you can share it on a good platform where you can add some good comments based on it, then it will be more helpful
Comment on their blogs:
After reading the blog you can post your comment below it. You can appreciate the work and make it more perceptive.
A good short review of the article and its effectiveness will give you identity. The writer will start to notice you.
Answer to social posts:
When they ask a question on social media, you can participate in it. If they find you everywhere they can easily identify you.
Point out broken links:
If you found out any broken link on that site, you can point it out. Broken links can badly effect SEO and it should be removed as soon as possible.
Check my links is an excellent tool to use if you want to find out any broken links from their website. By pointing it out, you are doing a great thing to them.
Send personal emails:
You can send emails by complementing about the blogs and how it helps you to improve business.
Bloggers receive very few personal emails related to their content. So, this is best to let them know that you are a genuine follower of their website.
These are the initial steps of action you can do to create a good impression about you to the influencers you choose.
It could be one person or else more. It is your decision and you can decide the number of influencers whom you want to use to promote your business.
4. Approach them:
After creating an identity, you can really approach those influencers. You can approach them in a friendly manner.
To connect with them is very essential if you want to work with bloggers or social media influencers
Share your content:
You can share the content that needs to spread across various social media platform or share your product details with bloggers to make a content based on it.
If they are interested to work with you then they will reply to your message. There a new relationship starts between you and the influencer who promotes your product
Guest blogging offer:
If you are looking to promote your content, then guest blogging is the best way to reach out to influencers.
You can send mail to the influencer and express your wish to guest blog on their website. This is one of the best ways to increase popularity.
You can include the topic you can blog about in the mail. If you get a chance, this is the golden opportunity to win more followers.
Link building:
Bloggers outreach also help you to build quality backlinks.
You can reach out to them and ask them to add your URL about a similar content of their blog to the resource page of their blog.
Building quality backlink will also help you to increase the website popularity and good SEO. Build a relationship with them using any of the above options.
These are some best ways to approach them and ask them to promote your product/service. You can actually get the feedback from them even if it is a No.
They will get so many emails like this daily because of their popularity. If they like to promote your product/service, then you don’t have to worry about your brand future.
5. Make the connection stronger:
After building a strong relationship you need to make it stronger.
Thank them for accepting you
You need to thank them for accepting your proposal. You can convey your regards to them by sending out some free products or giveaways.
There are many other ways through which you can express your gratitude towards them.
You can give them a commission after getting benefit from their promotion or else you can give a product discount also for them.
These will help to make the relationship of social influencers and your brand stronger
Give them their space:
When they create content, you should not interfere. It is very important to give them freedom of creation. They know how to project your product to their followers.
You can only give them smaller suggestions only about your product, not about its promotion. It is very important to trust them while you want to use their influence to promote your product.
Build relation online and offline:
The next thing to do is to grow your relationship with influencers online as well as offline.
Every way to get in connection with your influencer should not be missed. Both your brand and influencer should work together and both of you can get benefits from this.
6. Measure results:
Finally, after applying all the above statistics you need to track the results. This is very essential to know the result of all the efforts you have put through to promote your brand.
Online promotion is very essential, blogs and influencers can help you to do this. Check the analytics separately and check what works and what doesn’t.
This is the best way to understand the response you get from users also. There are many tools for you to analyze the result. Use them effectively to make your plan successful.
Some additional tips:
- Write solid mails and be polite while writing emails
- You can be straightforward while asking for their co-operation. Avoid writing demanding or unfriendly emails
- To get attention from influencers make your content better than your competitors
- Work together with them to build your brand
- Work hard to get the attention from your influencer
- While creating blogs, it should be informative and knowledgeable to users
Final Words:
There are many marketing strategies which you can use to reach out to influencers, and this is one of the most effective strategy as of now.
You can try every possible way to get good influencers to promote your brand. Bloggers also should be very talented to get the expected outcome you want.
When you outsource content creation, choose the best writers who can project your product/service well. This can help you to make your brand popular.
It is also very important to stay updated about everything happening in your niche.
Whatever you adopt to promote your product, give your 100%. Communication is the key when you want to get support from top influencers or bloggers in your field.
So, have you got the influencer’s list in your niche?
Start implementing new strategies to succeed.