It can be hard to find the right influencers to help promote your content.
With so many people claiming to be experts, it can be tough to know who you should trust.
However, it is a great way for businesses to increase brand awareness, traffic and sales by collaborating with influencers that can appeal to their target market.
This way businesses can focus on creating great products and services while they help promote them for you.
What’s Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a new and growing industry.
Influencer marketing is a collaboration between a business and an influencer who has built your desired audience.
Influencers have already built an audience that knows, likes and trusts them, o when they promote a product that they claim to use and love, their followers are likely to take action.
The content influencers create and post online can have a significant impact on your search engine optimisation.
This is because:
- Influencers create unique and interesting content (which can be discovered by social and search engines)
- Influencers can help build your link profile (which helps you rank higher on Seach engine results pages SERP)
- Influencers can help increase traffic, reach and engagement (which helps increase conversions)
The goal of this process should be engaging influencers in an authentic way that will allow you to access and borrow those audiences as needed.
Influencers come in all shapes and sizes.
Most of the time when we think of an influencer, we think of celebrities or Instagram models.
But really, an influencer can be anyone who has ‘influence’.
Just like Kylie Jenner is regarded as an influencer, so too are personal brands like Gary Vee, Tony Robbins and Neil Patel who all have massive social media followings.
Depending on your business, you’ll want to look for different kinds of influencers:
- Bloggers and journalists can link their articles to your eCommerce store
- Podcasters and YouTubers can link to you from their show notes to your store
- Social media influencers can share links in their stories or bio to your store
Google is the king of search, and most people use it to find information.
If you want your business or product to be found online, then using influencer marketing to optimise SEO can be an integral part of doing that!
Now when it comes to social media influencers, we need to remember that their impact is indirect.
For example, an Instagram influencer may have a lot of influence on the platform, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a lot of influence outside the platform, namely their own website.
What this means is that they may be able to get people to click on links on the platform, but those links don’t have as much power in Google SERPs as links from other websites do.
Essentially you should look for influencers who create quality content within your industry and who have high domain authority (how likely a website is to rank on Google).
The graphic below shows that while influencer marketing on social media can increase brand awareness, it does not do the same for link building and authority.
This means that if your goal for influencer marketing is to increase authority and your link portfolio, then using influencers who have high domain authority makes the most sense.
However, if your goal is to increase awareness then social media influencers can have a positive influence (even if they don’t have their own website).
Influencer marketing using guest posts, articles and interviews have shown to increase authority and traffic.
So the strategy you take really does depend on the outcome that you want.
Source: Orbit Media
Finding the right influencers
In order for influencer marketing campaigns to be successful (or at least get started), brands need not only to find talented influencers, but also need to make sure that their interests align, so there can ultimately be a stronger connection between one another’s followers.
When you want to build an audience, it’s important that your content speaks directly to the people who would be interested in your products or services and overall message.
Influencer marketing has been proven as one major strategy for marketers that want their voices heard in an increasingly noisy marketplace, where competition runs rampant every day.
Buzzsumo has a tool to find influencers to promote your brand.
Step 1: Head over to Buzzsumo
Step 2: Click on the influencer tab and then authors
Step 3: Type in your keywords
Step 4: Filter your results
Here are a few other influencer marketing platforms to checkout.
Influencer Outreach
Influencer marketing is all about collaboration.
Here are some ways to reach out to influencers:
1. Engage with their content on social media and search results
This is a great way to get on their radar and build a real connection.
You can follow them on social media and like and comment on their posts, as well as comment on their blog posts and let them know what you think.
You could even link to their content if you find something worth sharing and then let them know how helpful it was.
Another way to start a relationship is by asking them if they want to be featured in one of your articles.
This is a great way to show that you value them and their content.
2. Let them know that you are interested in collaborating
You can send them an email, direct message (DM), or even a voice note and let them know that they shouldn’t hesitate to contact you if they ever want to collaborate on something.
This can lead to guest blogging opportunities, quotes or even interviews. This is a great way to get directly in front of your ideal audience and let them get to know you.
Trust has already been built with the brand you are collaborating with, so it makes it easier for them to get to build trust with you.
3. Paid partnership
The previous two options mentioned above are ways to organically create relationships with influencers, but it is also important to collaborate on paid partnerships.
Here you and the influencer can agree on the terms of the relationship and its deliverables.
There are two types:
- Organic collaboration, where both parties work together at some point after meeting one another
- Paid partnership, where one party pays upfront costs to work with an influencer
By partnering with the right influencers, you can create relationships that increase brand awareness, traffic and links.
However, it’s important to remember to maintain transparency and set the terms of the agreement ahead of time.
The best way to find the right balance between collaboration and transparency when forming partnerships with influencers?
Now that you know how to do influencer marketing. You can proceed to the next section of the KAMG SEO Content Hub and begin to learn how to leverage PR for SEO.
Need some help with link building? Contact us today for a free consultation!
