57% of marketers report custom content is their top marketing priority; but, only 12% feel they have an optimized content marketing strategy. When creating your content strategy, integrating influencers into every stage of content marketing can be extremely valuable. Your brand can work with influencers to generate new ideas for content, co-create content together, and amplify content to new audiences. All too often, influencer engagement becomes a hurdle when marketers try to integrate their content marketing and influencer strategies. We get it, influencer engagement can be intimidating. Are you sending the right message to the influencer? What is the best way to approach an influencer? How do you ensure not to offend an influencer? These are all reasons why learning the ropes of influencer engagement is key to your content marketing strategy.
We partnered with Neal Schaffer and Social Tools Summit for a webinar on the crossroads of content marketing and influencer strategy. If you missed the webinar, then you are in luck; here are some of the key takeaways from the live event. Keep reading and learn how to upgrade your content strategy by mastering influencer engagement.
Content and Influence
Influencer marketing and content marketing can’t exist without each other. Without influence, the content you produce stays static and won’t create an impact. Without content, you don’t have a way to participate and, in turn, you won’t have a voice to be influential. Investing in a content and influencer marketing strategy can be one of the most impactful actions a business can make. Incorporating influencers that can inspire relevant action with your content marketing efforts facilitates reaching new audiences with brand messages that are credible and trusted.
Listen to Your Influencers
Listen to influencers to gain valuable insights. You can learn a lot by simply listening to the conversations your audience and influencers have online. Where are influencers steering the conversation? What opportunities does that create for your brand? Capitalize on your social listening by pinpointing optional opportunities for you to engage with influencers.
Socially listening to influencers can help marketers to:
- Understand their target audience
- Conduct content and opportunity audits
- Get inspired by their influencers' content
- Plan and prepare content
- Keep up with top stories and evaluate upcoming trends
Select Relevant Influencers
An influencer's number of followers online is not the only metric you should consider when selecting an influencer. The influencer's relevance to conversations that impact your buyers is much more important.
Philips designed a three tier content approach that allowed various influencers to have different levels of engagement with the brand. Philips leveraged this three tier content strategy to match their content needs to influencer strengths. Because different influencers were able to dedicate more time or resources than others, Philips created a content strategy that could easily accommodate even the busiest influencers. You can’t ask every single influencer to do a long-form documentary, no one has the time and resources for that. On the other hand, brands need more than just tweets to fuel their content strategy. This plan allowed Phillips to meet its content needs. As a result, this strategy helped to increase mentions among the high-value target audience of medical experts, increase Philips product mentions on social channels, and increase engagement with 45 hyper-targeted influencers to drive impact.
Influencers are three times more likely to share your content if asking them to share your content was NOT your first ask. Once you have identified influencers who are relevant to the conversations your brand is participating in, it is time to reach out and engage. Learn the right way to engage with influencers, download the Marketer's Guide to Mastering Influencer Engagement.