If you have ever created a content marketing strategy, then you’ve probably heard the term “influencers,” and possibly even worked with some. These online personalities generally have a large following in a particular arena – whether it’s parenting, skincare, or entertainment. Many of these influencers are bloggers, or at least started out that way, and they can give your content marketing strategy a much-needed boost.
It used to be that if a business wanted a blog to mention it, they had to pitch products or services for full-scale reviews. Today’s bloggers have easier ways to promote you, though, and they are usually more effective.
Take a look at a few ways to use bloggers in your content marketing strategy:
Hire them to write. If you want quality content, hire someone who writes online for a living. Find bloggers whose writing style you feel aligns with what your brand wants to convey and then contract them for your content marketing material.
Hire them to consult. If you find bloggers that seem to have a following in your target demographic, pay them for their insight. Ask them the best ways to create and distribute your content to reach the people you’d most like to see and hear about your product.
Partner with them. When you want a place to drop your own links, find blogs that have an audience similar to your business. You can either offer products or experiences for a review, or pay for the blogger to write a sponsored post (that fully discloses that fact, according to FCC regulations).
Have them tweet. Pay bloggers to tweet about your business or even post images of your products. Give it the hashtag “ad” and let the Twitterverse converse.
Have them post. A lot of bloggers see most of their engagement as far as commenting on their Facebook fan pages. Pay for them to post about your product or to share your website or Facebook page.
Have them pin. Look for boards on Pinterest that align with what your business sells and then seek out those bloggers to pin your products. Pinterest is looking for ways to regulate this type of influencing in order to monetize it but you can still work around it at this point.
Have them create video content. Whether it’s for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, or Snapchat, most bloggers are pretty video-savvy and can throw together engaging pieces that feature your products or services. An estimated 100 million videos are watched every day online so this is a smart way to show your own audience that you can deliver content they want to consumer – and put a video-savvy blogger behind the camera.
Have you had any success with influencers and content marketing?
