These days we are used to perceiving influencer marketing as something that fashion and beauty startups are using on Instagram, TikTok and Youtube to drive quick sales.
Yet, influencers can become a powerhouse for your on-site content as well making your content more trusted and actively shared.
While influencer marketing has proved to be an effective ROI driver, it is also a good way to build on-going consistent growth, and here’s how:
How Can Influencers Contribute to Your Blog?
There are several ways an influencer can actually help you build up your blog content.
Two basic rules to keep in mind here are:
- Always remember that influencers are very busy. Make it as easy as possible for them to participate in your campaign.
- Don’t make it all about a one-time campaign. You need to nurture your relationships with participating influencers, long after your article is published.
Ideas for you to get inspired:
- Create a monthly “tweetable” tips article collecting short actionable tips/quotes from experts in your industry and putting them together into an article.
- Invite an influencer a week to key-note your Twitter chat.
- Have a new influencer a month to get interviewed on your podcast.
- Invite influencers to share their personal experience or case studies on what you are currently writing about.
Here is a quick personal example of how we are using influencer marketing to generate content for our blog: ViralContentBee weekly expert twitter chat.
Viral Content Bee holds a regular Twitter chat where content marketing experts teach their community one marketing tactic a week.
The result is higher exposure through the prominent expert voices as well as a more engaged growing community.
You can mix and match different types of content formats. Feel free to host video interviews and create podcasts off that, then put the text version on your blog, etc. The more content you create the better.
Target Seasonality and Trends
I’ve had the biggest success when creating influencer roundups based on seasonality or currently hot trends. This content goes viral quite easily, especially with help of participating influencers’ shares.
It is a nice idea to use Text Optimizer to explore concepts and brands that are associated with a certain seasonal trend. For example, if I want to brainstorm an influencer-driven content asset for “Black Friday”, there’s a strong association with deals and discounts:
While Thanksgiving is associated with traditional food:
Focusing on these concepts when planning your influencer-driven content is a good idea if you want to create high engaging content.
How Can Those Contributions Drive More Traffic to Your Blog?
Having an expert contribute a blurb or even take part in a more time-consuming initiative (like a podcast) is only the first step.
To fully utilize that connection, you may want to encourage your contributors to engage with that content by commenting and sharing it with their social media following.
1. Send an Email to Each Influencer
Email your participating contributors thanking them for the quote and inviting them to share and comment. It is not a bad idea to use email marketing to make this task easier.
If you use content management solutions like MyBlogU, you’ll be able to automate that step.
Once you mark your article as published, all the participating contributors get an email notifying them of a published article.
2. Let Your Readers Tweet Influencers’ Quotes
Use the “Tweet this quote” trick to let your readers share any contributed blurb on Twitter while tagging the author.
This way, your contributors will be reminded of the piece with each tweet and they will certainly appreciate the exposure too!
Here are more ways to create tweetable quotes within your article to feature your participating influencers even more.
3. Turn Influencers’ Quotes into Visuals to Market More!
Visualize your contributors’ quotes and market them on social media, one by one, tagging each author on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.
Here are a few powerful online editing tools if you need more features to create more professional graphic designs for your influencer-driven content.
Note: Tagging a name means that each of your influencers will be notified that their name was mentioned on social media. Tagging dramatically increases meaningful engagement.
Keep in mind that you can schedule Tweets tagging other people (all you need is to use @ following by the Twitter username).
However you’ll have to manually share each quote on Facebook and Linkedin because you need to select the influencer from the drop-down to tag them on Facebook for them to be notified that they were mentioned:
Remember that each effort brings those influencers back to your content, encourages them to spread the word again and again building traffic and awareness.
What’s more, that builds up their trust in you and turns them into friends and ambassadors.
Conclusion
There’s one huge benefit of using influencer marketing in your content creation strategy: This content remains on your site. Unlike other channels where it would soon be forgotten, on your own site it will keep sending positive signals to Google, boost your brand’s authority and trustworthiness and attract on-going traffic.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
- How to Smartly Promote Your Content on Social Media - December 8, 2020
- How to Use Influencer Marketing to Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts - September 3, 2020
- 10 Tools to Streamline Your Twitter Strategy - May 26, 2020
