I recently wrote a blog post called 5 Tips to Help You Get Better Results with Influencer Marketing, which summaries pretty well how to get the results you’ve identified.
In today’s post, I want to break down one of those tips and give you more detailed information about it.
Tip #1:
What do you want?
It’s not enough to think you have a good idea; You need to be clear about what your goal is so that you don’t go off on some kind of tangent, or slip into the dreaded “overwhelm” sinkhole.
Before you start reaching out to influencers, decide if your goal is to build awareness, promote your book, drive people to Amazon or other online book retailers, increase your followers, grow your email list or something else. Getting the best return on your investment from this marketing channel requires that you know what you want and have a very clear goal in mind.
But even before you set that goal and start pitching various influencers, it’s time to build some social capital. What is that exactly? There’s an old saying by workplace expert Lois Frankel, Ph.D., who said, “The time to build a relationship is before you need it.”
We’ve all had experiences where someone came to us out of the blue asking for a really big favor. Now, that’s fine if it’s your BFF or a family member (or maybe it’s not; it’s your call) but when it’s a Facebook “friend” or distant contact who you aren’t regularly in touch with, or worse yet, someone you’ve never even heard of, then that big request can be a big irritant.
You know how it feels when it happens to you, and you don’t want to be “that person” to someone else.
Long before you do any kind of goal-oriented outreach, it’s time to build that social capital. Figure out who the influencers are that you want to target. If you’re already connected, that’s easy. You want to:
- Pay attention to what they’re doing
- Like and share their posts
- Comment when you can add to the conversation.
Of course, you really do want to be interested in what they’re saying. This is a strategy, but it still needs to be a strategy with heart.
If you’re not connected yet, you have some options:
- You can follow them on Twitter without them having to accept an invitation.
- The same goes for Instagram. Find them and follow them.
- Other social media platforms require that you send an invitation to connect first, which they may or may not do, so keep that in mind.
- You can follow their blog. If they accept comments, then if you have something interesting to add, comment. It puts you on their radar screen.
- Use your imagination. How can you be friends with this person? Then go about making that happen.
Some people define “influencer” as someone with a huge following in the hundreds of thousands, but I invite you to expand your thinking on this. Anyone can be an influencer for you if they speak to your market, and that market listens. They don’t have to have an outrageous number of followers to be effective, but they do need an engaged audience. They may only have a few thousand followers, but many buy what the influencer recommends, so that’s good for you.
Spend time building your social capital and then when you’re ready to begin your outreach campaign, you will not seem like the person out of the blue asking for a giant favor.
Ok, back to the original point:
What kind of outreach are you doing?
Are you trying to build awareness, promote your book, drive people to Amazon or other online book retailers, increase your followers, grow your email list or something else?
Once you’ve identified which it is, that information will help you to craft your pitch. Whether you’re writing a guest blog post, an article, suggesting some affiliate relationship or collaboration, knowing what you want people to do and building out your piece that way will get you there. You can often include a link in your bio to where you want to send them.
Knowing what you want, having a strategy, and then implementing it will either get you where you want to go, or it will give you feedback on what you need to change and tweak to get you there.
To your success!
Joanne
P.S. Landing feature interviews and article placement is always fun for me, but landing the cover always makes me dance. Cassandra Ohlsen, MD, is the author of Enlightened Eating: The Eightfold Path to Health on the cover of OM Times Magazine.
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