Content marketing is a valuable tool for marketers. If you execute it correctly, your prospects will seek your business out. That’s half the battle won for you, with no pushy sales tactics necessary.
But it’s not a walk in the park.
Getting Content Marketing Right Is Tricky
Unfortunately, content marketing can be tricky to master. Part of the reason is that it’s difficult to work out the return on investment. There’s no metric that measures the influence of a post on a consumer. You can track the visitor’s actions on your page, but that leaves you with a very narrow definition of success.
Traffic to a post is another very narrow way to define success. We all aim for our posts to go viral, but how much value is that adding to your business? It might help to boost your SEO results, but how much of that traffic results in a sale being made?
Another complication is that it takes a while for you to see results. The blog post that you publish now could take a few months to really start gaining traction. The delay between posting time and when you start to see results come in can seem interminable.
If only there was some way to gauge your target audience’s reaction faster. Could influencer marketing give you a head start here?
Let’s see.
Influencer Marketing + Content Marketing
Depending on the type of content marketing strategy you’re engaged in, you might already be involved with an influencer. If you’ve created a guest post for someone serving the same target market, you’re relying on their influence to boost your results.
Guest posting can be highly effective, but there are also issues to be addressed:
- You have no control over when the content will appear.
- The content may be altered to fit the style of the blog.
- You have no control over the work once it’s been published.
That’s why I’m talking about a more formal approach here. One where you hire an influencer to promote your brand.
The Benefits of Hiring an Influencer
Influencer marketing is an easy way to expand your reach and get noticed. When an influencer — someone with a large, engaged audience — mentions your brand or recommends your product, it can drive traffic and revenue.
Is influencer marketing right for you?
Hiring an influencer means that:
- You have more input on the timing of the campaign.
- You’re able to exercise full creative control.
- It’s easier to gauge the response of your target audience.
- You’ve got access to a wide range of followers who are willing to take the influencer’s advice.
- You have an expert who knows your target market extremely well.
How to Make Content Marketing Work with an Influencer
Measure the Right Metrics when Selecting Candidates
Before you start vetting candidates for your influencer marketing efforts, it important to understand the difference between potential reach and engagement.
An influencer with a million followers can be said to have a greater reach than one with twenty thousand followers. That said, that’s not worth much if those users aren’t actively engaging with the influencer.
If they’re not actively liking, sharing, or commenting on posts, your reach becomes more limited. The engagement of the audience is a much better metric to base your decision on.
Getting the Content Right
Many businesses make the decision to create their own content to be shared. From the business’s standpoint, this makes sense — you need to control what’s published online about your company.
In this case, though, it could backfire. You’re hiring the influencer because they have a voice in the community. Choosing content that fits with both their brand and yours is essential, or the message will seem inauthentic or convoluted.
That’s why it pays to allow the influencer some leeway when it comes to content creation. Let them rephrase or reformat your content into something that works for them. You can always check the finished product before it’s published.
Your influencer will be able to advise you on the type of content that works best. You can get more ideas for the type of content from the infographic below. First published on the Review 42 site, it’s packed with even more tips to help you with your content marketing strategy.
Influencer Marketing for Content
Content marketing and influencer marketing can be a good fit. You take the content to the online space where your target market likes to hang out. You get the benefit of the influencer’s advice, a fresh pair of eyes to look over your content, and access to an audience of people who trust the influencer.
Making these campaigns successful means partnering with the right influencer and ensuring that your content is a great fit. Here it’s essential to get the input of the influencer you’re hiring.
That said, this is one shortcut that can help boost your business and brand awareness. At the end of the day, it could work out to be a profitable transaction for both of you.
