Most content marketers have tasks assigned to them every week, constant pings about creating more content pieces for the firm’s digital properties and promoting them on social media platforms. However, many constantly put off these tasks due to time and resource constraints.
It’s a story that many marketers can relate to.
In essence, content marketing is a time-consuming task. 87 percent of B2B marketers struggle when it comes to creating engaging content for their buyers. In the B2C world, only 27 percent of marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. It’s becoming more and more difficult for them to keep up as blogs, webinars, white papers, and other content types invade the digital space in large numbers and users grow to expect vast amounts of content on their newsfeeds.
However, help is at hand! Marketers can now access a constant stream of valuable content to feed their company’s content marketing needs, without the continuous grind to publish more and more. How?
Influencer marketing!
Marketers can tap into the power of Influencers to add much needed firepower to their inbound strategy. Influencer-generated content can range from blogs and videos to images and social content. By collaborating with key opinion leaders more effectively, you can achieve several goals in less time: build traffic, drive leads, and delight existing audiences. It is a wealth of writers, experts, creatives and opinion-leaders at your fingertips.
Influencer Marketing Is the Answer to Your Content Marketing Woes
Influencer backed content marketing campaigns have a people-first mentality; content focuses on sharing ideas about great Brands as well as being an expert and trusted voice. As a result, these campaigns are regarded as more authentic than traditional campaigns, which is why people react to them in a positive manner.
For instance, Bigelow Tea took the smart route to content marketing by tapping into a network of Influencers. The Brand worked with expert bloggers to promote the health benefits of drinking tea and create emotional appeal.
The Influencers delivered. Some used the packaging to showcase do-it-yourself art, and others made original recipes using Bigelow Tea’s products. Jess, a blogger at A Million Moments, used tea packaging to create beautiful flower pots to wow her audience.
She also promoted Bigelow in a subtler manner by telling her readers that they could catch up with all things Bigelow by keeping updated with her blog.
The Influencers managed to create over 32,000 blog engagements with their content pieces. Bigelow Tea’s total media value amplified more than 3x, and the company enjoyed an 18.5 percent uplift in sales.
What benefitted Bigelow Tea is how smoothly influencers were able to integrate the brand’s product while creating content. Influencers are known to their audience and trusted by them, this transparency factor adds more strength to campaigns.
Also, content is marketed on both the Influencers’ and the Brand’s digital properties, which results in plenty of interactions and engagement.
Partnering With the Best Influencers for Your Campaign
The world of content moves fast. To keep up, you need to identify a diverse group of Influencers who understand your Brand and can help it cut through the noise. Here are some tips on how you can partner with the best content creators out there.
- Find Influencers Who Resonate With Your Communications
Search for expert content creators in your niche and make sure that they have a genuine passion for Brands like yours. Also, look at the social media engagement and blog comments they get. You want to work with someone who gets people talking. Companies can use an Influencer Marketing platform like Buzzoole to find Influencers with real Brand affinity, such as experts in your niche.
- Excite Them with Your Offer
Finding the right Influencer is only half the job done. You have to present them with an enticing offer to convince them to be a part of your campaign. It doesn’t have to be financial compensation. For instance, you can give them creative control over the content if you’re a well-known brand; influencers would love the fact that an established brand liked their work enough to give them creative control. Another thing you can do is label them as brand ambassadors for your Brand and feature them in your online and offline collateral. In a nutshell, the offer should make them feel special.
- Monitor and Optimise
As you work with Influencers and repurpose their content on your own digital properties, monitor the content’s performance to see what type of content gets the most traffic, engagement and conversions. Once you’ve identified the content, track the source (the Influencers who created it), and get them on board for more campaigns. One of the benefits of monitoring and optimising Influencer generated content is that it takes the guesswork out of the equation (you don’t want to keep working with the wrong Influencer) and fine tune your content strategy with what works best for your audience.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing can work wonders for marketers because it addresses one of their main challenges – creating meaningful content on a constant basis. By finding the right Influencers and working with them to create share-worthy content, you’ll be able to scale your content marketing across all your digital channels.