This is a guest post by Evy Wilkins, VP of Marketing at Traackr. Traackr is a sponsor of our Realtime Marketing Lab event, but this post is not sponsored.
If you practice content marketing, you also need to create and sustain relationships with the people who influence your customers. Why? Because your content is only as good as the people who read it and take action on it.
When you build strategic relationships with influencers, you open your content to new audiences and more relevant eyeballs. It’s how you grow your traffic, reach more people and get more leads.
You’ll find the more you build relationships with your influencers, the more opportunities you uncover to keep the ball rolling. One tweet becomes one comment becomes a few emails becomes an interview becomes a partner.
I’m passionate about how content marketing and influencer relationships work together. I’ve interviewed experts on this topic, I incorporate it in my work and I wrote a guide on how to do it.
Here are a few of the ideas from that guide with examples of businesses doing awesome work involving influencers in their content marketing and social engagement.
#1 Answer Their Questions on Your Blog
- Level: Easy
- How: Listen to your influencers’ content to find moments when they ask questions or open the door to a healthy debate.
- Ex: Gathering Clouds, a blog by Logicworks, keeps tabs on the cloud computing conversation and provides timely insights.
#2 Incorporate Their Tweets in Your Content
- Level: Easy
- How: Instead of publishing a curated list of posts, write your own piece and highlight other people’s points of view by embedding their tweets.
- Ex: We analyzed the trends at a social media conference and sprinkled the best tweets from influencers throughout the post.
#3 Use Your Assets To Support Your Influencers
- Level: Medium
- How: Leverage your publication platforms and channels to showcase your influencers and the work they do.
- Ex: Concur celebrated Small Business Week by featuring small business professionals on their blog.
#4 Help Your Influencers Tell a Story
- Level: Advanced
- How: Use your data to produce infographics or studies they can incorporate into their own work.
- Ex: Trulia, a residential real estate site, used their data to analyze dating trends. It was so interesting the New York Times picked it up.
#5 Provide Exclusive Experiences to Inspire Their Content
- Level: Advanced
- How: Find ways to incorporate special opportunities (interviews, early access) for influencers in your product development process, during your launches or at your events.
- Ex: IBM involved influencers at its Smarter Commerce Summit, resulting in wide coverage of their event to many different audiences.
The goal is to start seeing your content as a way to create relationships with the people who matter most to your business. When you put people at the heart of your content, you end up producing higher quality pieces that resonate with your audience.
Shares go up. Engagement increases. What ideas do you have for incorporating your influencers into your content strategy?
Image courtesy of franky242 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About the Author
Evy Wilkins is the VP Marketing at Traackr, a leading influencer marketing platform. She’s co-hosting Traackr’s Advanced Influencer Marketing Workshop in NYC on 10/15, the day after Realtime Marketing Lab.
