How To Leverage Influencer Outreach For Higher Rankings

— August 26, 2017

Leveraging influencer outreach is a powerful marketing strategy you need to pay close attention to. Simply creating content is not enough to secure those coveted higher rankings keeping you up at night. You need to expand your audience reach and connect in a more meaningful way.

Most marketers know the value of having a superb content marketing strategy. Stats compiled by Business 2 Community (B2C), found that 93 percent of marketers utilize content marketing. However, leveraging influencer outreach can have a colossal impact to your marketing strategy. In fact, influencer outreach can boost your conversions three to ten times. This is certainly the ideal when building your audience and getting higher rankings.

Influencers come in many forms, including industry experts, analysts, quality content developers, and even critics. They are powerful assets, influencing the actions of their followers. An influencer can increase content reach, accelerate business growth, and offer high authority inbound links.

How To Leverage Influencer Outreach For Higher Rankings

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Let’s take a closer look at how you can leverage influencer outreach to surpass your marketing goals.

Intrigue Your Potential Influencers with Timely Topics and Newsjacking

In order to leverage influencer outreach, you need to choose topics that will intrigue your intended influencer’s audience, according to marketergizmo. Influencers will not risk their reputation on topics that have little weight among their followers. If your topics fit, the audience will engage in a more meaningful way.

Research your intended influencers. Read their blogs and social media posts. After a bit of research, ask yourself a few key questions; What’s in it for my influencers? How will they benefit? Will their audience gain any helpful info?

Newsjacking is another way to leverage influencer outreach. Newsjacking is simply piggybacking breaking news in order to gain access to an otherwise unreachable audience. According to Small Business Trends, newsjacking became popular in 2011 by marketing expert David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking. It continues to have a place in many marketing strategies.

Develop Quality Content Supported by Expert Sources and Quality Media

If you want to leverage influencer outreach for higher rankings, you want to make your content count. According to a marketing study by Tomoson, 59 percent of marketers will increase their budgets for more influencer marketing.

Put that money to good use through quality content and media. The Tomoson study also found that, “51% of marketers believe they acquire better customers through influencer marketing.” However, poor content and media may yield little.

Developing content beyond the standard 500-word count is an essential strategy for gaining influencer interest. Research conducted on word count by MarketingExperiments found longer copy to perform better by 40.54 percent.

Photos, videos, and infographics are equally as important. A study found that 65 percent of marketing executives believe these media strategies are vital to brand awareness. Video marketing stats by SYNDACAST found that 51.9 percent of marketing professionals say videos have the best ROI.

Approach Influencers Carefully Building the Relationship Over Time

Approaching influencers and building a relationship is certainly an essential aspect to gaining higher rankings. Those social media posts will eventually fade, but a positive influencer relationship is invaluable and long lasting.

This is a vital step in leveraging influencer outreach. Simply approaching influencers to promote your content or brand will end in plenty of unanswered emails. You want to approach influencers with their best interest in mind first.

Approaching influencers with a, “what can I do for you” attitude will help your relationship with him or her rank higher. Be prepared to contribute to their goals prior to asking for anything in return. After all, they are the ones with the community you want to access.

Engage with your intended influencers by first having social media touch points. Comment, like, share, and retweet their content. Leave meaningful comments on their blogs, and use their content as helpful advice across your social media channels as well.

When the time comes, craft a thoughtful pitch email that is individualized. This is your first date, so make the most of it. You want to intrigue and catch your intended influencer’s attention from the get go.

Influencer Outreach Produces Higher Rankings and Better Monetization

Your influencer efforts will ultimately result in the high authority inbound links that produce higher rankings. These authoritative links are what you have been after the whole time. Authoritative links will boost your search engine rank, as well as an increased monetization, according to Forbes. And now with Google’s Real Time penguin and the potential for links being devalued on a real time basis, these influencer links are increasingly important and can signify the difference between a failed or successful online marketing strategy.

When you leverage influencer outreach, you will enhance your marketing efforts in a powerful way. Your influencers will link to your content and their followers will engage, resulting in supercharged inbound links and the higher rankings you want. Increase your content reach, accelerate business growth, and gain high authority inbound links by building those long lasting influencer relationships.

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Author: Megan Ritter

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