Influencer marketing is a lot like dating.

For your campaigns, you want a loyal, genuine partner that’s willing to make a long-term commitment. Sound familiar?

But in the hunt for the perfect match, many marketers are tempted to speed up the process with “blind dates” or “speed dating.” They reach out without knowing the influencer personally. They’re too forward with a weak relationship. They send out generic mass emails to try and get the attention of multiple suitors. Suffice it to say, these tactics just don’t work.

So, don’t put yourself through the pain of blind speed dating when it comes to your influencer marketing strategy. Instead, use the advice below from 15 influencer marketing “dating” experts to ensure you’re building the right types of relationships with influencers.

Michael Schiemer

Owner | Bootstrap Business

Mike Schiemer is no stranger to social media and content marketing campaigns, working on projects for Allstate, Reebok, GNC, DuPont, and other globally recognized brands. And many of those campaigns involve micro-influencer marketing — one of Mike’s many areas of expertise.

What’s Michael’s influencer relationship advice? Encourage collaboration and provide clarity.

“It’s your responsibility as the brand or business to work collaboratively and provide your influencer with the right tools to get the job done. Be completely clear from the onset about your expectations for the campaign and share your performance metrics with the influencer on an ongoing basis.”

Read more of Michael’s advice: Invest In Instagram Influencers

Follow Michael on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Neal Schaffer

CEO | Maximize Your Social

Imagine being so knowledgeable on a subject that universities use your book as a textbook. That’s how much of an expert Neal Schaffer is when it comes to social media strategy. His book “Maximize Your Social” has made the required reading list for many marketing and business classes.

What’s Neal’s influencer relationship advice? It needs to be mutual.

 “There is no company that cannot benefit from tapping into the power of influencers in their particular industry, and when you start to see the potential and the different ways in which you can collaborate with an influencer in authentic and mutually beneficial ways, you begin to unlock the power that is influencer marketing.”

Read more of Neal’s advice: Influencer Marketing Is About Community, Not a Campaign

Follow Neal on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Chelsea Krost

Millennial Marketing | Chelsea Krost Productions

 With an early start in media at the young age of 16, Chelsea is now one of America’s leading Millennial marketing influencers. Today, she coaches entrepreneurs and businesses on how to market to Millennials through social media, influencer marketing, and other digital marketing strategies.

What’s Chelsea’s influencer relationship advice? Spread the love.

 “Developing relationships and partnerships with multiple influencers can raise social clout and helps expose your brand to various different niche audiences. In order to build relationships, give influencers social love by following, endorsing, engaging and re-sharing their content.

“Network within influencer communities by taking it a step further and connect offline. Host your own meetup or attend social media conferences, blogging conferences, or other industry related forums.

“The stronger your relationships are with key influencers the bigger impact you will create together.”

Read more of Chelsea’s advice: Six Ways to Work With Influencers To Grow Your Brand

Follow Chelsea on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Keith Weed

Chief Marketing and Communications Officer | Unilever

 Their products live in nearly every home. From Dove to Axe to Lipton, Unilever’s brands are unmistakable. And Keith Weed is the man responsible for making sure those brands are household names through tactics like influencer marketing.

What’s Keith’s influencer relationship advice? Think of it as a partnership.

 “At Unilever, we believe working with creators is an important way to create engaging content to reach and build trust with our audiences, and so we strive to establish mutually beneficial partnerships. In this sense, influencer marketing is so much more than just paying people or groups to post content with #ad or #spon. Fundamentally, it’s always been about creating and nurturing authentic and credible relationships with people who understand and are close to the brand.”

 Read more of Keith’s advice: When It Comes to Influencer Relationships, It’s Complicated

Follow Keith on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Alicia Taggio

Customer Marketing & Advocacy Manager | Hootsuite

Alicia Taggio’s expertise is in her job title: advocacy. After all, that’s what you want to produce from your influencer relationships — loyal and engaged brand advocates. At Hootsuite, a favorite tool for social media managers everywhere, Alicia helps develop advocacy through customer and influencer relationships.

What’s Alicia’s influencer relationship advice? Leverage the strongest relationships.

 “The customer success team at Hootsuite has been key in helping our marketing team discover brand ambassadors. The nature of their role involves constant contact with our clients, and as a result, their team has established strong ties to our customers. With this kind of rapport, it makes sense that the customer success team can identify and recommend clients who would fit our brand advocacy program.”

Read more of Alicia’s advice: 6 Tips for Building Brand Advocacy

Follow Alicia on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Ursula Ringham

Head of Global Influencer Marketing | SAP

Influencer marketing is what Ursula lives and breathes day in and day out at SAP. Working for a global enterprise software company, Ursula knows what it takes to establish trust with a tough B2B audience through the right influencer relationships.

What’s Ursula’s influencer relationship advice? No trust, no relationship.

“Trust is the currency all brands must have when marketing to an audience. And if you can find trusted advisors to share authentic experiences about the purpose of your brand, you’ll make an impact on the world.

“Listen to someone’s story. Understand where they came from. And what makes them who they are today. You never know where that new relationship will take you.”

Read more of Ursula’s advice: The Power Of Connections

Follow Ursula on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Shane Barker

CEO | Shane Barker Consulting

 Shane Barker talks the talk and walks the walk. As the CEO of his own consulting firm, Shane helps Fortune 500 companies navigate the world of influencer marketing. He’s also been named one of the Top Digital Marketing Influencers of 2018 by Whatagraph.

What’s Shane’s influencer relationship advice? Don’t be the clingy or controlling person in the relationship.

 “It’s crucial for brands to let influencers be their creative and honest selves. Restricting an influencer’s creativity could significantly ruin your relationship with influencers. It will also take away the authenticity from your campaign. And as audiences identify this lack of authenticity, they could lose trust in both your brand and the influencer.”

 Read more of Shane’s advice: How Brands Can Build Strong Relationships With Influencers

Follow Shane on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Mark Fidelman

Chief Marketing Officer | Fanatics Media

 Forbes Magazine has named Mark Fidelman one of the Top 20 Influencers of CMOs. Inc. Magazine has also dubbed him a Top Social Media Keynote Speaker. These titles aren’t just for show, either. As CMO for Fanatics Media, Mark has led and spearheaded some of the most recognizable marketing campaigns for brands like eBay, Oracle, IBM, Dominos Pizza, and more.

What’s Mark’s influencer relationship advice? Both parties have to be compatible.

 “Influencers have never been ‘one size fits all.’ It’s not just a matter of different audiences, either. Sure, brands need influencers with audiences that align with their own target consumers, but brands also need influencers who share their values, their image, and to some extent their voice.

“This cuts both ways. Brands don’t want their images muddied or tarnished by the wrong influencers, and influencers don’t want their influence diminished by representing the wrong brands.”

 Read more of Mark’s advice: Influencers: Full of Value, or Full of Bullshit?

Follow Mark on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Martin Jones

Sr. Marketing Manager | Cox Communications

 Forbes. Inc. Entrepreneur. Social Media Today. Martin’s thought leadership and advice is published regularly on some of today’s leading media outlets. Through social media, content, and influencer marketing Martin has helped Cox Communications grow to over 1 million engagements.

What’s Martin’s influencer relationship advice? Know who you’re going out with.

 “Due diligence in researching the potential influencers’ social media history will reveal a lot about their personality, style, character and more. You want to ensure that the influencer will in no way put your brand’s reputation at risk.

 “There is much more to a successful relationship than the dollar value and reach. Influencers that align with your company’s goals, objectives, and values will advance your organization in many ways beyond a marketing campaign.”

 Read more of Martin’s advice: B2B Influencer Marketing Interview: Martin Jones, Cox Communications

Follow Martin on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Jay Baer

Founder | Convince & Convert

 Jay Baer is a New York Times best-selling author, an award-winning keynote speaker, and founder of Convince & Convert. And if that didn’t do the trick, he’s also the founder of not one, not two, but five multi-million dollar companies. There’s one thing we know for sure: Jay knows how to grow. And he can teach you how, too.

What’s Jay’s influencer relationship advice? Master your pick-up lines and icebreakers.

 “To build a productive relationship with an influencer you first have to cut through the clutter so that your pitch is heard. Make it clear who you are. Take the time to really learn what the influencer does, why they do it, how they do it. Create an opportunity that describes what you want. Be explicit about how this helps the influencer.”

Read more of Jay’s advice: How to Pitch an Influencer

Follow Jay on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Marcy Massura

CEO | MM+CO

 As the CEO of a full-service marketing agency, MM+CO, Marcy is very familiar with influencer marketing strategies and tactics. It’s a central pillar of MM+CO’s service offerings and is a crucial component of their client campaigns.

What’s Marcy’s influencer relationship advice? A little motivation doesn’t hurt.

“Influencer marketing is now mostly transactional in nature with the relationship taking the shape of contractual content creation with social syndication. Meaning a high majority of engagements are incentivized with payment, experience or product of value.”

Read more of Marcy’s advice: Influencer Marketing: It Has Changed, Have You?

Follow Marcy on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Jeff Meltz

Senior Social Media Manager | Sony

At Sony, Jeff Meltz is the man behind their social media strategy and management, including their influencer programs and activations. For the past decade, Jeff has specialized in content creation, global social media management, community building, and, of course, influencer marketing.

What’s Jeff’s influencer relationship advice? Social media stalking is okay.

“Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, those are our sort of three bread-and-butter social-media sites. Facebook highlights weekly events. Twitter is the campaign’s day-to-day chat room between users and influencers, and Instagram is the photographic evidence.”

Read more of Jeff’s advice: The Present and Future of a Content Strategy

Follow Jeff on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Missy Voronyak

Group Director, Social Media Strategy and Influencer Engagement | W2Ogroup

Taking a look at Missy’s LinkedIn bio and one word will stand out: influencers. From influencer engagement to sponsored content influencer campaigns, Missy is passionate about helping others build authentic influencer relationships and produce meaningful results.

What’s Missy’s influencer relationship advice? Be ready for commitment.

“At WCG, we work with global brands to identify influencers who are relevant to their business and engage with them in a meaningful way. Key word = meaningful. One of the biggest keys to working with influencers is to think of building long-term relationships, rather than a quick way to get someone to mention your product or company online.

“This means doing your homework to find the right people who might want to engage with you, study them and get on their radar (begin building that relationship) before you pitch them. Do they talk about topics relevant to your brand? Search for your company name or product within their blog to see if they’ve covered your company or anything like it before.”

Read more of Missy’s advice: Extending the Reach of Your Brand With Influencers

Follow Missy on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Stefan Held

Director, Social Media Strategy | WPromote

While technically the director of social media strategy for WPromote, Stefan expertly ties in additional tactics like content and influencer marketing to amplify campaign results. He’s been in the marketing game for over 15 years and knows what it takes to develop highly productive campaigns that achieve ambitious results.

What’s Stefan’s influencer relationship advice? Earn their attention.

“If your content adds value and is well-written, you will begin earning attention from bloggers, websites, and news sites. While well-honed social media efforts ‘earn’ this attention passively, it’s possible to increase results by taking a proactive approach. Your marketing team could reach out to bloggers and journalists, for example, informing them of content and owned social media assets.”

 Read more of Stefan’s advice: How to Successfully Integrate Owned, Earned, and Paid Social Media

Follow Stefan on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Michael J. Lamp

SVP, Social/Digital Media | Hunter Public Relations

Believe it or not, public relations is a lot like influencer marketing. You have a target list of media publications and journalists you want to work with and you need to maintain the relationship if you want any real shot of being mentioned in an article. As the go-to digital media pro for Hunter Public Relations, Michael has incredible insight on how you can manage those vital influencer relationships.

What’s Michael’s influencer relationship advice? Never date a famous person.

“It isn’t the power of celebrity that drives people to act — it’s the power of digital influencers with dedicated, engaged followings. So how can brands identify who holds this power of engagement? Regardless of who has a higher influencer score or which brands become household names, content remains the most important key to unlocking the secrets of digital influencer success.”

Read more of Michael’s advice: Social Media and the Power of Influence

Follow Michael on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Connect First. Date Later.

Don’t go into your influencer relationships blind. Take the time to get to know them first. Then make your big ask. The last thing you want is to pair up with an influencer who will love you and leave you. You want them to be in it for the long haul. And the advice above can help you build relationships with influencers that will stand the test of time.

Wish there was an influencer marketing dating app? We want to help you find the right match, without snap judgments and over-eager swiping. Sign up for your free trial of GroupHigh to experience first-hand how we can help you identify, nurture, and track all of your influencer relationships.

Today I’m starting a new series of content on the GroupHigh blog titled user Q&A.  Over the past 8 years running a software company in the influencer marketing space we have amassed a great deal of Q&A dialogue between our prospects, leads, clients, and employees.  This new series of blog posts will help to showcase the diligence of the GroupHigh team in answering these questions as well as offer an inside look at solutions to common influencer and blogger outreach problems.

Today’s question comes from a gentleman at Vtiger; an open-source crm company who competes with SugarCRM and salesforce.

Today’s question:

“We are starting an influencer marketing initiative. Want to see how GroupHigh can help.”

Our Reply:

Summary

This is a great starting-point for any company starting to build relationships with bloggers and influencers that have mentioned them and their competitors.

Unless this is your first day in the marketing/business world, chances are, you’ve heard a thing or two about influencer marketing.

Now, the concept of influencer marketing has been around for many, many years. In essence, it’s simply the practice of working with a credible figure in a certain community to talk about a product or service in a positive light. Back in the 1940s, doctors put their expert stamp of approval on smoking Camel cigarettes.

In the 1970s, Puma worked with Pele on a very subtle campaign promoting their shoes.

Fast forwarding to the present day, social media has made the concept of influencer marketing much more accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Nowadays, we see this practice at work each and every day. Whether it’s a sponsored Instagram post, inspirational video, ect., working with influencers has become a staple in marketing strategies across the world.

With so much opportunity comes a whole slew of lessons that can be taken from previous examples. Here are three big ones from some recent campaigns.

Stand for Something – Stella Artois and Water.org

Today’s consumers are a fascinating bunch. This is truly the first generation of buyers to live in the era of “constant connectedness.” One of the most interesting observations of this bunch is that the majority is very socially conscious. In fact, a recent study by Cone/Porter Novelli found that 77% of Americans feel stronger emotional connections to purpose-driven companies. Many brands are utilizing this trend for win-win results.

In the early months of 2018, Stella Artois partnered with Water.org for a campaign aimed to provide people living in the developing world with access to clean water. In terms of influencers, they had to go no further than the co-founder of Water.org: Matt Damon.

The original commercial aired during the 2018 Super Bowl. The call to action was for people to purchase a branded Stella Artois chalice; of which the proceeds from each one would go directly towards providing five years of clean water to one person in the developing world.

In addition to the commercial, Stella, Water.org, and Damon ran a series of videos geared to bring attention to the issue. Many of which were incredibly powerful in raising awareness to the cause.

Overall, the global impact of the campaign was a roaring success. To date, Stella and Water.org have helped more than 1 million people in the developing world gain access to clean water. Additionally, the campaign raised over $8 million in donations to Water.org. The goal is to reach 60 million people by 2022.

In many ways, this influencer campaign did wonders to transform the traditional model of cause marketing into a platform for global impact.

Businesses across the world can learn a great deal from this example. It not only proves that supporting a cause can reach people on an incredibly personal level, it shows that a simplistic call to action paired with socially-geared motives can bring a brand to global recognition while making the world a better place.

Don’t Ignore the Micro-Influencers – Fyre Festival

Oh, the Fyre Festival. Honestly, what didn’t go wrong with the Fyre Festival?

For those who don’t know, the Fyre Festival was promoted with a handful of hugely popular Instagram influencers as a luxury music festival taking place on an island in the Bahamas in 2017. Patrons were promised a number of top-tier musical acts, 5-star meals catered by a celebrity chef, private geodesic villa accommodations, and more. The festival was dubbed as “The Coachella of the Caribbean.” Ticket packages costed up to $12,000.

When people started arriving on the island, it was immediately clear they had been duped. The festival site looked more like a muddy construction zone. Many of the musical acts backed out of the event days before the festival upon hearing rumors of total disorganization. Instead of geodesic villas, the accommodations were actually disaster relief tents – of which there were no housing assignments whatsoever.

Instead of gourmet meals, guests were treated to little more than cheap, store-bought slices of bread, slices of cheese, and a handful of lettuce.

Sometimes, the best marketing lessons come from the catastrophic failures. In this case, one of the many failures of the Fyre Festival stemmed from its marketing strategy. Organizers of the festival reached for the very top shelf of the influencer pool; including big names like Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin, Kendall Jenner, and more. All of which have well over 1 million followers on Instagram. It has even been reported that organizers spent as much as $250,000 for a single post by Jenner! Based on what the festival actually provided to the guests, it’s a fair assumption that they blew most of their budget paying high-authority Instagram models to promote the event. As a result, they significantly under-delivered what they originally promised.

So what can brands take away from this?

You don’t need to spend huge amounts of money on the biggest influencers to get awesome results. In fact, a study by Experticity found that 82% of consumers are “highly likely” to act upon recommendations from micro-influencers (figures with followings under 100,000).

In addition to being substantially cheaper to work with, the major difference between micro-influencers and big name influencers is the engagement. Even though the number of followers may be smaller, the communities that micro-influencers hold sway in are typically more focused and receptive. Another study produced by HelloSociety (reported by Adweek) found that content produced by micro-influencers is 6.7 times more efficient at engaging audiences than bigger names.

By using micro-influencers in your marketing strategy, you can do a lot to build more personal relationships with your target audience and get them more involved in your messaging; all while keeping your budget in check. When it comes to influencer marketing, bigger is not always better.

Showcase Real Stories – National Geographic, Microsoft, & STEM

STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, has been a proud initiative to get the younger generation (particularly women) more involved and excited about careers in these fields.

In 2017, Microsoft partnered with National Geographic to create the “Make What’s Next” campaign. The campaign was launched for International Women’s Day with the goal to encourage young girls to get involved in STEM. They leveraged a number of famous Instagram photographers/influencers (affiliated with National Geographic) to support the initiative. 30 photos were posted across five of National Geographic’s Instagram channels. The major element in these photos was that each featured a real story of a woman adventurer or scientist.

The results of this campaign were amazing. Collectively, these photos generated 3.5 million likes in one day and reached approximately 91 million people! Currently, there are nearly 3 thousand pieces of content created under the hashtag “MakeWhatsNext.

This campaign goes back to the roots of what makes influencer marketing so powerful. By showcasing real stories from real people, audiences can connect with your messaging on a deeper level. When building out an influencer campaign, the most important component needs to be a fully authentic message that highlights the best attributes of your brand. During the creative phase of your campaign, try to find ways the influencer(s) can not only use your product or service, but do so in a way that provides actual value to viewers. Using real stories is perhaps the best way to accomplish this.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a tactic that has long stood the test of time. Being as how there is no magic formula set in stone that guarantees success, the best thing you can do is keep an eye out for the best (and the worst) campaigns and use them as inspiration.

About The Author:

Manish Dudharejia is the President and Founder of E2M Solutions Inc, a San Diego Based Digital Agency that specializes in Website Design & Development and eCommerce SEO. With over 10 years of experience in the Technology and Digital Marketing industry, Manish is passionate about helping online businesses to take their branding to the next level

Bagging a social media influencer can make or break a business, especially one that is on the cusp of breaking out and just needs that last push from a recognized brand to make good.

The latest research has found that influencer marketing has generated about $1 billion for businesses, which makes it an attractive strategy.

Influencer marketing has soared over the past few years, and it’s not just about a business hooking a celebrity. In fact, a recent study found that 70% of Millennials are more likely to pay attention to a non-celebrity influencer.

Social media is clearly the place where audiences engage with influencers, with Facebook and YouTube ranking as the most popular and persuasive platforms that impact buying decisions.

There’s little doubt that influencers with a large social media following and a recognizable brand name can generate the type of interest and persuasion necessary for increased website traffic and conversions.

But there are some cracks beginning to show.

These cracks are the result of an increasing amount of influencer fraud, which is negatively impacting how audiences view influencers and the businesses they endorse.

What Is Influencer Fraud?

Reputable influencers have spent years building a credible following through targeted content on platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

These influencers use their time, money, and sweat equity to provide their audiences with relevant information in entertaining ways that take advantage of their unique personalities.

Over time, influencers gain followers that like their content, and more importantly, engage with the influencer on a personal.

That authentic connection between the influencer and the audience is what makes influencer marketing so valuable, and why so many businesses solicit influencers to endorse their products and services.

Unfortunately, the influencer industry has spawned frauds, people who want to take shortcuts to build the kind of authentic brand that takes years to achieve.

Influencer fraud occurs when these newcomers decide to buy followers, or worse, use bots to generate comments.

According to a recent study, a single day’s worth of posts tagged #sponsored or #ad on Instagram contained over 50 percent fake engagements. Out of 118,007 comments, only 20,942 were not made by bot followers.

Fraudulent influencers engage with brands on social media campaigns, presenting themselves as genuine influencers with hard-earned followers when in reality their followers are bought instead of being organically built.

For example, let’s say your business sells skateboards, and you target an influencer with 200,000 followers. You agree to work with that influencer to promote a social media campaign, believing that the influencer’s audience aligns with your marketing objectives.

What you don’t know, however, is that more than half of those followers are bought, which means that you’re not getting access to genuine, motivated followers. Instead, you’re paying an influencer that has generated fake followers that can’t do anything to advance your marketing goals.

In other words, you’ve been conned out of time and money.

What are Types of Influencer Fraud?

The most common types of influencer fraud include:

• Bought Followers – This means that an influencer has paid people to become followers to a social media account. That also means that those followers aren’t genuine believers in the influencer’s brand, and aren’t likely to post comments (although that’s available for a price as well). Most fake followers are added gradually, to help disguise the fact that they’re not real.
• ‘Bot’ Comments – Follower comments are one of the ways that influencers build their brand, but ‘bot’ comments aren’t made by real people. Instead, they are made by services that sell automated ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ to make audiences believe that an influencer is generating a positive reaction to posts, images, and videos. Although platforms like Instagram are beginning to shut down some of these automated services, hundreds more crop up daily, ready and willing to sell fake likes and fake comments. In fact, one study found that bots generated 40 percent of the comments on 500 sponsored posts.
• Pods – Pods are groups of people on social media that form alliances to provide positive comments and ‘likes’ on each other’s posts. Instagram pods have become the most famous example of this. To form an Instagram pod, 30 Instagram users work together to increase engagement with each other’s posts. Some influencers build their brand by making deals with these pods, which calls into question how genuine these alliances are since they aren’t built on real, organic interest.

How can you Detect Influencer Fraud?

Now that you understand how influencer fraud works, you need to know the warning signs so that you don’t use a fraudulent influencer in one of your campaigns.

These signs include:

• Sudden Spike In Followers – If you notice that the influencer has a sudden spike in followers that isn’t explained by another factor like a major event, it could be a sign that the influencer has bought new followers. Major events that could organically boost the number of followers include a live streaming session, a recent appearance at a fan get-together, or a popular video that went viral.
• Unequal Ratio of Likes/Comments to Number of Followers – If an influencer has a relatively low number of followers and a very high number of likes and comments, that’s a red flag that those likes/comments could be auto-generated. Conversely, an influencer with a solid number of followers with very few likes and comments may be buying followers, and not smart enough to also buy the automated comments that would prevent fraud detection.
• Comments Don’t Align With Posts – You may notice that comments on an influencer’s social media platform don’t have anything to do with what that influencer posted. For example, the influencer posted a video of a dog eating his lunch, but the comments talk about an entirely different subject. This is a sure sign that those comments are fraudulent.

What Steps Can You Take to Avoid Influencer Fraud?

To avoid the perils of influencer fraud, you can take the following steps before making a decision about engaging with an influencer on a campaign:

• Track the Influencer’s History – How long has the influencer been active? What’s the evolution of the number of followers, comments, and likes? What is the tone of the influencers posts, and have those posts remained consistent with that influencer’s brand?
• Track Campaign Performance – Analyze the influencer’s prior social media campaigns to determine the quality of content and overall performance. If the prospective influencer has little or no history of social media campaigns for other brands, it’s probably time to move on to someone more credible.

Stay Vigilant With Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing can still reap benefits for your business, but it’s important for you to vet your targeted influencers before you commit your money and time to a campaign.

Genuine influencers that believe in your products and services are always the most effective at communicating your brand message to your target audience.

The author Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly providing thought leadership on SEO and social media best practices. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on his travel blog 1 Way to Wanderlust. You can follow him on Twitter @jonleeclark.

The core objectives of influencer marketing have been around for a very, very long time. Everyone across the public and private sector understands the general idea of pairing with a well-known and respected name to help expose their messaging to a certain (and bigger) audience. In many ways, the practice is more or less a stamp of approval deeming a product or service as credible.

As influencer marketing becomes more and more widespread, understanding the granular details before, during, and after a campaign is incredibly important. In the age of “constant connectedness,” a botched influencer campaign can have detrimental effects on everyone involved. Fortunately, the meteoric rise of big data in the business world has made given brands the ability to execute an influencer campaign with the upmost precision.

Here are four ways you can use it to do just that.

1. Use the Right Keywords

When you are creating content, in any capacity, one of the initial steps of the process should be long-tail keyword research. This is what gives you a data-backed idea of what people are entering into the search bar, what their intentions are, and how you can position to your content accordingly.

Once you formulate a nice list of keywords related to your topic/goals, you can create your content (or instruct your influencer to create it) around that list. After the content is crafted and published with a healthy mix of relevant keywords, the search engine bots will crawl it and see if it can be ranked on the SERPs for those particular terms.

For example, let’s say you own a website that offers recipes for vegetarian diets. You are looking to work with an influencer who runs a popular food blog. Regardless of whether you are writing the content to be placed on the website, or are having the influencer do it, the posts should include relevant terms such as: vegetarian dinners, veggie meals, amazing vegetarian meals, delicious vegetarian recipes, etc.

There are many data-driven tools out there to give you the proper insights you need for this task. Neil Patel’s keyword tool Ubersuggest is a fantastic – and FREE – keyword suggestion and optimization resource for getting the information you need to create content that gets noticed. The tool helps you in researching and finding the trending terms and phrases based on monthly search volumes, and ultimately output a long list of relevant keywords with information on how difficult each one is to outrank. Additionally, it shows you how your competitors are using them.

Most content collaborations with an influencer should be rooted in keyword research. Being as how the heavy majority Google searches never go past page one, the name of the game is producing data-focused content that ranks in the top 10 spots on a search. Furthermore, the trending keywords and terms serve as the basis for how you can create content that plays to the target audience’s interests.

1. Justify Your Direction

Influencer marketing has become a staple in business campaigns of all industries. However, now that there is practically an unlimited amount of options for a brands to partner with, it can be surprisingly difficult to know where to start.

While setting general goals like increasing web traffic, growing followership, and boosting sales are important, there needs to be a defined path for what these objectives entail and how they will be executed. This is where big data enters the mix.

Let’s say you run an online jewelry store. Your overarching goal is to improve conversion rates. Your sales data will give you a much more in-depth understanding of what you need to do, who would be an ideal influencer fit, and how you can formulate your campaign. Most ecommerce platforms these days have in-built point of sale (POS) systems that show you datasets relating to sales trends, the geographic location where certain items are most popular, the channels that lead to sales, and much more.

For example, let’s say your sales data shows that sapphire gems are selling incredibly well in the northeast region of the United States, and a great deal of the traffic to these pages is coming from Instagram. So, in this case, targeting an Instagram influencer known for posting pictures of sapphire jewelry would be a great way to expand your messaging even further.

Using data-backed insights to identify trends is perhaps the best way to determine the direction of your influencer campaign early on. Your ability to read between the lines and understand the numbers is the key to choosing the right influencer and how to structure your collaborated content.

1. Create Noteworthy Content That Benefits Everyone

Content creation for a single brand is one thing. Creating content for an influencer campaign is a whole different ballgame. In most cases, the trick is knowing how to frame your messaging in a way that speaks to both your audience and theirs. Additionally, the tone, voice, and overall feel of the content should accurately reflect the influencer.

Viewers, readers, and all other types of consumers are not stupid; if a piece of content comes off as inauthentic or forced, it will stick out like a sore thumb. When this happens, everyone loses. Your message does not get received well, the influencer might lose credibility, and followers get subpar content.

For the most part, giving the influencer creative freedom is the best option. In fact, 76% of influencers value brands that let them take the reins on content creation. However, you will likely need to provide general guidelines for topics that fit both parties. That being said, your inspiration needs to be backed with data. Start by looking into the chatter taking place throughout your niche. Tools like Mention make it easy to monitor certain keywords, brand names, or topics across social media and forums.

This way you stay on top of conversations taking place in your industry and the general sentiment on certain issues. You’ll want to conduct research on both your own brand messaging and the influencer to look for content overlaps. This should be your inspiration for messaging that gets the maximum benefits.

1. Put ROI Under a Microscope

One of the toughest aspects of influencer marketing is measuring the ROI. When partnering with a big name, the costs can be very high. If the campaign isn’t meeting your goals, you need to know when it might be time to opt out and cut your losses.

If you use a special analytics program for influencer marketing such as GroupHigh, this aspect of the job will be pretty straightforward. If you use a more general tool like Google Analytics, you might need to do some problem solving and critical thinking to get a clear idea for these metrics.

Once the influencer’s post goes live, you need to be checking your analytics very frequently. For example, if you paid the influencer $1,000 for a post, and if the spike in traffic didn’t take place or revenue was only $800 after a certain timeframe, you need to assess whether or not you change the strategy, or terminate the partnership.

The data you see should be the guiding force behind your relationship with influencers and how you evaluate success.

In Conclusion

Influencer marketing, while it may have its ups and downs, is a tactic that has been brought to new heights in the age of social media. Thankfully, the advancement of big data took center stage at about the same time.

If you want an influencer campaign to work for you, you need to know how to extract and read the datasets that apply. The answers are in the numbers. Once you know what they all mean, you are in a fantastic position to put every single dollar to good use and reduce your losses.

Author Bio

Pratik Dholakiya is the Co-Founder of E2M, a full service digital marketing agency and PRmention, a digital PR agency. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, Growth Hacking, Entrepreneurship and Digital PR. Pratik has spoken at NextBigWhat’s UnPluggd, IIT-Bombay, SMX Israel, and other major events across Asia. As a passionate marketer, he shares his thoughts and knowledge on publications like Search Engine Land, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, The Next Web and the Huffington Post to name a few. He has been named one of the top content marketing influencers by Onalytica three years in a row.

Brands from virtually all industries have had great success in influencer marketing because it provides an opportunity to connect with a wider audience than most traditional marketing strategies allow.

However, it is important to note that these campaigns were a success because the brand partnered with the right influencer. While influencer and affiliate marketing are crucial gateways to expanded audience reach, they will only be effective if those customers are still part of the business’s relevant market. Exposing the brand to uninterested customers is just a waste of everyone’s time and money.

That being said, there are a few things that your marketing team needs to keep in mind in order to find the perfect brand influencer.

Here is how to do it in four easy steps.

1. Dig Deep into Customer Demographics

First things first, you have to know who your audience is before you start marketing to them. While your company may have a general idea of who your ideal customer is, it is important to clearly define them in order to find the right influencer who can make a meaningful connection.

Demographics play a huge role in a customer’s interest and acceptance of influencer marketing. Collective Bias’s study on influencer marketing found that male customers are twice as likely to be influenced from a blog post or a YouTube video than women. However, female customers were much more likely to be influenced through social sites like Facebook and Instagram.

Information like this should guide your influencer marketing strategy, as it could affect the types of people you connect with. Twitter’s analytics tool is a great starting point that shows the interests that your current followers have to help your team gauge some important audience insights.

This type of data is the key to creating audience personas that can help your marketing department get a grip on the types of people that make up your target audience. Once you have the details and demographics nailed down, it’s time to find an influencer whose audience fits into the same categories.

2. Track Influencer Interactions to Find an Authentic Fit

Authenticity is crucial when it comes to influencer marketing, and nothing will turn customers off faster than fake promotion (think of Scott Disick’s fitness tea promotion snafu).

While you can certainly work with influencers who have never tried your product before, it is best to connect with someone who is already familiar with your brand. This will create a sincere connection between your company and the influencer.

Your team can use tools like GroupHigh to monitor brand mentions and respond instantly when an influencer engages with your page. This will help you identify the influential accounts that are already invested and interested in your business for more authentic influencer messaging.

If an influencer has already engaged with your brand, used your product, or followed your social media account, it is a signal that things are off to a great start. After all, there are no better brand ambassadors than satisfied customers.

3. Find Accounts Whose Content is a Proper Brand Fit

Influencers are essentially an addition to your marketing team, so it is important that they are a good culture fit with your brand. Before you start a partnership with an affiliate, take each party’s branding into consideration. Influencers are very focused on keeping their own branding consistent, so your goals must fit into theirs and vice versa. Take a look at their accounts to get a feel of the types of colors, imagery, and messaging they use to communicate their brand.

Before you reach out to a potential influencer, make sure that your marketing team goes over questions like:

• Is there any overlap between the branding details they use and your company’s?
• Would a picture or video of your product naturally fit in with their feed?
• Does your product seem like something this influencer would actually use?

Most importantly, is your tone in line with the type of content they produce?

Answering these questions can help your marketing team assess whether or not an influencer would be a good choice for collaboration. Influencer marketing has to make sense for both parties. Influencers want to have great content for their sites, but the brands and products they feature must match everything they represent. Be sure that your team properly evaluates whether or not the collaboration would be a good fit.

4. Set Your Goals Beforehand

It is virtually impossible to qualify a marketing campaign as a success or failure if there are no defined goals set beforehand. This is why it is important that your team clearly states the desired outcome from an influencer campaign before they dive into anything.

Of course, seeing more sales is the real desired outcome, but what other goals could an effective campaign accomplish? Does your team want to see an increase in social media followers? What about a boost in SEO rankings?

The influencer marketing strategy plays out depends greatly on your ultimate goals, so it is important to define them first and the milestones before the wheels start turning.

In Conclusion

Finding the right influencer is a tricky process.

There are all kinds of little details that can have a huge impact on the success of you campaign. To succeed, you’ve got to find the account that is the perfect fit for both your brand and your customers. By doing some planning, goal-setting, and lots of research beforehand, you can come up with long-term influencer campaigns to compliment your overall marketing strategy for years to come.

Author Bio

Mostafa Elbermawy is a seasoned SaaS growth strategist. Over the past 9 years, Mostafa has helped brands such as American Express, P&G and Workzone refine their growth marketing strategies and tactics. Mostafa is also a regular tech contributor for Wired and BBC Arabia. He currently heads marketing at Harver, a leading AI recruitment platform.

Ready to get your brand out there and tap into segments of your audience that you have had trouble reaching in the past? If your answer is yes, then affiliate marketing is exactly what you need to be paying attention to.

The premise is straightforward. You connect with affiliates who will promote your brand in return for compensation based on performance. As a merchant, you only pay when the affiliate can produce results in the form of lead generation or sales. It couldn’t be simpler.

Except that figuring out where to start can be a challenge.

There are multiple avenues that affiliates can use to promote your brand. The path you choose to take is entirely dependent upon your goals and what your intended market is going to best respond to. With this in mind, we’ve gathered a few examples of affiliate marketing strategies so that you can better assess which will create the best fit for your brand and your goals.

Know Your Niche

You’re going to have greater success with affiliate marketing if you put a little thought into who is going to be seeing your brand. Sure, there are some affiliate marketers who are wildly successful promoting a range of products and services. With the right team, this can work.

However, the goal is to put your brand is view of consumers who are going to click and convert. For many brands, this means focusing in on your niche market. The site howtocleananything.com is a great example of niche based affiliate marketing.

This site offers advice-filled content on how to clean pretty much everything. Seriously, from your Birkenstock straps to your belly button, they have it covered. While the advice ranges from medical care to household tips and everything in between, it’s all unified under a common theme. Practically every post contains and an affiliate link, and you know what?

It makes sense when paired with the content produced to accompany it.

This is a great example of how pairing with the right affiliate for your target market can equal huge gains in conversions and your ROI.

Gather Reviews… Lots of Them!

It doesn’t matter what your brand is, or how you’re marketing it, reviews matter. From a consumer standpoint, they often make the difference between choosing your brand or your competitor’s. In fact, more people trust reviews that they find online over those from a trusted friend or family member.

Bottom line? What consumers read about your product or service online matter. One way to use affiliate marketing is to choose affiliates that use a review platform as the base of their site. One of our favorite examples is NerdWallet.

Designed to dispense practical advice on all things financial, NerdWallet offers reviews on all types of products and services related to the financial industry.

What really makes the difference with review based affiliates is respectability. Look for affiliates that produce top quality, respectable content. You want a genuine feel from your affiliates when they’re reviewing your brand.

It’s a great idea to build a relationship with your affiliates before beginning work together. Consider offering your product or service to the affiliate for free of charge for them to use and get acquainted with before they begin promoting your product. A brand that they have personal experience with is going to come off as sincerer to your intended audience.

Affiliates That Offer Real World Value

There are two things that people are looking to get out of the content they view online. They either want to be entertained, they want the content to add significant value in their life, or both. If you are aligning yourself with an affiliate who relies on content creation, make sure that what they are producing meets the criteria for success. Some of the best content for affiliate marketing offers real world, practical advice that will keep the audience coming back for more. Let’s look at MoneySavingExpert as an example.

When you land here, the first thing you notice is that the site is jampacked with content. First, it’s all quality content that’s highly relevant to the target audience. Secondly, there’s something unusual about this site. It gets no money from advertisers. All revenue comes from affiliate links.

Stop and think about that for a minute. Affiliate links are performance based. That means this site only makes money when those links generate action. Do you think they would keep using this model if it wasn’t working for them? We’re guessing the answer to that question is no, so they must be creating major action for their affiliate merchants.

Coupon Sites, Deals and Promotions

Another way of expanding your brand’s reach through affiliate marketing is by having a presence on sites that are set up to specifically offer coupons, deals and promotions on partner brands. While this type of affiliate relationship works a bit differently, but with the right strategy it can be equally effective. For example, Nomad Coffee Club leverages this well by partnering with bloggers doing giveaways and product reviews along with promotional discounts.

Rather than using content and influence to push your brand, you are relying on the consumer’s love of a bargain. Anyone who shops around online knows that finding the best deal is part of the fun. Coupon sites help them out by connecting them to the best deal on your product or service.

You sponsor a coupon or promotion. The site posts it, along with those of other brands that they are working with. The key to making this work is realizing that your SEO strategy will need to be optimized to produce results for you on their page. Many of the most successful deal sites will assist with this process.

Wait, Did We Forget to Mention Video?

How long has it taken you to read through this article up to this point? 5 minutes maybe? Something amazing has happened in that amount of time.

Approximately 1,500 hours of YouTube content has been uploaded. Every minute, there is 300 hours’ worth of video uploaded for viewing. Now, think about what it could mean for your brand if you had a presence on some of that video content. The potential is huge.

Affiliates with a YouTube presence can promote your brand directly, or through a banner on their video. Just how successful can YouTube affiliate marketing be? Just look at this guy.

You might know him as the adorable face behind Ryan’s Toy Review, or you might know him as the $11 million affiliate guru. The premise of this affiliate marketing strategy is that a YouTube influencer / celebrity promotes your product or service in their video, in this case through reviews. The downside is that it can be more difficult to track traffic with this type of relationship, unless a link is built into the content.

The upside is that video is huge. In fact, it’s the preferred type of content for most internet users, especially those that are accessing content from their mobile device. This means that your brand gets placed in front of a larger, more engaged audience, which means more conversions and profit in your pocket.

That’s a Start, But What Else?

So, there were some great examples of different styles if affiliate marketing. But, it takes more than examples to get started. You also need some practical advice. Here are 5 tips to keep in mind, no matter what type of affiliate marketing you choose for your brand.

1. A little research means money in your pocket. Before you start out, you need to have an idea of what your competitors are doing, and what they’re paying to make it happen. To attract the most successful affiliates, your rates need to be competitive.
2. Speaking of rates, it’s acceptable to have a few tricks up your sleeve. Consider having a flat rate that you offer to all affiliates, including all new contracts. Then have a second compensation tier for your best performing affiliate partners.
3. Start off on the right foot. Communication is key. If you can’t communicate readily and easily with your affiliates, then it’s probably not going to be the best working relationship for you. You want to be able to share product details, sales information, guidelines and even brainstorm on how your brand could be best promoted.
4. Have a set of rules in place. Decide how much liberty your affiliates can take with your brand. Are you fine with them offering a discount that you didn’t approve of or using your product in a way that it wasn’t intended? Set forth all the ground rules before you get started.
5. Have a budget in mind, but be adaptable. If you’ve reached the point where you’ve met or exceeded your affiliate marketing budget, look at what it’s done for you in terms of ROI. If you’re generating sales and a good profit, there’s no reason to stick to the exact numbers you’ve put down on paper.

Now’s the time to get grow your brand with affiliate marketing. Where will it take you? There’s only one way to find out. Start today and push your brand forward with affiliate marketing.

If I said there was a marketing strategy that was expected to grow $6.8 billion by 2020 would I have your attention? How about if I told you that 81% of brands are already using it and it can produce monster gains in your ROI?

That perked you up, didn’t it?

The marketing strategy that I’m talking about is affiliate marketing, also known as performance marketing, and it can be the singular most effective strategy in your playbook. Did I mention that it’s also makes it incredibly easy to maintain a continuous stream of income? It just keeps getting better.

Affiliate marketing is a way of having others, typically influencers in your market niche, promote your product or services for you. Due to the popularity of social media influencers and high traffic blogs, putting your brand into the hands of the internet’s powerful voices can produce greater success for you than even the most extensive marketing strategies.

Sound great, right? So, let’s get started.

Start with Some Goals

The first thing you need to do before jumping into affiliate marketing is to ask yourself what your goal here is. Maybe you’re looking to generate more brand awareness, or you want to see some serious jumps in conversions. Whatever your goal, it’s important to identify it before you get started.

Affiliate marketing goals generally fall into one, or more, of these three categories.

• Increased Traffic: Generating greater traffic, especially if you have an e-commerce business, can be the key to success for your brand. Affiliate marketing is a great way of driving traffic to your site. Affiliate marketing can also help you increase traffic from a specific geographical location or market niche by using affiliates that are closely connected or influential to those audiences.
• Increased Revenue: It almost seems unnecessary to mention this because who doesn’t want increased revenue? The key here is to recognize if this is your only goal. You are going to want to set both long and short-term goals for revenue growth that will help you plan your affiliate marketing strategy and adapt it for greater success along the way.
• Marketing Budget and Performance: If your marketing budget is on the lean side and you want the most bang for your buck, affiliate marketing is the way to go. Affiliate marketing is performance based, so you only pay for results. It is up to you to decide if you want to pay for traffic generation or actual sales. There are pros and cons to each.

For example, it might make more sense to you to only pay for clicks that lead directly to a sale. That’s a guaranteed return on your investment. But, you are also likely paying more for each of those clicks and your affiliate is going to promote your product in a way that is meant to generate sales rather than just increased traffic.

So, you might be missing out on the chance to generate more leads that you can then convert for yourself. Think carefully about how to best achieve your goals with your marketing budget.

Ready, Set, Find Your Affiliates

Now that you have your feet firmly planted on the idea of affiliate marketing, it’s time to actually get out there and find the affiliates that will help explode your growth. There are three main ways of finding affiliates to promote your brand. You can either find and contact them yourself, hire an affiliate manager or use an affiliate network.

We will go over all three options in just a second, but first, let’s talk a bit about who you want to be promoting your brand.

Before you set out to find affiliates, have an idea of what type of personality you want attached to your brand. A great affiliate influencer can build your brands reputation, while the wrong affiliate can tarnish it. You also want to keep in mind the audience you want to attract. You might find a successful affiliate, but if their market doesn’t match yours, or is at least vertical to yours, you are only going to be disappointed in the results.

This is also a good time to think about how you want your brand promoted. Are you looking to work with affiliates on social media or blogs? You have other options such as email publishers and loyalty pages. It’s good to think outside of the box here and consider all your options before signing on.

Ok, now back to finding those affiliates.

The Search is On

Your first option for connection to affiliates is to get out there and find them yourself. This will require the most footwork on your part, but it’s also the most cost effective since you won’t be paying a manager or network to do the work for you. There are many avenues for finding your own affiliates. Here are just a few ideas.

• Use Your Website: Want to know who makes the best affiliates? People who are already familiar with your brand. You can advertise your interest in affiliates right on your webpage. Keep it in a prominent location with a link that provides more information.
• Direct Contact: You can contact people you would like to have as an affiliate yourself, but it’s a good idea to build a relationship with them first. Start by subscribing to blogs or social media pages and interacting with them. Get a feel for their audience. Personalities or brands that market to a vertical niche can make great affiliates.
• Use Your Platforms: Do you have a high revenue blog or high trafficked social media account? Use it to promote the fact that you are looking for affiliates.
• Word of Mouth: This strategy hardly ever fails. Chances are you know someone who knows someone, who knows…. You get the picture. I wouldn’t use this as your only strategy, but simply getting the word out there is bound to produce some results.

Connect with Affiliate Managers and Networks

Your second option is to hire someone who will do the work for you. Affiliate managers and networks like Refersion will help you find the best affiliates and manage a chunk of the work. The immediate downside to this is that these types of services do cost money, but they can often produce better results than you could on your own, so your ROI will be nothing to be ashamed of.

Affiliate managers and networks can connect you to affiliates that have a proven track record or provide a platform for success. They also have analytical tools and metric standards for analyzing the effectiveness of your affiliate strategy and help to adapt your campaign toward success.

Policies, Procedures and Small Print

You’re about to put your brand into someone else’s hands. Are you going to do this without some sort of guidelines about how the process should be handled? We didn’t think so.

Your affiliate relationship is a working relationship, and with it will come certain expectations about how your brand image should be handled and promoted. You should also have a clearly defined contract of payment between you and your affiliates. For which actions will payment be made, it what form will it be made and how often.

Also, affiliate marketing comes with its own set of legalities to consider. For the protection of you, your brand and your affiliates, you need to have a solid understanding of any and all legal regulations on affiliate relationships. Even those pertaining solely to your affiliates should be outlined in a contract so that your brand doesn’t inadvertently get tangled up in a messy misunderstanding.

Get Ready for Success

There you have the basics of getting started with affiliate marketing. What’s the one thing that you have left to do? Get yourself ready for success! The right affiliate relationship is going to generate traffic and drive conversions are going to make your brand more successful than ever. Get out there and get started today!

The Author Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly providing thought leadership on SEO and social media best practices. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on his travel blog 1 Way to Wanderlust. You can follow him on Twitter @jonleeclark.

So, you’re ready to make more money online. Let’s be honest, who isn’t?

Maybe you’ve tried your hand at all sorts of ways of bringing in some extra income online, or you’re a merchant that’s looking for ways to branch out your marketing strategy. But if you’re still wondering about the key to success, chances are you haven’t yet ventured into affiliate marketing.

To generate a decent income online, you have two real options. You can either sell your own stuff, in the form of products, content or services, or you can get paid for promoting (and selling) other people’s stuff.

Affiliate Marketing Is Easier Than You Think

If you’re unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, it can seem like this mysterious marketing entity that only a privileged few have access to. The fact is that nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only is there nothing mysterious or intimidating about affiliate marketing, it’s actually quite easy for anyone with an online channel to tap into.

The basic premise goes something like this.

An online entity, usually a blogger or social media influencer with a sizable following, becomes an affiliate and promotes a merchant’s products or services. When a sale occurs as the result of the affiliate’s recommendation, the merchant makes a payment to them. Sounds simple enough, right?

It actually is. Whether you are a merchant looking to promote your product through affiliate marketing, or you’re looking to generate income as an affiliate yourself, it’s one of the most effective performance based marketing strategies in existence.

The Affiliate Merchant Relationship

Anyone can work as an affiliate, but the most successful ones are typically bloggers, content sites and social media personalities that are somehow related to the merchant’s industry. For example, if you want to promote a line of tools, you might seek out a highly trafficked home improvement blogs, rather than an influencer that’s known for their culinary creativity.

It’s all about the perfect pairing of product and affiliate.

The affiliate’s job is to take the merchant’s brand and introduce it to their audience. The goal is for the affiliate to promote the merchant in a way that seems natural, so that the audience feels that the affiliate genuinely supports the product.

Want to know the secret for coming across and genuine? It’s the existence of a respectful relationship between the affiliate and the merchant. This means that as an affiliate, you should avoid the temptation to dive into every potential lucrative opportunity that comes your way and stick with brands that your respect and trust. It’s pretty much guaranteed that your audience will pick up on being “sold” to, so make sure that what you’re promoting actually offers value to your market.

Source

Let’s Talk About the Money

So, the process goes something like this. The affiliate promotes the merchant’s brand through a blog post, banner ad or even offering a discount code specifically for their viewership. Their followers click and purchase. Then what happens?

As an affiliate, you get paid per transaction. This means the more audience engagement you have, the more income potential you can generate. Being paid per transaction, rather than a flat rate for promoting the brand also means that you’re probably going to put a little more work into convincing your audience of the value of the merchant’s brand.

As the merchant who is using affiliate marketing to promote your brand, affiliate marketing produces a higher ROI then other channels of promotion because it’s performance based. With affiliate marketing you’re paying for conversions. This is in contrast to other marketing strategies, such as PPC where your paying for clicks whether or not they actually lead to a sale.

Simply put, with the right relationship, affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for everyone, even the consumer.

But, Is There a Downside?

Affiliate marketing sounds like a dream come true, doesn’t it? No matter which side of the relationship that you’re on, affiliate marketing is an almost guaranteed way of generating even more revenue. But, is it too good to be true?

Is there a downside?

Just like anything, there’s always opportunities for things to go wrong. That said, with some forethought and smart business sense, affiliate marketing almost always goes right. To protect yourself no matter which side of the transaction you’re on, consider these following points.

• The wrong relationship can ruin your credibility. This is true for both affiliates and merchants. Choose your partners wisely, and keep your own image and professional goals in mind when forming affiliate relationships.
• Make sure that there is an intuitive connection between the merchant and the affiliate. Affiliate relationships that produce results with minimal effort are a waste of time and energy for both parties.
• When you’re just beginning in affiliate marketing, start off slow. There’s always a learning curve, so give yourself enough time to get used to the process and learn from your own mistakes before expanding your affiliate marketing efforts.
• Don’t rely on affiliate marketing alone. Let’s say that as an affiliate you have landed a great contract with a well-known brand. You might have dollar signs in your eyes, but don’t forget that you actually need to drive traffic to your site before you can be successful. Affiliate marketing only works when you also focus on other marketing strategies that increase traffic to your site.
• As an affiliate, take care to not overwhelm your audience. Always keep your focus on your market.

Affiliate marketing is a performance based model that drives success. It is one simple strategy that generates income, broadens your audience and can increase your overall value to your market. When you’re ready to take your online presence to the next level, affiliate marketing is one of the most successful tools for making it happen.

Jon Clark is the founder of Fuze SEO, a boutique digital marketing company in New York. He writes regularly providing thought leadership on SEO and social media best practices. When not working or writing, Jon enjoys documenting his travels on his travel blog 1 Way to Wanderlust. You can follow him on Twitter @jonleeclark.

In the current state of the marketing world, just a few thousand followers on Twitter or Instagram can earn you the title of “thought leader.” There are plenty of people out there who claim to have secret knowledge or hidden formulas for the perfect campaign. However, there is a certain “it” factor that puts the elite leaders in a league of their own.

So what makes a marketing genius? Is it their commitment to hard work, special talents, or their ground-breaking ideas? While all of these things certainly play a part, the secret to their success goes beyond just gifts and good ideas.

“Wantrapreneurs” can certainly learn from these modern-day marketing geniuses and see how their traits, habits, and focuses all work together to define their success.

1. They challenge convention
   

Sticking to the status quo is not a common quality among most successful marketers. Many are self-starters with unique back-stories and non-traditional business approaches, and they certainly don’t recommend following the crowds.

Ultra-successful business consultant and online educator Sam Ovens certainly strays from the norm when it comes to business advice. In an interview with Huffington Post he said, “I like contrarians and have no interest in hiring ‘normal’ people. Hiring normal people gets normal results, and who wants that?

Sam founded Consulting.com, an online educational program that teaches others to start their own business consulting program. This venture took Ovens from completely broke to a multi-millionaire in just a few short years. He credits much of his success to embracing the non-conventional, especially when it comes to adding new recruits to his business.

There is so much noise out there in the marketing realm that if you are just following the crowd, you are certainly going to get lost in the shuffle. It takes more than a creative idea to get your brand to stand out; eschewing the status quo altogether is what makes great marketing over good marketing.

2. They deliver answer-driven messaging

Successful marketers focus on providing value to their audience through the content they release. They give advice, share personal experiences, discuss new ideas, etc. Their expertise and authority is easily demonstrated by their knowledge. The messages deliver information that is relevant, and more importantly, actionable.

Lots of marketing leaders turn to content marketing to effectively engage with their audiences. Neil Patel, Co-Founder of the companies that gave marketers the popular analytics tool Crazy Egg and message plugin Hello Bar (which literally hundreds of thousands of sites have installed) is famous for his in-depth marketing strategies and smart tips on everything from SEO to conversion rate optimization.

Patel is in the business of sharing information through his personal website and blog; of which features a wide range of articles and podcasts. A good deal of his messaging works to address common questions posed by those new to the marketing industry while providing result-oriented advice.

Ultimately, when people view content, they want answers. Giving the audience something valuable they can walk away with is perhaps the best way to establish yourself as industry leader and an expert resource.

3. They adapt quickly

Perhaps the one thing that remains constant in the marketing world is the concept of rapid change itself. From new challenges to emerging trends, staying relevant requires marketers to be flexible and adaptable.

Serial entrepreneur Benny Luo knows exactly what it means to roll with the punches and adapt to a quickly changing market. He started out working for Dell and Apple in his early tech career. But, he soon learned there was a great opportunity when it came to affiliate marketing. While it earned him large sums at the time, the market quickly matured, best practices became outdated (and some tactics were actually illegal). The result left Luo down on his luck and running out of options. Instead of surrendering, he moved on to the next trend he saw coming: social media advertising.

Since then, he has gone on to start several successful marketing and consulting companies such as Next Shark, New Rockstars, Discover Me, and The Other Asians. Luo knows what it’s like to experience great success and great failure. Instead of seeing failures as mistakes, he sees them as lessons to do better in the next round. As he put it, “I realized that after each failure, I always gained some valuable knowledge of things I could apply to or avoid in my next project.”

Becoming a successful leader means you need to be willing to take some chances, make mistakes, and play the hand you’re dealt. Adapting to the changing world and being willing to try something new are exceptional traits that elite marketing leaders must possess.

4. They are everywhere

Take it from Thomas Edison, one of the earliest marketing geniuses in modern history. He lived and breathed by the philosophy that branding is everything. The prolific inventor was also obsessively devoted to creating a brand associated with his name and face. He went to great lengths to ensure it was plastered everywhere. Today’s marketing leaders still do this today (although maybe not as tenaciously as Edison).

The reason these marketing geniuses are leaders is because they constantly get their name out there and diversify their channels to consistently reach wider audiences. One of the most famous names in marketing these days is Gary Vaynerchuk, and he certainly does his best to keep his name in the forefront of people’s minds. From speaking at innumerable events, writing best sellers, being highly active on social media, to hosting Apple’s first original podcast, Vaynerchuk makes sure his name and face are seen everywhere, and for good reason.

Marketing leaders recognize the importance of diversification. While focus is critical in this field, getting trapped into just one source or channel is limiting. True marketing geniuses see the importance of getting involved with multiple ventures and expanding their horizons.

The wrap

Today’s marketing geniuses are admired for their ambition and intelligence, but it is their character that truly sets them above the rest. These leaders are committed to their craft and furthering their success. They don’t let the negative press get them down or hold them back. They focus on pushing the envelope, breaking the mold, and providing meaningful content for their followers. Above all else, these are the traits that make them truly great.

Author Bio

Pratik Dholakiya is the Co-Founder of E2M, a full service digital marketing agency and PRmention, a digital PR agency. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, Growth Hacking, Entrepreneurship and Digital PR. Pratik has spoken at NextBigWhat’s UnPluggd, IIT-Bombay, SMX Israel, and other major events across Asia. As a passionate marketer, he shares his thoughts and knowledge on publications like Search Engine Land, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, The Next Web and the Huffington Post to name a few. He has been named one of the top content marketing influencers by Onalytica three years in a row.

Influencer marketing was huge this year, and that trend is on target to not only grow – but explode – in the coming year. Surveys tell us that 84% of marketers say that they are interested in launching influencer campaigns in the next year, and 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do word of mouth from their friends.

If you want to keep up, you need an influencer strategy of your own.

What better place to get inspiration than from brands that are already doing the influencer thing the right way. Many brands have good influencer strategies, but some are knock it out of the park. These are the ones you want to follow, the ones you want to watch closely and the ones we want to introduce you to.

What can you learn from these brands and their influencer marketing strategies? Pay attention to the trends. These companies have had great success, but they didn’t need huge name influencers to make it happen. Some of these brands, who are quite large themselves, have learned that the more relatable the influence is to their market, the better the results.

These brands used relatable people like bloggers and personalities with a strong presence on social media, but not quite celebrity status. Micro-influencers and real people are what you are going to see with influencer marketing going forward this year.

Here are a few examples of brands that have mastered the art of influencer marketing.

Bigelow Tea

Bigelow is one of the most recognized names in the tea industry. With the upsurge in craft coffee and tea houses, Bigelow decided they needed something that would generate more attention to their classic teas on grocery store shelves.

How did they do it?

They looked at the customer base that is most likely to choose a specialty and figured out how to reach them. Their goal was to appeal to them on an emotional level by connecting to customers through lifestyle bloggers and promotion of the healthy aspects of drinking tea.

The brand managed an 18.5% increase in sales through their blogger influencer campaign, one of the most influential being Ashley Thurman, of Cherished Bliss. On her blog, Ashley promoted the brand by showcasing recipes, including one with lemonade ice cubes that was perfectly timed for the season.

In the end, Bigelow’s brand was promoted by handfuls of bloggers who had earned the trust of their readers and put Bigelow’s name in the forefront of a younger Millennial audience.

Frank BodyFrank Body is an Australian skincare company, that makes natural beauty products with a focus on making its customers feel healthy and beautiful, even on days when that presents a challenge.

The company started in 2013 with one signature product, a coffee scrub. Frank Body sent samples of the scrub to beauty bloggers and influencers worldwide. In just a few short years, Frank body has gone from shipping out samples to being a worldwide success worth $20 million.

That is the power of the right microinfluencer.

It didn’t take long for Frank Body to become an Instagram success, with images of beauty bloggers, fitness bloggers, models and athletes showing up and gaining follows.

Buick

When you think of Buick, you think of a pretty major brand, right?

So, why would such a big name use a microinfluencer strategy more suited for a small to medium sized business?

Because they know when it comes to influencers, micro strategies deliver pretty impressive results.

In their “Pinboard to Dashboard” campaign, Buick reached out to “Pinfluencers,” who have a major following on Pinterest, and asked them to create a board that showcased their personal style and life passions. What really gained the attention of Pinfluencers? A winning board would be chosen and used as inspiration for the color palate and interior décor of the company’s updated Encore model.

What Buick did right here was to recognize that the market buying new cars was very different from their traditional customer of years past. They needed a fresh approach that would attract the younger, automobile buying audience.

Considering that over ¾ of Pinterest’s users are 45 and under, this was a great way for Buick to reach out to a market that is interested in the beauty and luxury that has so long been associated with the brand.

Glossier

Glossier is a beauty brand with a cult following, who happened to get that way by believing in the power of every one of their customers as a potential influencer. What has this line of thinking done for their brand?

They say that 90% doesn’t come from paid marketing, but rather influential and engaged fans. Yes, you read that correctly. NINETY percent.

So, how do they do it? How do they engage the right influencers to drive sales in their target market? The concept is simple. They reach out to them, provide free samples and let the quality of their products do the rest of the work.

The fact that Glossier has developed such a cult following means that sending out just a few preview samples of products before they are released, to the right bloggers, will create major buzz around their brand.

What can we learn from Glossier’s success? If you have faith in brand and provide exceptional products and services, you can trust your followers to be the most effective, revenue building influencers around.

RescueThis natural remedy brand was looking for a way to drive sales. They took to influencer marketing as their chosen approach, but went a more traditional route.

Rescue reached out influential bloggers in the natural health industry and asked them to share their personal stories and experienced with Rescue stress relief products. Consumers associated personal narratives with an increased sense of trust. When Rescue reach out to the microinfluencers they knew their target market was listening to, that tapped into a goldmine.

To sweeten the pot, Rescue asked influencers to share a buy one, get one free coupon in their blog posts. If there is one thing that speaks strongly to consumers, it is the combination of trust and value.

How did it all work out? The brand received 133 million social media impressions and a 258% increase in their Instagram followings, indicating that they succeeded in tapping into a new market that was just sitting there waiting for them.

From Rescue, we learn that there is always, always a new market, new customers that we can be reaching. All we need is the right strategy to connect.

Under The Influence

When we look at these success stories, what we see is the growing trend of shunning big name influencers for those that consumers can relate to on a personal level. Consumers trust influencers that they can look at and think “that could be me” or “I can see that in my life”.

This is great news for small and medium sized business that want to grow using influencer marketing. You don’t need a huge advertising budget. You only need to connect with your audience and appeal to them personally. Micro influencers are the new marketing tool of the future.

We’re doing something special for this month’s influencer spotlight and focusing on influencers in different verticals who have all written gift guides. These bloggers will show you the best gifts for all your favorite people. As a bonus instead of focusing on 5 bloggers we’re giving you a 6th to really showcase there’s a place for every brand. From Tech to Fashion to Travel, they showcase the best gifts of the season.

Alyssa Ramos
Los Angeles, California, United States

Total Reach: 200.5K  MozRank: 5.17  Alexa Global Rank: 489K

Blog Topics: Travel, Solo Adventurer, Travel Gear
Affiliate & AD Networks: Amazon Associates, AdSense
Check out this post: The Ultimate Travel Gear Holiday Gift Guide

Social Audience Demographics                                 Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 29 years old                                          Huffington Post
Dominant Gender: 62% Women                                  Matador Network
Top Countries: US, UK, Canada, Egypt                       Caribbean BlueBook
Top Cities: London, New York, Los Angeles, Cairo

Edie the Pug & Kelly Harding
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Total Reach: 16.4K  MozRank: 4.19  Alexa Global Rank: 2M

Blog Topics: Pets, Pet Health & Nutrition, Pet Product Reviews, Rescue Stories
Tactics: Giveaways, Product Reviews, Sponsored Posts
Check out this post: Holiday Pet Gift Guide 2016

Social Audience Demographics                                         Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 32 years old                                                  Royal Canine
Dominant Gender: 78% Women                                         Ontario SPCA
Top Countries: Canada, US, UK, Australia
Top Cities: Toronto, New York, Ottawa, Nashville

Andrea Soranidis
London, England, United Kingdom

Total Reach: 734.5K  MozRank: 4.84  Alexa Global Rank: 1.2M

Blog Topics: Food, Recipes, Gluten Free, Inspiration
Affiliate & AD Networks: AdSense, BlogHer
Check out this post: Foodie Gift Guide 2016

Social Audience Demographics                                        Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 31 years old                                                  Great British Chefs
Dominant Gender: 91% Women                                          Veg Kitchen
Top Countries: UK, US, Italy, Canada                                  a2 Milk
Top Cities: London, New York, Los Angeles, Manchester

Michael Aulia
Melbourne, Australia

Total Reach: 33.1K  MozRank: 5.21  Alexa Global Rank: 890.4K

Blog Topics: Tech News, Gadgets, Gaming, Technology
Tactics: Giveaways, Product Reviews, Guest Posts
Check out this post: Christmas Gift Guide 2016

Social Audience Demographics                                    Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 28 years old                                             Telstra Exchange
Dominant Gender: 58% Women                                    nuffnang
Top Countries: US, Australia, India, Canada                  Meld Magazine
Top Cities: Sydney, Melbourne, New York, London

Chriselle Lim
Los Angeles, California, United States

Total Reach: 2.9M  MozRank: 5.32  Alexa Global Rank: 627.2K

Blog Topics: Fashion, Outfits, Beauty, Lifestyle, Home Decor
Affiliate & AD Networks: DoubleClick, RewardStyle
Check out this post: Holiday Hostess Gift Guide

Social Audience Demographics                                         Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 21 years old                                                   Elle
Dominant Gender: 93% Women                                          My Domaine
Top Countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia                           Byrdie
Top Cities: New York, Los Angeles, London, Toronto

Erinn Sluka
Seattle, Washington, United States

Total Reach: 47.9K  MozRank: 4.84  Alexa Global Rank: 1.1M

Blog Topics: Parenting, Education, Healthy Living, Home
Affiliate & AD Networks: LinkShare, Amazon Associates, BlogHer, Adsense
Check out this post: 2016 Holiday Gift Guide Buying Guide

Social Audience Demographics                                   Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 28 years old                                            Thinking Outside The Sandbox
Dominant Gender: 85% Women                                   US Family Guide
Top Countries: US, Canada, UK, India
Top Cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle

For a more comprehensive list check out the Top 100 List of Gift Guide Influencers!

Product placement and sponsored advertising have been around for years. However, people are getting tired of these direct marketing tactics, particularly with the rise of subtle, inbound marketing methods such as influencer marketing. In fact, almost half the customers are blocking ads, while only 14% can remember when they last saw an ad and what it promoted.

Instead of focusing on the number of followers alone, brands are now emphasizing engagement. That’s why micro-influencers, who tend to have fewer but very engaged followers, are taking the influencer marketing world by storm. According to a study, micro–influencers have up to 22.2 times more buying conversations that include product recommendations each week than the average consumer. As a result, several brands including some of the leading ones are taking advantage of this relatively low-cost social marketing option.

Read on to find out exactly how micro-influencers are changing the face of online marketing.

Direct Personal Communication

While social media gave brands a direct line of communication with consumers, micro-influencers are taking it to the next level. Most micro-influencers started out with their friends, family members, and colleagues as social media followers. As a result, they now have a strong personal relationship with their audience, resulting in predictive direct personal communication.

Compared to mainstream celebrities, micro-influencers are also more likely to respond to comments, tweets, and emails from their followers. The intimate communication often leads to better engagement that eventually contributes to valuable sales and conversions.

That’s one of the reasons why MVMT Watches decided to engage both, macro and micro-influencers to promote their products. The purpose of using macro influencers was to generate visibility. Micro-influencers, on the other hand, were instrumental in producing engagement. The #jointhemvmt campaign is still going strong with over 55K posts on Instagram so far.

Authenticity and Trust

Usually, micro-influencers are more authentic than celebrities in promoting a brand as they are more likely to endorse a product they love. Thus, their followers often tend to value their opinions and recommendations rather than paid advertisements or direct endorsements. They also help you create high-quality organic content that helps improve your brand’s social media standing in the long run.

Unlike celebrities, micro-influencers may refuse to promote a product if they don’t feel an authentic connection. That’s why people trust micro-influencers more than anyone else. In fact, 82% of consumers are highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro–influencer.

Adidas launched the Glitch app last year to promote a new line of soccer cleats. The company took a revolutionary approach of using micro-influencers (despite having its share of celebrity football endorsers such as Lionel Messi) to promote the app across multiple social media channels. Young football players selected from football academies across London tested the prototypes, featured in promotional videos and promoted the app as well.

More Bang for Your Buck      

Influencer marketing may have been affordable when it started to take off a few years ago, but this is no longer always the case. In fact, macro-influencers and celebrities are in high demand and extremely expensive. The top twelve Internet celebrities including bigwigs such as PewDiePie, Roman Atwood, and Tyler Oakley earned a combined $70.5 million in the twelve months ending in June 2016. So, if you want to hire a macro-influencer, you may have to shell out thousands of dollars just for a few posts.

Hiring a celebrity isn’t a great option either as they often fail to target a niche market. Why pay Beyoncé thousands of dollars to promote your new gym when a local fitness guru can do same for just a few thousand dollars? Likewise, a small restaurant may benefit by collaborating with micro-influencers such as local food critics or food enthusiasts. Thus, it is a lucrative marketing tactic, particularly for small businesses as it allows them to get more engagement for relatively less investment.

The biggest advantage of micro-influencer marketing is that it allows you to run a pilot experiment to see which influencers, content and media, and channels are working for your brand. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket (to pay one celebrity or macro-influencer), you can try different tactics and concentrate all your efforts on the most successful ones. So, you can get the most bang for every buck you spend.

Data Science-Backed Campaigns Drive Higher ROI

One of the biggest challenges marketers still face is the ability to measure the effect of their influencer marketing campaign on direct sales. However, with data science-backed campaigns, measuring the impact of marketing efforts has become a lot easier.

They are now using online purchase data, point of sale (POS) data, loyalty card data, foot traffic data, and data from the promotional offers to measure actual sales and conversions. For example, a rice brand that wanted to drive trials at Walmart used data science-driven influencer marketing tactics (combining coupon codes with inspirational content), leading to a whopping 44.8% redemption rate versus a historical rate of only 15%.

The new generation data analysis allows you to carry out a thorough inspection of the complete sales cycle. Brands can efficiently identify the most trending products and social media channels to adjust their inventory accordingly. Thus, it can quickly elevate the effectiveness and return on investment of your influencer marketing campaigns. Data science backed campaigns also allow micro-influencers to focus on the most effective platforms to drive more sales. However, if you want to take advantage of the cutting-edge developments in this field to analyze your micro-influencer campaigns, your marketing team can use advanced data science training or consult well-trained data scientists.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing has become one of the most successful marketing strategies in the past few years. Until recently, most marketers were under the impression that the higher the number of followers, the better the results. However, the rapid rise of micro-influencers has a different story to tell. This new breed of influencers has caught the online marketing world by surprise. Hopefully, these four points will help you understand how these unsung heroes are changing the online marketing one post at a time.

Want to connect with the author Dipti Parmar? Visit E2msolutions.com 

Find out how GroupHigh’s influencer identification and relationship management software makes it easy to grow and measure the success of your influencer marketing efforts- here!

Learn from the best explores how today’s best marketers and companies operate blogger programs and build relationships with influencers. The experts highlighted in this series work in different industries, but all understand the value of fostering relationships with bloggers and efficiently activating and managing their campaigns.

OXO’s Approach to Influencer Marketing:

Back in 2011, OXO decided to invest in building a blogger network to help enhance their existing word-of-mouth marketing and give a new audience a chance to experience how the company’s products could help make their various routines, like cooking & cleaning more enjoyable. Initially, the OXO team formed relationships with bloggers on a one-to-one basis, often interacting in person at conferences and events. As their database of bloggers began to grow, the company’s in-person recruiting was supplemented by online efforts.

We had the opportunity to speak with the OXO team and learn about how the brand’s blogger program got started and what strategies they’ve used to measure the success of their influencer efforts. Check out what OXO had to say…

Download Highlights:

• How the brand’s in-person interactions with bloggers transformed into the online influencer program they focus on today.
• The value of actively engaging with their blogger network, and the importance of providing influencers with creative freedom.
• The strategies and tools used to measure the success of their programming.

Read about how OXO manages their blogger network and activates campaigns, or visit them at www.oxo.com. 

Learn how OXO uses GroupHigh to run their blogger program – I’d like a demo.

As the holiday season quickly approaches, we are focusing the spotlight on baking influencers. These bloggers post about sweet treats for the holidays, getting kids involved in the baking fun and trends & new twists to decorate your favorite desserts. The content creators we are featuring love offering creative new baking ideas and engaging with their audience.

Rosie Alyea
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Total Reach: 665.3K  MozRank: 5.39  Alexa Global Rank: 912K

Blog Topics: Baking, Cakes, Sprinkles, Recipes
Affiliate & AD Networks: Amazon Associates, AdSense
Check out this post: Unicorn Angel Cake {And A Heartfelt Hello!}

Social Audience Demographics                                 Outlets Interviewed By:
Average Age: 27 years old                                          The Globe and Mail
Dominant Gender: 91% Women                                  Best Friends for Frosting
Top Countries: US, Canada, UK, Spain                        Studio DIY
Top Cities: Toronto, New York, London, Vancouver

Shelly Jaronsky
Andover, New Jersey, United States

Total Reach: 2.9M  MozRank: 5.61  Alexa Global Rank: 106K

Blog Topics: Recipes, Baking, Cookies, Food, Fun Sweets
Tactics: Sponsored Posts, Giveaways
Check out this post: Double Chocolate Caramel Stuffed Cookies

Social Audience Demographics                                         Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 28 years old                                                  Dixie Crystals
Dominant Gender: 88% Women                                         Tips on Life & Love
Top Countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia                           Food Fanatic
Top Cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto

Pooja Khanna
Mumbai, State of Mahārāshtra, India

Total Reach: 9.1K  MozRank: 3.91  Alexa Global Rank: 1.6M

Blog Topics: Recipes, Baking, Baker’s Journey, Sweets
Tactics: Sponsored Posts, Product Reviews
Check out this post: Matcha Biscotti with Aashirvaad Multigrains Atta

Social Audience Demographics                                        Contributed/Mentioned On:
Average Age: 30 years old                                                  Global Asian Times
Dominant Gender: 73% Women                                          One of a Mind
Top Countries: US, UK, India, Australia                               Vikhroli Cucina
Top Cities: New York, London, Los Angeles, Chicago

David Lebovitz
Paris, Région Île-de-France, France

Total Reach: 1.1M  MozRank: 6.53  Alexa Global Rank: 66K

Blog Topics: Recipes, Paris Bakeries, Cooking
Affiliate & AD Networks: BlogHer, Amazon Associates
Check out this post: S’mores Ice Cream Pie with Salted Butter Chocolate Sauce

Social Audience Demographics                                    Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 28 years old                                            Condé Nast Traveler
Dominant Gender: 79% Women                                    Food52
Top Countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia                     The Denver Post
Top Cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London

Jane Dunn
Portsmouth, England, United Kingdom

Total Reach: 140.7K  MozRank: 4.85  Alexa Global Rank: 242.8K

Blog Topics: Baking, Desserts, Recipes, Chocolate
Tactics: Sponsored Posts
Check out this post: Lemon Meringue Roulade!

Social Audience Demographics                                         Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 30 years old                                                  Foodie Flavours
Dominant Gender: 88% Women                                          Food Heaven Magazine
Top Countries: UK, US, Italy, Germany
Top Cities: London, Manchester, New York, Birmingham

Also check out GroupHigh’s Post On Steps to Successfully Forage for Food Bloggers!

One of the key trends is to use public relations campaigns to encourage online visibility, for local businesses. Though, it still remains a rarity to developing the complete potential of PR for small as well as medium-scale businesses. Failing to offer actionable content for flourishing PR campaigns stands as one ordinary reason behind such deficit.

As many of the businesses depend on the very old content creation techniques, their viewers and customers are flooding with different information which doesn’t click with appropriate answers. Then how should one plan out to promote their business? The accurate answer is ‘actionable content’. Let’s check out how to craft actionable content and how they can make strong engagements for your PR promotion.

What is actionable content?

Actionable content are being put into practice by the readers. It is those kinds of contents which readers find relevant, informative, perfect, and entertaining too. Best examples of actionable content posts are “how to”. Well, like any content marketers, you are apt, to begin with, normal content to crafting interacting content and then learning to create actionable content.

Actionable content enlightens what to meet, and even explains to the readers how to do it. These contents can draw huge traffic and produce extra leads. Actionable content generates an assessable expansion of revenue and conversions. Thus, you need approaching with planned out content marketing strategy to develop, edit and promote those actionable contents across the internet.

Few elements of actionable content cover: targeting your niche audience, develop trust, offer value, convey your audience’s needs, getting your readers involved, support your marketing goals, and interacting efficiently.

How to produce actionable content?

Actionable content signifies in engaging your target users. But it will differ from niche to niche. Some of the features of actionable content which one has to memorize include:

• Explain how to perform: While crafting actionable content, you have to clarify what to do and how to do it. If you want to surpass your competitors, you must concentrate on ‘how to do’ aspect of the content. Another benefit of detailing ‘how to do’ is that it sets you as a resource, thus crafting a powerful bond of reliance with your loyal readers.

• Make use of Visuals: You can make use of different visuals including creative images and videos that relate to your web post. These visuals are the simple ways to convey your ideas and thoughts. You can apply high-quality screenshots, images, videos, graphs, and memes to explain your creative text. You can apply in-house visuals and also pick images or videos from media-sharing websites like YouTube and Pixabay to name few. Ensure to add the source of those visuals.

• Make quotes of industry experts and niche personalities: Content marketers need to quote well-known industry experts and niche personalities in their blog posts. This will help in enhancing the credibility of their web contents. It will also make you exceptional from your competitors, thus gathering more traffic. Through this, you can also grow a professional relationship along with industry experts belonging to distinct niches. You can also add diverse viewpoints in your web post.

• Innovate: With so many kinds of contents pouring from various websites, only innovative contents get noticeable. You have to now take a step in surpassing those conventional PR campaign methods. Biggest brands across the globe are using innovative tricks to associate with their target audiences. For example, a web page crafted by Red Bull called Red Bulletin portrays real-life stories of persons who have experienced adventure.

• Give a personal touch: You need to give a personal touch to your contents so that you can grow an attachment with your prospective consumers thus striking an easy conversation. This will also make them visit often to your website. Ensure to respond to the comments mentioned by your readers. Make it a point to answer their queries in a personal tone. Also, evade any grammatical errors as your readers tend to return away from your site on noticing them.

• Answer the common questions: To craft actionable contents is to place yourself in the shoes of your readers. Then only you can understand what they actually look for from your website. Your target should be that the topic in question should provide all the necessary information in that content which would show a positive response from your viewers and readers. Consider the problems that your audience might be facing, and try to speak up those issues in your web post. Ensure that your post’s title should speak about your reader’s questions or issues. Also, the intro, body, and conclusion of your content are dependable with your subject matter. Make sure that the information you share with your target audience offers them large results.

• Add real-life examples to establish trust: If you want to engage your readers in an interesting way, you need to share some real-life success stories on your portal that applies to your topic. These real-life examples in your actionable content will let your readers recognize the path towards success. When they notice that other people have profited from your tips, they are going to follow you so that they can gain your advice. You even need adding actual numbers to provide full support to your mentioned statements and views.

Summarize

Public relation stands as one of the most useful marketing strategies present in the digital world. But many PR campaigns are not up to the mark and unfortunately fall short to produce the desired results.

Actionable content stands as one of the most significant features of effectual PR methods which are often neglected by the PR managers. It is easier to say about crafting actionable and relevant contents than to execute it.

The above tips will assist you to produce actionable contents which are unique and have a long-lasting impression on your target readers, thus offering your PR promotion with greater online exposure than you’ve thought of ever.

Want to connect with Joseph Payne? Visit CouponsMonk.com for deals and discounts.

Last month, for August’s complementary influencer list download, we provided you with a group of the Top Parenting & Family influencers. This month, we curated a list of the Top Sports & Athletic Influencers. From nutritional tips for endurance athletes to pro sports news & opinions, and fantasy football strategy, these bloggers provide their audiences with helpful information around a variety of different sports themes. GroupHigh’s extensive blogger index was used in combination with GroupHigh’s Blogroll Extractor for Chrome to identify these creators. We curated these influencers based on SimilarWeb Desktop UMV, Total Reach metrics, and relevance of vertical by category.

Here are a few of the content creators you will find on this list…

Amanda Brooks is the athlete and content creator behind Run To The Finish. From yoga to kick boxing, swimming and biking, Amanda does it all. Her site offers new ways to keep motivated and stay in shape. 

Coach Levi is a USA Cycling Certified Level 3 Coach as well as Lever 1 Certified with Precision Nutrition. His site, Coachlevi.com helps readers “Feel better, ride faster, and look great.” 

Fast Pitch Lane is a blog created and managed by Ken Krause, a seasoned girls fast pitch coach with over 20 years of experience. His site covers niche topics related to fast pitch including coaching ideas and technique tips. 

Download The Full List of Sports & Athletic Influencers Here!

Want to learn more about GroupHigh’s influencer identification and relationship management software? Check it out!

If you’ve been reading digital marketing guides over the last few years, there’s a good chance you’ll have come across the term influencer marketing or influence marketing.

The way people talk about how amazing influencer marketing is can make it sound like a secret formula to marketing success, but what exactly is it and why does it matter?

Influencer Marketing In A NutshellSource

The challenge with influencer marketing lies in putting your finger on someone who’s a real influencer. And oftentimes, many marketers confuse it for celebrity endorsements—that’s not what influence marketing is (more about that here).

Sure, celebrities are influential, but that’s not the kind of influence influencer marketing is about.

Influencer marketing is about leveraging the power of word-of-mouth advertising by getting someone influential in your industry or niche to talk about your brand.

Examples of influencers are industry thought leaders, experts, and other figures of authority.Source

This is where celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing go their separate ways. Celebrities are about fame while thought leaders are about influence—the two are not exactly the same thing.

Why Do You Even Need Influencers?

There’s no denying that marketing has moved into the social media landscape. Your business can’t afford to be left behind, not when as much as 70 percent of brands are investing more resources in social media marketing.

And social media is no longer an afterthought to traditional media. For many businesses, it’s where the real battle for visibility and brand awareness happens.

The reason is simple: social media is more engaging. Customers want to interact with brands instead of being talked to, which is what traditional advertising has been about for many years.

Customers want to be informed, entertained, and delighted by brands instead of being asked to buy Product A over Product B. And this is where social media influencers do the most marketing damage. Because they have a pulse on their respective audiences, almost anything they say is treated as reliable and worthwhile information.

So, strategically partnering with the right personalities helps put your brand out there, leading to improved brand awareness and organic conversions.

People Trust Influencers More Than They Do Brands 

These days, consumers trust information coming from third parties more than brands themselves—you’re probably doing this yourself.

Think of the last time you wanted to buy a product you knew next to nothing about. Chances are, you asked someone you know—a friend or family member perhaps—if they can vouch for a brand they can trust.

The same concept applies to influencer marketing, in that the influencer is the person vouching for your brand with their followers, who also happen to be your target customers.

Because of the strong relationship between the influencer and his audience, the influencer has the power to drive traffic to your website and social media channels, get you more views, and increase sales.

How Do You Spot An Influencer?Source

Although the concept of an influencer is a fluid one, these people are generally active on social media and almost always create content of their own, whether it’s on blogs, videos, webinars, or podcasts. And because of the great content they produce, their followers see them as reliable sources of valuable information.

What’s also important is finding an influencer who’s actually relevant to your brand (http://www.convinceandconvert.com/digital-marketing/5-tips-for-finding-the-right-social-influencers-for-your-brand/)

It’s not enough to simply work with a person who has thousands of followers. You want your target influencers to be a contextual fit with your business, so that every time they mention your brand and its products, there’s a high likelihood of it generating leads and sales.

For example, if your business is an automotive parts distributor, you would naturally want to partner with someone who’s a trusted name in the car industry.

Three Characteristics Of An Ideal InfluencerSource

Relevance

An influencer to one brand isn’t necessarily an influencer for you. Again, it’s all about relevance.

For example, a mention by someone like Neil Patel would be incredibly valuable, but only if your business is a provider of some digital marketing service.

But if you’re a real estate company, like Darling Homes, his most active audience probably won’t be interested in your services. Sure, you might see a spike a traffic, but not sales. And sales are ultimately what you want. More about this in the third characteristic.

Influence and Reach

OK, so you found someone who’s a perfect fit with your brand. But does that person have the marketing juice to back it up? Will a mention of your brand actually be heard?

In other words, does that person have the kind of influence and reach worth investing in? If you’re selling beauty products, having an Instagram model on board might not be such a bad idea.

Magnetism

Finally, you want an influencer who’s not only relevant and relatively influential but also someone who can drive organic action.

This is the kind of influencer who generates inbound activity. In other words, it’s someone people choose to follow on their own volition

This way, you know the influencer’s audience is engaged and genuinely interested in what he or she has to say. So, if the influencer mentions you, their audience has a high likelihood of turning into your followers.

Locating Your Perfect Influencer

OK, so you have a pretty good idea of what your ideal influencer is like. The next task is to find one.

Not surprisingly, the first place you should look is social media. Start with a social media audit—are there any people with a social media following mentioning your brand? If not your brand, how about your products and services? Are these people using any relevant hashtags? What topics are they talking about?

Once you’ve found your target influencers, engage them with a follow or like. You can then propose a content feature in exchange for a product/service sample. Just make sure to take your time and build a relationship with influencers instead of just asking for a quid pro quo arrangement.

Closing Thoughts on Influencer Marketing 

This quick guide should have cleared up any confusion you may have had over the subject of influencer marketing, and now, it’s off to the races. Outline your ideal influencer and start looking for someone who’s a contextual match to your business.

And remember, take your time when building relationships with influencers. You don’t want to be that guy at a trade show or conference that brags about himself to everyone he meets. Try to offer something of value so you can get a favor in return.

Oh, and don’t forget: you want your influencer marketing efforts to lead to revenue, not just awareness. Sure, awareness is important, but it should never be the final goal of any marketing initiative.

Want to connect with Jon Clark? Check him out on Linkdin, Twitter, Instagram, or at Fuze SEO.

The importance of developing a loyal online consumer base can’t be stressed enough. However, developing a dedicated audience can take months or even years. What if you could borrow someone else’s audience instead? Influencer marketing allows you to do just that. In fact, it has become one of the most successful marketing techniques in the recent years.

A staggering 86% women turn to social media for opinions, advice, and recommendations before making a purchase, while 70% teenage YouTube subscribers feel they can relate to influencer opinions more than conventional celebrities. So, whether you are introducing a new product or announcing an end-of-season sale, influencer marketing is one of the best options to increase your sales.

Read on to find out how influencer marketing can help you to generate sales.

1. Create an Influencer Persona

As a marketing professional, you must have gathered as much information as possible about your target audience. You can use this information to create the influencer persona that would best serve your marketing and sales goals. The influencer must be present on the same social media channel where your consumers hang out regularly. Plus, he/she must fit the demographics including age, category, profession, and location.

One of the most important aspects is the personality of the influencer or the tone with which he/she addresses the followers. For example, if your company is into video games, someone like PewDiePie is the excellent choice. Some of the influencers may have a large following. But, they are also expensive. On the other hand, micro-influencers offer a razor-sharp niche appeal at an affordable cost. However, these are just a few guidelines, not the exact rules. You need to find out your own set of selection criteria depending on your marketing and sales goals.

2. Reach out to the Right Influencers

You can scourge various social media channels to find the influencer that fits your selection criteria. This may seem simple enough in theory. However, in reality, looking for the right influencer is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to minimize your hard work.

The first thing you can do is to search for an influencer among your brand’s social media followers. If you already have social media presence, you may have more than few followers having considerable following themselves. In other words, you may be able to find a few micro-influencers among your fan base.

Alternatively, you can use various influencer marketing platforms to connect with influencers in your niche. Some of these platforms can even manage influencers and measure the results they deliver. Grouphigh is one of the most popular influencer marketing platforms. It allows you to connect with influencers across various niches. You can search for new influencers, manage your present influencer relationships, and track the progress of your activities on social media channels.

3. Create Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Influencer marketing can be even more successful if you can blend it with your present digital marketing and PR tactics. One the easiest ways to do this is to create influencer marketing based campaigns. The biggest advantage of creating such campaign is that you can track and measure the results in real-time.

The first thing you need to do is to create a time frame including how long will it take, delivery and posting schedule for the content, payment processing, and measuring the results. The most crucial part of the campaign is the approval process as one of your team members will need to review the content created for the campaign. You will also need to take care of legal issues such as copyrights and influencer commission.

Any marketer worth his salt knows that marketing campaigns are only worth the results they produce. Besides, influencer marketing campaigns require considerable investment. That’s why you need to take a look at your sales goals and KPIs periodically. However, first run your campaign by a well-trained business analyst before launching it. Make sure the business analyst is effective, result-oriented and capable of analyzing complex, multi-channel, and short-term campaigns.

4. Try the Content Co-Creation Technique

When it comes to influencer marketing, content quality trumps quantity. Influencers have a considerable following because they share high-quality content and reliable products. So, they will expect nothing less but exceptional content that accurately reflects your product or service. Usually, brands had to bear most of the content creation responsibility as influencers created content occasionally. However, this trend seems to be changing rapidly. In a recent survey by Linqia, 57% of survey respondents indicated that influencer content either somewhat or greatly outperforms brand created content.

You can ask the influencer to create the content limiting your role to just reviewing the content before it goes online. However, this approach can be slightly expensive as influencers may charge extra for content creation. Co-created content, on the other hand, is affordable as well as efficient. Content co-creation will also allow you to build a sense of trust with your influencer.

5. Publish on Multiple Channels

Your brand needs maximum exposure to generate better sales. That’s why you need to run your influencer campaign across multiple channels. Plus, this approach allows you to interact with your target audience multiple times and in a variety of ways. While you can share the photos of your fresh organic produce on Instagram, sharing YouTube videos of original recipes made from your organic produce will keep the momentum going.

The multi-channel approach will also help you explore which type of content and which platforms perform better than others. Thus, the next time you create a campaign, you can exploit your strengths and avoid repeating the same mistakes. However, makes sure to publish the content over the course of time instead of sharing it all at once(not for time sensitive content) as it will generate maximum exposure for your content. As most influence campaigns are short-term, a multi-channel approach will get you the most bang for your buck.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing allows you to acquire the followers of others expanding your consumer base in a relatively short time. It has, therefore, become one of the most sought after marketing strategies in the digital realm. However, this strategy requires a thorough analysis of your brand, customers, and present marketing efforts. Hopefully, these tips will help you generate sales using shorter-term and sales-driven influencer marketing campaigns. Which tips have you used to make your strategy more productive? Let us know in the comments section below.

Find out how GroupHigh’s influencer identification and relationship management software makes it easy to develop and measure the success of your influencer marketing efforts, here!

With Back-to-School season underway we’re focusing on influencers who speak about getting ready for school. These spotlighted content creators speak about topics ranging from the best supplies for your backpack, classroom, dorm room and personal style. These back-to-school influencers we’re featuring engage with their audience on curriculum ideas giving advise on how to keep focused and learning fun.

Catherine Goetze
Stanford, California, United States

Total Reach: 38.9K  MozRank: 4.71  Alexa Global Rank: 1.1M

Blog Topics: College Life, Perspective, Stanford, Easy Reads
Tactics: Guest Posts
Check out this post: Announcing: The Dear Reader Diaries

Social Audience Demographics                                 Outlets Mentioned On:
Average Age: 23 years old                                          Pulse Magazine
Dominant Gender: 71% Women                                  Medium: Stanford Magazine
Top Countries: UK, US, Australia, Canada,
Top Cities: Chicago, Stanford, New York, Los Angeles

Angela Watson
Brooklyn, New York, United States

Total Reach: 325.8K  MozRank: 5.26  Alexa Global Rank: 101.2K

Blog Topics: Education Trends, Teaching Tips, Mindset & Motivation
Tactics: Sponsored Posts, Guest Posts, Product Reviews
Check out this post: Overcoming The Back-to-School Teacher Jitters

Social Audience Demographics                                         Contributed/Mentioned On:
Average Age: 30 years old                                                  Kids Nation
Dominant Gender: 70% Women                                         House of #EdTech
Top Countries: US, Canada, UK, Australia
Top Cities: New York, London, Chicago, San Francisco

Kim Vij
Gainesville, Florida, United States

Total Reach: 1.6M  MozRank: 5.38  Alexa Global Rank: 938.4K

Blog Topics: Preschool, Grade School, Reading, Math, Science
Tactics: Sponsored Posts, Product Reviews
Check out this post: 9 Back to School Tips For a Busy Family

Social Audience Demographics                                          Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 30 years old                                                   B-Inspired Mama
Dominant Gender: 81% Women                                           Steve Spangler Science
Top Countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia
Top Cities: New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Orlando

Ashley Mullen
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

Total Reach: 12.3K  MozRank:4.39  Alexa Global Rank: 600.4K

Blog Topics: Homeschool, Kids Activities, Recipe Box
Affiliate & AD Networks: BlogHer, SkimLinks
Check out this post: Tips to Get Back to School Started Off Right

Social Audience Demographics                                     Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 28 years old                                              Thinking Outside The Sandbox
Dominant Gender: 91% Women                                      ParentLife Network
Top Countries: US, Canada, UK, Australia                      One Smiley Monkey
Top Cities: New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Toronto

Trisha Novotny
Gig Harbor, Washington, United States

Total Reach: 757.6M  MozRank: 5.14  Alexa Global Rank: 1M

Blog Topics: Free Printables, Mom Tips, Parenting, Education
Tactics: Amazon Associates
Check out this post: Free Back to School Student Organization Printables

Social Audience Demographics                                         Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 29 years old                                                   News 12
Dominant Gender: 77% Women                                          SC Johnson
Top Countries: US, Canada, UK, Australia                           Healthy Eating Org
Top Cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto

Also check out GroupHigh’s Top 70 List Of Back-to-School Influencers!

As a small business, you are probably marketing through social media, content, or Google’s Pay-Per-Click.

Well, are you aware that your advertising methods could yield more fruit if you tried influencer marketing?

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is the practice of connecting your brand with online influencers, who then market your business to their followers. Usually, these online influencers are people with a big social following, normally in at least two major platforms. These influencers work even better when they are in your niche market.

For example, there are online influencers who connect with people who want to better their culinary skills, others are nutrition experts, while others are specifically in touch with the millennial generation. This explains why you see your favorite celebrity posting photos of them drinking fit tea, on Instagram, for example.

A skeptical businessman would wonder how exactly this strategy improves sales!

Well, it works well because your target market will trust recommendations from an online influencer, especially if it is someone they look up to. As a matter of fact, 92% of people trust word-of-mouth recommendations, more than what brands say.

Additionally, businesses have reported that influencer marketing is the fastest growing customer acquisition method, from where they actually get nearly a quarter (22%) of their customers. This also explains why they report an average ROI of $6.85 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. It is no wonder therefore, that 59% of businesses are actually planning on increasing their influencer marketing budget.

So, now that you understand the perks of this marketing technique, how do you do it correctly?

5 Ways To Get Into Influencer Marketing

1) Think Small And Influential

While using a celebrity for your marketing efforts could be way above your set budget, thinking small and influential will sure bear good results, better yet, in a budget that you are comfortable in. Simply go online and look for a micro influencer-an influencer who has an influence in a particular niche, but big enough to earn results.

This is easier done using hashtags. For example, a grocery store in New York would prefer to specifically work with influencers in that location hence, searching with hashtags such as #nyfoodbloggers, #newyorkfoodbloggers, #nyfoodie, and #nychefs would suffice.

Don’t waste time engaging with an ‘influencer’ who has over 100,000 followers, yet no engagement. You’d be better off settling for one with only 80,000 followers, but triggers significant engagement with their posts.

The goal is to find and engage those mid-level influencers who have the perfect balance of influence and reach.

These influencers are likely a combination of bloggers, active social users and the biggest fans of your brand. Remember, the aim is to use someone who is not only influential, but can cause his audience to react.

2) Court Your Influencer

Sure enough, this is about money, and anyone would want to get paid to simply advertise a business on their Instagram post.

But, how do you ensure that you land a quality influencer?

To get the best, you need to court influencers you’ve settled on, because this stage serves as an interview, for both parties. A serious influencer would use this opportunity to learn your values as a brand, so you need to bring your A game.

Assert your presence by following and subscribing to an influencer’s content, sharing it with your community. Follow this up by establishing a rapport, via linking back to their content, commenting on their posts, and letting them acknowledge your content. Also, sending a small promotional gift will not do any harm.

3) Engage Influencers

After courting different influencers, you will have identified those with the highest potential of reaching your target market.

At this point, you need to engage them more directly, co-creating content, brainstorming, asking for quotes, requesting them to review your products and services, and you, sponsoring their initiatives.

Such a professional approach is what gave the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), early success in influencer marketing. Using the Social Media 411 strategy, the company attracted high quality influencers.

4) Weed Out The List

This is the most crucial part, where you choose which influencer to ultimately work with.

Fact is, through the first three stages, some influencers might have ignored your message. Well, don’t be quick to cross them out, unless this is done repeatedly, or they reach out, requesting that you stop contacting them.

Influencers who for some reason, fail to trigger engagement during the ‘interview’ process should also be weeded out. Basically, if your target reaction from their audience, such as email signups, subscriptions, sales, downloads or followers, is not achieved, it is time to try a different influencer, before investing too much.

GroupHigh’s Influencer CRM tool is an ideal application here as it will allow help you organize and better manage your blogger relationships.

A Real World Example

I began working with DK Grand Safaris last year. Based in Kenya, while their referral and repeat business was very strong, they were experiencing challenges competing against some of the larger safari outfitters based in the US.

We implemented an influencer outreach strategy with the goal of generating content on influencer blogs. This would not only be shared on the influencers social media handles but also provide us with third-party social media content we could promote on our own handles.

Our goals were three-fold:

1. Generate general awareness by associating the brand with influencers
2. Highlight bucketlist experiences like Gorilla Trekking
3. Illustrate how a safari can be part of a major life event experience (i.e. honeymoon)

We started with this list of the top 70 luxury travel bloggers to court targeted influencers. After following these influencers on social media and engaging with their posts, the conversion began with a simple email outreach message:

While some of the email strings became quite lengthy and not every outreach attempt was an ideal match, the positive responses were overwhelming:

Here are just a few of the successful collaborations:

•  http://thetravelista.net/2017/02/20/11-incredible-things-might-see-safari/
• http://www.luxury-travels.net/planning-the-perfect-honeymoon-safari-for-a-newlywed-adventure/
• http://www.luxurytravelmagazine.com/news-articles/gorilla-trekking-seven-tips-for-the-trip-of-a-lifetime-27094.php

Way Forward

Remember, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get into influencer marketing. Simply, narrow down your search to a local micro influencer, as long as he has a grip on his audience. Ensure that they play a key role in your niche market, then court and engage them, as a way of gauging their value. Eventually, weed out those that don’t give results or are unresponsive to you, investing instead on an influencer that has shown results.

Want to connect with Jon Clark? Check him out on Linkdin, Twitter, Instagram, or at Fuze SEO.

For July’s complementary list of influencers, we curated a group Technology & Gaming bloggers who post about the latest advancements in software, video game tips, and other various developments in the tech world. This month, we put together a list of the top 60 Parenting & Family influencers. This list of content creators provide their audiences with great ideas for keeping the kids busy, offer opinions around the latest toys & products, and offer ways to enjoy those rare quiet moments…

GroupHigh’s extensive blogger index was used to identify this group, focusing primarily on last post date, SimilarWeb’s Desktop UMV estimate, and either ad technology or influencer tactics like sponsored posts in their blog.

Here are a few examples of the type of influencer you will find on this list…

Wisconsin Mommy is a family lifestyle site created and managed by Maureen Fitzgerald that offers tips & reviews around travel, home life, technology, and cooking. 

The Shirley Journey focuses on topics spanning from family-friendly cooking ideas to travel to toys & crafting. With two young boys & a husband of her own, author Christina provides her audience with amazing how-to information around family life. 

The Playground Dad began back in 2008, as a way to provide advice and tips for parents & dads. Covering everything from youth sports to parenting to technology, Mike helps his readers navigate modern family life.

(Download the Full list of Parenting & Family Influencers Here!) 

Brand ambassadors provide a face for your company within a community of people with whom they have established trust. They represent the values of your brand to consumers, and empower you to spread the word about your brand to potential customers without having to use annoying in-your-face marketing tactics.

Because of their importance, it is critical for companies to enlist ideal candidates to represent their brand. But how can you tell the difference between someone who will fervently represent your brand, and someone who is just in it for the money or merchandise?

In this article, we will outline the key characteristics of a great brand ambassador, as well as provide tips on where to find these folks in order to create a grade A brand ambassador program.

Key Characteristics

While you may think finding enthusiastic, hard working brand ambassadors is as easy as reaching out to your brand’s fans, not every fan is going to fit the criteria for an outstanding brand ambassador. Below are some characteristics an ideal brand ambassador candidate should exhibit.

Passionate & Relavant to Your Brand

First and foremost, brand ambassadors need to feel impassioned by what it is they are representing, and this passion isn’t limited to your products. Brand ambassadors should also be passionate about your brand itself, and the values and mission of your company.

Their own personal interests and hobbies should align with those of your product’s buyer persona. For example, if you are selling hiking equipment, you would want your brand ambassadors to be able to connect your products with ways they could enhance their readers live’s. 

That being said, it is your brand’s job to give your ambassadors something to be passionate about and provide them with as many opportunities as possible to tell your brand’s story. Just as you want them to stay on message, your brand should constantly be reinvigorating itself with new mission-driven products or promotions for your customers and ambassadors to get excited about.

Active & Engaging on Social Media

Another necessity for any brand ambassador is a knowledge of social platforms and an ability to represent their brand on social media. Going back to the hiking supply company example, having a team of brand ambassadors who outwardly embody the essence of the brand by posting hiking photos and spending time in nature would be of acute importance.

It is a good idea to seek out candidates who already have a medium- to large-sized network established. This way, they can immediately jump into sharing content for your brand with people who already know and trust them. 92% of consumers trust a recommendation from another consumer over promotional content directly from a company, according to a Nielsen study, and your brand ambassadors are exactly who these recommendations will be coming from.

Professional & Consistent 

As the face of your brand, your brand ambassadors must understand that with representation comes responsibility. Be sure to fully vet your potential ambassadors by confirming that there is nothing problematic or contradictory to your company’s values on their personal social media accounts. Ensure that your ambassadors will always represent your company in a positive light by communicating ambassador or campaign specific guidelines before launching your brand ambassador program. Provide your network of influencer with enough information and partnerships criteria without impeding on their creating freedom. 

Where To Find Influencers 

Knowing what to look for in a brand ambassador is only half of the battle. Actually finding and engaging with them is the next step.

There are several influencer software indexes and market places that make brand partnership identification and management easy. GroupHigh, for example, allows brands to effectively target, interact with, and measure the results of the content creator relationships they develop.

When searching for candidates to represent your brand, you can also scout social media. Browsing consumer review sites like Yelp or Consumer Affairs (which even offers an option to help you find brand ambassadors!) is also a great way to discover who is already strongly advocating for your brand.

Another method of actively recruiting candidates is through sites like Indeed or LinkedIn. Post job descriptions and consider including a questionnaire along with the application that can help weed out the bad candidates from the good.                              

Regardless your recruitment method, still be sure to examine your applicants using the criteria from above; If they don’t embody the aforementioned key characteristics of a brand ambassador, you will be wasting your time. People share a lot online, so use this to your advantage when deciding if someone would be a good fit for the position. The ideal brand ambassadors are out there, and they are likely right under your nose. Finding them is simply a matter of knowing what to look for!

For this month’s Influencer Spotlight we focused on interior design influencers. These content creators give their interior styling advice, DIY project ideas and home furnishings for every budget. The content creators we featured this month love engaging with their audiences, often posting about their own design projects and offering actionable tips & tricks that anyone can try.

Kate Baxter
Manchester, England, United Kingdom

Total Reach: 542.8K  MozRank: 4.97  Alexa Global Rank: 1.1M

Blog Topics: Design, Products, Interiors, Styling
Affiliate & AD Networks:  SkimLinks
Check out this post: Leading Light: Luminary Bakery

Social Audience Demographics                                 Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 29 years old                                          Heart Home Mag
Dominant Gender: 72% Women                                  Pippa Jameson Interiors
Top Countries: UK, US, Canada, India
Top Cities: London, New York, Manchester, Brighton

Sarah Van Peteghem
Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Total Reach: 160.1K  MozRank: 5.36  Alexa Global Rank: 674.2K

Blog Topics: Design, DIY, Interior, My Styling
Tactics: Giveaways, Sponsored Posts
Check out this post: Tylko Shelf In My Office

Social Audience Demographics                                          Mentioned On:
Average Age: 27 years old                                                   DeZeen
Dominant Gender: 73% Women                                          Urbanara
Top Countries: UK, US, France, Netherlands
Top Cities: London, Paris, Berlin, New York

Deborah Sommerlot
Medford, Oregon, United States

Total Reach: 33.7K  MozRank: 4.62K  Alexa Global Rank: 730K

Blog Topics: DIY Projects,  Upcycle/Reuse, Decoration, Simple Living
Affiliate & AD Networks: Amazon Associates, ShareaSale, RewardStyle, AWIN
Check out this post: Project – Backyard Update

Social Audience Demographics                                          Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 34 years old                                                   The Kim Six Fix
Dominant Gender: 65% Women                                           Hometalk
Top Countries: US, Canada, UK, Australia
Top Cities: New York, Portland, Toronto, Chicago

Grant Pierrus
London, England, United Kingdom

Total Reach: 82.2K  MozRank: 4.78  Alexa Global Rank: 1M

Blog Topics: Interior Design, Furniture, Design Rules, Art
Tactics: Sponsored Posts, Guest Posts, Sponsored Posts
Check out this post: Exploring The Best Cape Town Property

Social Audience Demographics                                          Outlets Contributed On:
Average Age: 32 years old                                                   KitchenAid
Dominant Gender: 59% Women                                          Reed Harris
Top Countries: UK, US, South Africa, France                      Design Life Network
Top Cities: London, New York, Cape Town, Paris

Sarah Fogle
Mayfair, Georgia, United States

Total Reach: 3.3M  MozRank: 5.27  Alexa Global Rank: 542.5K

Blog Topics: Decor, DIY, Home Improvement, Renovation
Affiliate & AD Networks: Amazon Associates, CommissionJunction, ShareaSale, VigLink
Check out this post: My 15-Minute DIY Coffee Table

Social Audience Demographics                                         Contributed On:
Average Age: 28 years old                                                  Pfister Faucets
Dominant Gender: 81% Women                                          Houselogic
Top Countries: US, Canada, UK, Australia
Top Cities: Atlanta, New York, Toronto, San Francisco

Be sure to also check out GroupHigh’s List of DIY Influencers!

GroupHigh’s Learn From the Best Expert Series:

Learn from the best explores how today’s best marketers and companies operate blogger programs and build relationships with influencers.  The experts highlighted in this series work in different industries, but all understand the value of fostering relationships with bloggers and efficiently activating and managing their campaigns.

Vega’s Approach to Influencer Marketing:

Since the company’s conception in 2001, Vega has been committed to building real relationships with consumers and providing their community with clean, plant-based nutrition. In 2014, the brand had matured and was receiving word-of-mouth attention from different professional athletes who were passionate about plant-based alternatives so they decided to launch a formal blogger program.

We had a chance to speak with Tevor Ellestad, Vega’s PR and Advocacy Supervisor to pick his brain about the brand’s strategy for fostering authentic relationships and measuring the results of their outreach. Check out what Trevor had to say…

Download Highlights:

•  How the brand grew their influencer network from just a few athletes to over 1,500.
• The strategies used by Vega to build and maintain personal relationships with their network of bloggers.
• Tips for implementing a hybrid approach when reporting on the ROI of an influencer campaign.