Marketing With Influencers in 2016

Content marketing and in particular marketing with influencers seems to be coming of age with authority sites like Forbes suggesting that it is the big cheese in marketing for 2016.

However, marketing with influencers is certainly not new. In fact it has been an extremely popular and success business model for many entrepreneurs that use webinars to interview experts in their field.

Here's what Forbes had to say in a recent article on the subject.

"Content marketing is all about your audience. Selling stuff is certainly a good thing, but in content marketing it’s almost a residual effect: The real driver of content marketing is to attract and engage the right audience. 

Building an audience usually takes time, but there is one proven shortcut to building an audience – work with influencers. 

What is influencer marketing? 

Influencer marketing is a form of relationship building; you develop rapport with the people who can create visibility for your product or service. Unlike other marketing approaches that focus on “masses,” this approach focuses on the individual influencers, who can range from niche bloggers to well-known celebrities. 

Why focus on just one person? That  person can influence many, many people far better than any advertising or content marketing you could ever produce. Influencers can give you access to an audience you’d never reach on your own , and that audience sees them a trusted source of information. If you and the influencer are a good fit, some of his/her people might join your audience as well. 

Here’s how it works: 

1) You identify influential people in your niche or industry.
2) You make a short list of the influencers most complementary to your business in terms of audience, reach, and tone.
3) You build a connection with them.
4) You partner with them to create content, promote content, or to endorse your product or services. 

Does it work? 

You bet. Influencer marketing works extremely well. That’s probably why heavyweights like Lee Odden, author of “Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing,” named influencer marketing (specifically influencer content co-creation) as one of his top predictions for content marketing in 2016. 

Marketers as a whole appear to be getting great results with influencer marketing, though their success depends on what their objectives are for it. Augure’s 2015 “State of Influencer Engagement” report broke out how the marketers they surveyed are doing based on their influencer marketing objectives. 

Influencer marketing works for many reasons. First, it works because it cuts through all the noise of advertising. There are no ad blockers to worry about. Your marketing messages are too well woven into the influencer’s content."

However, I believe that there's also lot more psychology at play than that.

Take the example of an expert being interviewed by the interviewer who may himself or herself, not be that knowledgable on the subject of discussion. If you've listened in on an interview with an expert speaker, you may have noticed that the interviewer will often also come across as being knowledgeable in the topic of discussion. I'd suggest that there is in effect a transfer of expertise and authority, in the eyes or ears of the audience, from the expert speaker to the interviewer.

"Here are a few tactics that are influencer marketing: 

• Writing a guest post for the influencer’s blog or website. This allows you to showcase your expertise, product or service directly in front of the influencer’s audience.

• Interviewing the influencer for your own content. Their audience is likely to come to your site to see/read that content, and the influencer is also likely to promote it by sharing the URL with his/her followers.

• Asking the influencer to include your product or service in a tutorial. For example, if your business sells auto supplies, you’d ask a car repair blogger  to mention or link to your specific oil filters when doing a tutorial on oil changes.

• Asking an influencer to review your product or service. If he/she is happy with your product or service, you gain a great endorsement that’s shared with his/her followers."

To read the full story, check out the original article "What You Need To Know About Marketing With Influencers"