How To Use Influencer Marketing and Blogger Outreach To Grow Bigger, Much Faster

Trust Is Conveyed Socially

We humans are social creatures, and as such, we interact with people differently when there is trust, than when there isn’t, and trust is therefore a very social phenomenon. This trust factor is critical in every personal interaction. We generally trust others who have passed through our personal trust filters, and it just so happens that although some of us have very specific and unique trust factors for certain things, they tend to converge to a handful of common ones. And nowhere is this more evident than online.

If you think about how you know someone is good at what they do, you most likely have a set of largely unconscious perceptual filters that, when triggered, give you a feeling of confidence that yes, this person is good at this. These might be someone else you trust already telling you the person is good, or it might be more of an intrinsic value system that lets you judge this, in which case, you might not weight someone else’s telling you as much. And you likely use different sets of filters for different things; I trust myself to look at a guitar and tell its quality and characteristics, for example, but I’d defer to someone else more on the quality of an antique vase.

How we do this, how we trust that someone is authoritative, and can be trusted therefore, is subject, just like other ways we think, to our innate need to create rules of thumb, or heuristics. This is the cognitive mechanism we use to know a Chihuahua and a Collie are both dogs, and it is also the one we use to create stereotypes. They are the mind’s way of not having to perform longhand calculations every time we need to make a judgment about something.

Since we’ve migrated so much of our attention and purchasing to the internet, we’ve seen the emergence of very niche-specific online “influencers,” people who’ve built enough trust and authority in their respective online communities that what they say on the topic matters much more than what others might say. And it turns out that building relationships with influencers in your target audiences can be a huge lever for growing your business in a very mutually beneficial way.

Reaching out to and working with influential bloggers, writers, YouTubers, office holders and speakers is much easier than it would seem, with modern tools like social media platforms, and various software stacks, and doing so can help you to tap into not only their audiences, but their expertise as well. They can help you to elevate your game, by osmosis. Who wants to remain average when they’re in strong company?

Influencer Marketing

Less than 2 decades ago, just having a website was more than enough to generate excitement. No longer. Today, social media dominates the internet and key to customer conversion is the building of strong relationships. One of the most profitable, and quick ways to do this is by having influencers recommend your product or service to their audiences.

With social media influencers, many mistakenly assume that they need to go with the biggest and most popular, who come with millions of followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Huge influencers like Kylie Jenner on Instagram, Lance Stewart on Facebook or Yuya on YouTube have millions of followers, but you don’t always need them to find the right audience for your business who can positively impact your business. Just as in life, social media influencers needn’t always be that popular to drive substantial traffic in your direction.

Many influencers are ordinary people who have built up an engaging social media following, usually focused on a single niche market. Finding people who have an engaged audience that falls within your niche area is much preferred to generic influencers who have millions of untargeted people following them, who may or may not fit your ideal prospects’ dimensions. They are also not nearly as likely to be already promoting your competitors. Below, I’ll show you some useful tools for starting and operating influencer and blogger outreach campaigns, but to further drive the point home, let’s look at why you might want to do this:

Influencer marketing statistics

Invesp Conversion Optimization Company created the infographic below, and it shows very clearly why 94% of the marketers who used influencer marketing believe it to be more effective than other methods: it delivers 11x higher ROI than traditional forms of digital marketing.

Blogger outreach campaigns

The main idea behind most blogger outreach campaigns is reaching out to work with several different websites that already have an audience established, especially bloggers in your niche and sub-niches. Not only can you leverage the influence these blogs have on their audience to promote or highlight your products and services, but once you have established a connection, you can ask them to review your product or service and link back to your website, often in anchor text you specify.

By way of example, if you are in the health and fitness industry, you could ask relevant bloggers to review your products or services, mention your brand on  their website, cover your newest product updates, promote your next launch, etc.

This works best when you have a good working knowledge of the niche in which the blogger specializes and he or she believes that you can provide their readers with a lot of value. Doing guest blog posts on their blogs and inviting them to guest post on your own drives value in both directions, as good content is always in demand. In this respect, if you aren’t keen on writing blog posts, don’t enjoy it, or for any other reason, it is very easy to hire a freelance writer, supply them with your expertise or have them research the topic, and have them deliver an excellent piece of original content for a very reasonable ($10-200) fee. You’ll want to avoid paying less, generally, because a good piece of content needs to be well-written, original (NOT spun content) and use good grammar. You will only be disappointed if you order cheap content.

You can also ask them to do a guest series on your blog, and/or do one around a theme on theirs.

Other benefits of running blogger outreach campaigns include improved coverage for your business, high-quality backlinks (an important factor for search engine ranking algorithms), the potential for longer-term partnerships, etc. One thing you should always remember is that each piece of content must be unique (free of plagiarism/spinning – you can check for originality on copyscape) and well-written. You can take all the leg work out of this by simply outsourcing your campaigns to outreach agencies like mine or by using guest post services like Quality Guest Posts.

Differences between influencers and bloggers

The primary difference between influencers and bloggers is one of perception. It’s in the media they use to convey their work.

Influencers are highly dependent on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and  Twitter to grow their popularity and engage with their audiences using photography, video, audio and digital effects. They usually have a strong presence online and lots of followers.

Bloggers usually have their own blogs or websites and their content is most often written, but often includes other media forms to help punctuate their message. Influencers are not generally not dependent upon bloggers, but a blogger can leverage social media influencers to drive huge amounts of traffic to their sites. There is no clear dividing line between influencers and bloggers; they tend to cross-pollinate. Bloggers usually have a strong foothold in a small niche market, unlike traditional influencers who have large fan bases.

Tools And How To Get Started

If you want to do this yourself, you’ll want some tools to get started. I highly recommend using Buzz Sumo to get good content ideas. You can get a free trial for 7 days to get a feel for it, but it will allow you to quickly and easily locate the most popular content topics for any search string you input. It’s quite useful for giving you something solid to work off of, and letting you put your own creativity to work in making a topic your own.

Another tool I highly recommend is some type of outreach automation software, like Pitchbox or Ninja Outreach. I’ve used both, professionally, as many of my clients, often other agencies, outsource their outreach to my agency. After having used both of these, I have to give the nod to Ninja Outreach. It’s lower cost and higher-functioning at the same time. Pitchbox runs $300/month but with Ninja Outreach you can pay as little as $49/month if you pay it annually. Even if you do it monthly, it’s half the cost of Pitchbox, and again, has greater functionality. Both let you discover blogs according to whatever search string you input, then email bloggers en-masse with your offer, but Ninja Outreach includes a much more robust ability to reach social media influencers.

Taken as a strategy, outreach campaigns can have a huge levering effect on your growth strategy, by improving search appearances for your business, enhancing your business’ or your own perceived value in the marketplace by association, and by driving highly-targeted traffic to your content, your brand or your offer.