Content marketing is a cost-effective tactic to increase awareness about your brand. This strategy can also help you generate leads and build credibility. However, do you think content marketing should be combined with influencer marketing?
Let’s bust a myth right now. Content marketing and influencers cannot work in separate compartments. They go hand in hand. Influencer marketing is an important element of content marketing. It’s one of the best ways to build trust and credibility through content shared by prominent figures on social media.
When done correctly, both marketing forms can have a great impact on your brand. However, some might ask, why should you combine content marketing and influencers, and how can you do so?
The first part of this post will address is why it is important to combine content marketing and influencers. And the second section will guide you through how to combine these amazing strategies to get the best of both worlds.
Why should you combine content marketing and influencers?
Content marketing and influencer marketing aren’t independent marketing forms. They are very closely related to each other and interdependent. In fact, influencer marketing is a key aspect of content marketing. So, marketers should ideally integrate content marketing and influencers.
Webinars, ebooks, or whitepapers are all important components of content marketing. However, unlike influencer marketing, they fail to provide a human touch. This is one of the reasons why influencer marketing is one of the most effective forms of content marketing. In fact, for every $1 that is invested in it, marketers are able to get about $5.20 in sales.
Following are three undeniable reasons why you should combine content marketing and influencers.
1. Influencer marketing can help you tap into new markets
Every brand always aims to expand their reach and gain new customers. And influencer marketing makes this job easier for you. Influencers can help you get the attention of your target audience and increase the visibility of your brand among their followers.
When you collaborate with influencers, they create high-quality content and share it with their audiences. You can share this content with your followers as well. This way, content marketing and influencers help you reach new markets.
2. Influencer marketing is authentic and genuine
Content generated by influencers is genuine, authentic, and relevant. It can help you win the trust of your target audience. This is because influencers are viewed as third-parties rather than partners of the brand. Due to this reason, their recommendations and reviews are perceived as authentic.
Influencers have thousands of followers with whom they engage and interact. This makes their audiences feel like they are just like them.
So, when brands collaborate with influencers, they get genuine content for promotion. That’s how they can use content marketing and influencers to reach their marketing goals.
3. Influencer marketing sells experiences rather than products
In a competitive environment, you can’t hope to boost your sales by simply promoting your products. You need to focus on selling the experience of using your products. That can help motivate your target audience to visit your website and make a purchase.
And who is better at selling experiences than influencers? They create high-quality content based on their personal experiences which doesn’t look overly promotional.
Also, their followers can easily relate to them and trust their reviews or/and recommendations. This is another reason why brands need to combine content marketing and influencers to make the most out of their marketing budget.
How to combine content marketing and influencers
1. Define your content marketing goals.
Before you combine content marketing and influencers, you need to identify the goals of your content marketing campaign. Once you identify your goals, they will help you create an effective influencer marketing strategy.
You might already know what you want to achieve, but it is equally important to know why you want to achieve it. Also, your goals will help you track and monitor the performance of your campaign. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult to evaluate your content marketing campaign.
Well-thought-out goals will help you make quick decisions during the campaign. However, don’t get overwhelmed and focus on too many goals. When you start with the campaign, focus on one or two goals to achieve the desired results. That way, you’ll be able to reach them efficiently.
2. Identify relevant influencers.
The next important step to combine content marketing and influencers is to identify relevant influencers.
If your influencers are not suitable for your brand, then your entire marketing campaign will fall flat on its face. Their values and voice should match that of your brand’s. This ensures that there’s a certain level of consistency.
It is very important that your influencers are from the same niche as your brand. Otherwise, the content created by them may not resonate with your target audience.
The following are the parameters which you need to consider when identifying relevant influencers:
- Your potential influencers need to have high engagement rates. You need to track the number of likes, comments, and shares their posts get and calculate the engagement rate. This can be calculated by dividing the total number of engagements by the number of followers.
- Your potential influencer needs to be an expert from the same industry as yours. This will help you reach relevant audiences and build credibility among them.
- It is important that your audience demographics are similar to that of your potential influencers.
- You need to follow your potential influencers on social media and check if they post consistently and create authentic and aesthetic content.
These parameters will help you identify relevant influencers. You can search for potential influencers manually, but you can save a lot of time if you use tools. You can use influencer marketing tools like Grin to search for suitable influencers. It has many filters like location, engagement, and reach which will help you find the best influencers for your campaign.
Apart from finding influencers, GRIN also helps you manage your entire influencer marketing campaign. You can contact influencers and maintain your relationships with them directly from the platform.
Additionally, you can pay them and send them their gifts from it. You can also see how well your campaign is performing on the platform.
3. Select your content formats.
As mentioned above, ebooks, infographics, and whitepapers are vital components of content marketing, but they lack a human touch. To humanize your brand, you need to combine content marketing with influencers. Now, that you have identified influencers for your campaign, it’s time to decide on the content format.
You need to select content types which will help you achieve your campaign goals. However, it’s also important that you give your influencers the creative freedom to select the best format. So, you and your influencers need to be on the same page and agree to use the same content formats.
Here are a few creative content formats which you and your influencers can select from:
1. Organize giveaways or contests.
Giveaways or contests are one of the best ways of combining content marketing and influencers.
You can ask your influencers to host a giveaway or a contest in which you offer one of your services or products as the prize. However, make sure that they clearly list the instructions to enter the content in their posts. When done correctly, giveaways can help you increase brand awareness and boost your engagement rate.
For instance, Loungefly used content marketing and influencers and collaborated with Rosalie Chiang, who is an actor, to host a giveaway. As you can see in the post, the instructions are very clearly mentioned by Rosalie. She has also announced the gift, a Red Panda Cosplay mini backpack, which will be given to the winner.
2. Tutorial videos
You can also ask your influencers to create tutorial videos which talk about how to use your products. Tutorial or demo videos are arguably the best way to combine content marketing and influencers to showcase the features of your products to your target audience.
They also help your target audience to familiarize themselves with your products. And this might encourage them to visit your online store and make a purchase.
For instance, Omar El-Takrori is a professional photographer who shares a tutorial on how to use Adobe Lightroom. The video has managed to gain 308K views.
3. Social media takeover
A social media takeover is another interesting way to combine content marketing and influencers to connect with your target audience. If you’re running out of fresh content ideas, simply ask your influencers to take over your social media accounts temporarily.
Your influencers will post creative and engaging content on your behalf for a limited period of time. If you don’t want to provide access to your accounts, then you can ask influencers to send you the content. Once you receive it, you yourself can post it on behalf of your influencers.
However, do ensure that whenever you’re doing this type of collaboration, you make an agreement. This should detail the deliverables from either side.
At the same time, it should mention the duration of this contract and till when the takeover should last. This will help improve accountability and even simplify the entire social media takeover.
For example, Glow Juicery used content marketing and influencers to spread the word about their brand through this method. They offer fresh fruit and vegetable juices to their customers. As you can see in the post below, they announced a Stories takeover by influencer, Marnie.
4. Bring it all together.
Now that you and your influencers have decided which content formats to use, you need to bring all of the components together. However, it’s important that you discuss what the campaign should look like with them.
If there are any special instructions you want to give to your influencers, share them from the very beginning. That will help prevent wasted effort or influencers creating the wrong kind of content. It leads to efficient use of content marketing and influencers to give you the kind of marketing boost you need.
Final thoughts
Content marketing and influencers are very different, however, they are interdependent and need to work hand in hand. You need a trustworthy voice to support your content to generate epic results. And that voice is the voice of your influencers.
Influencers can help humanize your brand and establish a connection between your target audience and your brand. So, you need to combine content marketing and influencers to generate amazing results.
Learn more about influencer marketing: Influencer Marketing 101
