One of the most powerful ways to spread your content brand is to reach out to influencers. By building relationships with these influencers, you open the door to several of these influencers potentially sharing your content with their audiences.
Reaching out to influencers and starting the dialogue is not as difficult as it seems. You need to create a reason for the dialogue and determine your goal.
What’s Your Goal?
Do you want influencers to share your content, become guests on your podcast, or something else? Determining your goal will improve the dialogue because you’ll have clarity. Having clarity is the first step towards meaningfully achieving your goal.
What’s In It For The Influencers?
Once you determine your goal, your next step is to determine what’s in it for the influencer. Remember that influencers are people too, and some of their in boxes are stuffed with messages like yours.
They get plenty of emails that ask them to share content or to be a guest on a podcast. By answering this question in advance, you can write an email that sets you apart.
When I ask influencers to become guests on the Breakthrough Success Podcast, I make it clear what type of exposure they’ll get. I mention right away that I have over 500K social media followers, over 10K email subscribers, and almost 70K students on Udemy. My potential guests know that this episode will be seen by a lot of people.
I also establish the credibility of my podcast by mentioning some of the guests from past episodes. If you are just launching your podcast, just focus on your audience size and how many people you’d spread the message to.
If you don’t have a podcast, there’s still plenty you can offer to an influencer. A popular tactic to reach out to influencers is to mention them in one of your blog posts before reaching out. You can then tell the influencer that you mentioned him/her in the blog post and ask for a share.
Influencers, just like anyone else, are more likely to share content that they got mentioned in. If you mention five influencers in all of your blog posts, and you reach out to all five of those influencers, you can start generating massive traffic.
How Do I Get Them To Notice Me On Social Media?
For some influencers, an email isn’t enough. While the above tactics are the most effective for getting a desirable response, there are other ways to reach out to influencers…and get them to notice you.
We can’t do everything or be everywhere at once. This is a popular lesson that gets repeated time and time again. While you can’t be everywhere, you can be everywhere to someone. In this case, that someone is an influencer.
If that influencer tweets, start liking, retweeting, and responding to their tweets. Like and comment on their Facebook posts. Repin their pins, and comment on their Instagram pictures while you’re at it.
Liking and sharing will get the influencer’s attention, but nothing is more powerful than leaving quality comments and responses to their content. So many people are willing to like, fewer people will share, but almost no one is willing to leave a comment.
That’s why you’ll see the Instagram pictures with thousands of likes but only a few dozen comments. If you frequently comment on an influencer’s content (that in some cases, you would have consumed anyway), immediately positions you in their frame of mind.
When it comes time to ask the influencer for a favor, they’ll remember you from all of the likes, shares, but most importantly, comments, that you leave on their posts.
How Do I Continue The Conversation?
Some influencers will respond to your emails while others will respond to your comments. A few will even respond to both. At this point, you have a conversation.
The way you continue the conversation depends on how the influencer responds. The rule of thumb for continuing a conversation is to think of the conversation with someone offline.
If they weren’t interested in your idea, you wouldn’t just blow them off and not write back. You would thank them for considering your idea or use another approach without being too pushy.
If the influencer is interested in continuing the dialogue on social media, asking questions and sharing additional insights will continue the conversation. When you ask a question, the influencer needs to answer it.
If you share an additional insight, the influencer will elaborate on that insight and maybe offer some of his/her insights.
If the influencer agrees to be a guest on your show or to share your content, provide them with the next steps.
What’s The Most Important Thing For Me To Remember?
Influencers are people. The moment you treat them like people instead of opportunity-bearers, you’ll have more success.
Also, don’t stop interacting with any influencer. There is no end-goal with influencer relationships. Sure, you may want them on your show or to share your content, but you need to continue the dialogue.
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Follow-up with influencers you haven’t been in touch with for a while. Just check in and keep those relationships healthy. You may need them in the future, and they may need your help in the future.
Featured Image: influencermarketinghub.com
In-Post Images: Shutterstock
