Influencer Marketing has really taken off in the last couple of years, but you have to be careful how you go about leveraging this newer digital marketing channel. Yes, there are a lot of big influencers but they charge too much and can have questionable results on any given campaign. However, there are multitude of targeted smaller social media influencers, niche bloggers, and online publishers that can be worked with to really get out the word and promote your company during the holiday shopping season. Here are some of our top strategies when it comes to working with influencers in Q4 and beyond:
- Influencer Outreach – it’s a good idea to conduct outreach to social media influencers that reach the audiences that you want to get in front of prior to the holiday shopping season. We use a tool called CISION to target influencers, journalists, bloggers and other types of content producers on behalf of our clients. It’s the #1 tool for reaching journalists, web publishers, bloggers and other types of influencers. Contact us for pricing. This is a very effective way to get your company out there on well-ranking 3rd party websites and blogs to expose your holiday promotions to their targeted audience, as well as building SEO rankings and credibility. We only work with high quality bloggers in that regard.
- Dedicated Promotions and Coupons – Once you have some influencers responding to your outreach, giving your influencers dedicated promo codes that they can market to their audience is a great way to track the results. A lot of times they are charging fees to market to their audience so it’s imperative to measure the results. Along the same lines you can use dedicated toll free phone numbers to track the results of your influencer marketing campaigns.
- Paid Sponsorships – some influencers require paid sponsorships, some will do it as an affiliate, and some are “hybrid” deals, meaning some fee and some commission. You have to hammer out the deal and then track and measure the results to see how well it worked, then go from there. Then, you can adjust and find more to work with and grow the channel. The holidays are a great time to run paid sponsorships with influencers and bloggers, as it will have a good chance of working since people are in buying mode. Similarly, you may find the campaigns doesn’t perform as well off-season. In which case you have to get creative with the promotions, sweepstakes, posts, whatever the medium maybe the influencer is promoting on your behalf. It’s great when you can get a package deal, i.e. blog post, newsletter blast, Facebook boosted post, push notification, etc as part of the deal, so it has the greatest chance of working.
- Blogger Contacting – we recommend a proactive outreach campaign to contact and recruit relevant/niche bloggers to work with your company on a mutually beneficial basis. Having a good amount, if not 100’s, of unique blogs posting content about your company is a great way to broaden your audience, increase traffic, boost your SEO rankings, and increase revenue during the holiday shopping season and beyond. As an agency service, we provide blogger outreach campaigns for clients, contact us to discuss.
- CISION Email Blasts – If you need Influencer/PR/Blogger outreach campaigns, contact us about it. We can create online press releases and then promote the releases to an influencer audience that we create through Cision. Cision is an expensive annual membership that we subscribe to as an agency, so you can leverage their contacts and the influencer outreach strategy by hiring our agency to run your influencer outreach campaigns. Personalized email blasts can be sent with a release or without. We have sent targeted email blasts to influencers about doing paid sponsorships and affiliate relationships. However, most influencers and bloggers in CISION are doing paid sponsorships, which can work if structured properly with the right CTA, promotion, and conversion rate on the website. Contact Us for more information.
These are some great ways to find and work with influencers during the holiday shopping season. If you need your influencer marketing and/or blogger outreach managed and executed, let us know! Thanks have a great holiday shopping season!
