02 Feb
Influencer marketing is one of the most efficient ways to build brand awareness and trust as well as increase sales and leads. The simplest example of an influencer marketing is a brand sponsoring a video product review on YouTube or a visual endorsement on Instagram done by a user with a solid following.
Whereas, influencer marketing can be effective in blog marketing, too. Influencer marketing can be tricky and time-consuming if you don’t have the right influencer marketing tools at your disposal.
Who are influencers?
An influencer is someone who has the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience. a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages.
What is an influencer marketing platform?
Influencer marketing platforms make it easier for brands and content creators to discover each other. It’s like a matchmaking platform for influencer marketing. Through these platforms, influencers can get more visibility while brands can search for influencers based on their campaign requirements.
Many influencer marketing platforms have specialized influencer search engines that make the search process easier. They also have databases of pre-vetted influencers who are willing to work with brands.
Tools for creating an effective influencer-driven content marketing strategy
1. Ubersuggest
The first step when planning any content marketing project should be keyword research. Hence ubersuggest is one of the easiest tools to use.
Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that specializes in generating new keyword ideas. Originally founded as a tool that scraped Google Suggest terms. It allows you to get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge.
Additionally, this tool can be run for free and it returns pretty awesome data, including a so-called “SEO difficulty” of each keyword, which is the number that reflects organic competition. The number allows content marketers to choose search queries that will be easier to rank for.
Why Ubersuggest?
Because it is the easiest tool to figure out, even if you are very new to keyword research. It is also very usable for free. If you choose to upgrade, it costs $29 per month for an individual managing one-two-three websites.
2. Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is a cloud-based platform that helps you discover the best engagement, content and outreach opportunities across social and search. Discover new keywords, trending stories, customer questions and content success, all while monitoring what’s most important to your brand.
On BuzzSumo, you’ll find bloggers writing about your topic. This offers powerful tools to better research your niche content and authors. Apart from content research, Buzzsumo offers more sections including Youtube influencers, Twitter influencers, and more.
BuzzSumo allows you to review and sort potential influencers by the following parameters:
- Page Authority
- Domain Authority
- Number of Twitter Followers
- Retweet Ratio
- Reply Ratio
- Average Retweets
- Instagram Authority
BuzzSumo helps you discover and analyze influencers by their reach, authority, influence, and engagement. Also, you get to see what kind of content these influencers share. This can help you evaluate them better. Such insights make it one of the most useful tools in the influencer space.
Why Buzzsumo?
Because it’s a tool that would offer the aforementioned influencer research features. Buzzsumo offers a seven-day trial and it will cost $99 per month for a team of five users.
3. Twitonomy
Twitonomy gives detailed and visual analytics on anyone’s tweets, retweets, replies, mentions, hashtags. You just browse, search, filter and get insights on the people. It backups/export tweets, retweets, mentions and reports to excel and pdf in just one-click.
Moreover, Twitonomy is a good free way to quickly run an interaction analysis of any Twitter account.
Why Twitonomy?
Twitonomy offers a pretty solid report completely for free. Also it gives you search analytics on any keyword, hashtags, URL or users.
4. Google Spreadsheets
Google Sheets is a spreadsheet program included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. Now you don’t want to create a list of 1,000 influencers. Depending on your industry and time availability, anything between 20 and 50 is a good start.
What you want to have in that list
- Influencer’s primary account and name
- More social media profiles (make sure you follow them everywhere)
- Whatever other contact info you have ever used or are aware of
- Whether you had any previous contact or engagement and when
- Any notes you choose to make
The list will grow and change over time but don’t get overwhelmed with too many rows and columns at the start. I love using spreadsheets to maintain a list of contacts.
Why Google Spreadsheets?
Google Spreadsheets are absolutely free and offer a great set of features. They are also incredibly fast which is very important for collaboration.
Spreadsheets can be shared across teams, so they are great for collaboration. You can also integrate Google Drive into your WordPress dashboard to make it easier to find and access.
5. Text Optimizer
Text Optimization Tool is used to rank higher. It tailor your text to better match search engines’ expectations. To help you come up with interesting questions for your expert roundups, it offers a handy tool for collecting and analyzing popular questions for any niche. Also, you can use the tool to come up with influencer-driven content ideas.
Why Text Optimizer?
The tool doesn’t rely on any API: Their data completely relies on the semantic analysis of the tool. This ensures two things:
- The data is not skewed by any single source
- The data is only available to the current users of the tool
It is one of those tools that hasn’t been overused yet, so you can rest assured your competitors may not yet have it. The tool offers a seven-day free trial, and will cost $60 a month after that.
Question research is a great tool to build influencer-driven content but there are more ideas to consider:
- Brainstorm ideas that relate to your product lifecycle
- Use surveys to generate more ideas from your audience
6. Finteza
A brand-new analytics and marketing service with unique opportunities for optimizing conversion. It compares performance of various pages, optimizes conversion rates and analyzes traffic.
Finteza allows you to set up on-site remarketing campaigns: You can set up your roundup visits as an event and serve those visitors custom CTAs inviting them to buy a matching product or optin using a related content upgrade.
Why Finteza?
Because it offers a remarketing functionality on such an affordable budget. The tool offers a 30-day free trial and will cost $4 per 100,000 impressions a month.
You can use Facebook remarketing options to reach your visitors outside of your site. This is especially powerful for lead generation purposes (when you use influencer-driven content to generate webinar signups or whitepaper downloads).
Conclusion
Influencer marketing continues to grow in popularity with more brands trusting influencer collaborations to run successful marketing campaigns. And it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
When influencer marketing drives your blog promotion, you can achieve both: a much more in-depth content and more shares and traffic. It’s a long process but it’s well worth the effort in the long run.