How to Reach Influencers: 5 Core Tips for Influencer Marketing Campaign

Finding the right influencer for you can be a challenge, but it's worth the effort because influencers have the power to gain trust, establish a good rapport with thе audience and create buzz around your brand. In this guide, I'll cover several practices and methods that you can leverage in order to reach out to influencers and maximize your influencer marketing efforts.

While this may seem like tedious work, it's easier than it sounds when you use an Excel tracker that keeps track of potential influencers, the actions that you need to take, where you are in the lifecycle of your influencer marketing campaign, and so on. Of course, it helps to have at your fingertips all of the critical information about potential influencers, such as their Twitter handles, authority blogs, Google+ pages, and Facebook profile pages. Here are the key headers to have in your tracker:

• Name and email ID;

• Facebook link;

• Twitter handle;

• Status (cold/active/abandoned/for future targeting);

• Date of the last contact.
  

Tools like Influence.co follow the new trend of influencer marketing, allowing you to search for top-ranked social media influencers in seconds.

This means that you can complete the initial phase of identifying the most important influencers for your business goals quickly in order to prepare for the more demanding phase of influencer outreach.

Do you know that, for every 100 influencers, 86 have their own blog? This fact alone is sufficient reason for you to make use of blogger outreach as a part of your influencer marketing strategy, though there is another good reason, as we'll see in a moment. The question then is how to identify the top blogs. Here is one method:

• Go to alltop.com;

• Type your keywords into the search box to the top right;

• A list of categories will come down. Click on the most relevant ones;

• A list of the most powerful blogs from the niche will be generated;

• Add all of these blogs in your tracker.
  

By way of example, here is how the categories would show up for a search of "pop music."

The other good reason to use blogger outreach is that you can easily create a snowball effect for your influencer marketing efforts through your guest post. In your post content, mention the opinions and insights of three or four top influencers.

Once the post is live and has gathered some views, contact these influencers; let them how much you appreciate their work and that you have cited them in your content.

Even if only one of these influencers shares your post, this is sufficient for the first phase of a snowball effect, as one mention will eventually generate more. Then you're on your way to building your own digital power circle.

Why Snapchat, you ask?

Unfortunately, there isn't any search function within Snapchat that you can use to find influencers quickly. Here are several workarounds:

• Specific Google searches, for instance, "top 50 Snapchat accounts to follow for Fashion," will yield a lot of valuable information;

• Look for influencers on other platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook;

• Add details regarding identified influencers to your tracker. Watch for them on Snapchat and leave comments when you see something interesting. After interacting with the influencer (or, to put it another way, getting into the influencer's mind space) for a month or so, you can begin with the outreach process, during which you communicate your proposition to him or her.

Nothing makes you show up on the radar of influencers more than your willingness to make them look good on your platform.

Whether you propose an interview podcast, a Powerpoint deck with insights and opinions, a dedicated interview blog post, or any similar digital promotional content, influencers are going to be interested. Since you can create sophisticated web content, such as videos, podcasts, and slide decks, without spending much time and money, the effort is definitely worth it.

Better still, you could conduct a series of influencer interviews in order to create a mega video.

Here are some of the many ways in which you can repurpose content to generate online mentions of influencers that they would love to share with their followers.

• Create YouTube episodes by breaking your video into parts;

• Create a podcast out of your video;

• Create a series of blog posts by paraphrasing the influencers;

• Create a Powerpoint deck and share it on SlideShare;

• Create an infographic with key takeaways and snippets from your interviews with influencers.
  

Bonus tip: Here's a list of terrific questions you can ask in any influencer interview.

You can use hashtags to identify active influencers. The advantages of this method are that:

• You get to know influencers who are especially active in your area of interest;

• You can gain insight into the kind of content/ideas that you can create to pitch to these influencers;

• While most platforms don't offer advanced influencer search options, a hashtag search will help you to identify influencers operating in micro-niches.
  

In addition to Twitter, hashtag searches also work well on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The biggest success secret is very simple: keep going. Even when you have attracted influencers' devotion, don't slacken your efforts. Instead, keep finding ways to start conversations with them, to create mutually-owned honeypots online, and to extend your power circles. This is where your tracker, as discussed earlier, will help. Keep in mind that it's easier to retain influencers than to get new ones on board.