The greatest challenge in content marketing is not even in creating content. Distribution is a daunting task. It beats sense to create impressive content if you cannot get it in front of the right audience. It may seem impossible to adequately distribute your content if you are a small brand, with a site with little traffic and a small following on social media. You certainly need to get influencers to share your content, if it is going to be seen by a large percent of the relevant audience. Here are some ways to go about it:
1. Prompts
This is the strategy that you should use most of the time. It involves presenting yourself as a committed follower, and then presenting your idea as one which you think is worthwhile. You then need to ask for the influencer’s viewpoint. Of course, remember to thank them.There are a number of platforms through which you can prompt an influencer: via email, a LinkedIn message, a Facebook message, a direct message on Twitter, or even a tweet.
Ensure that the content that you have created is relevant and outstanding. Use a compelling title that will capture the attention of the influencer. This is no easy task. However, it can be equated with the challenge of creating high valuable, compelling content, a hurdle that you have already encountered and jumped.
Most importantly you need to think about the specific influencer that will help amplify your content and why you think that they are the in the best position to do so.
Email outreach tools
- Voila Norbert
You can use this to find influencers' emails
- Conspire
This tool allows you to see the people who have emailed the person who you intend to approach as an influencer. You can use this tool to identify someone else who can introduce you to the influencer.
Another great tool is Followerwonk. It helps you figure out who the influencers are.
2. Inclusion
There are a number of aspects of inclusion:- Influencers’ concerns
This technique involves being keen so as to recognize concerns raised by the influencers. You then need to respond to the concern via mentioning the influencer, for instance, their Twitter handle. You need to provide value. You can either point them to a solution to the concern raised or if your content can respond to the concern, it is an opportune time to mention it. You could also use other platforms like email or LinkedIn.- Relevance
Another aspect of this content marketing strategy is informing relevant people and brands when you create content that includes them.- Long form content
Sometimes, you may opt to respond to a tweet or blog post via professional and respectful long form content. This works best if you disagree with something. Remember to advance the conversation by including non-obvious things that will make the conversation more helpful. You then need to share it with the prospective influencer, especially before you publish it.- Reviews
This involves doing a review of one of your prospective influencer’s products, for instance, guides. The review needs to be authentic and positive. Ensure that it is valuable, and its sole purpose is not to get the influencer to share your content. You should not do this for the sake of attention, links and shares. You need to put in some authentic thought into it. The emphasis is on a quality review.3. Networking
Followerwonk will be very helpful here. Another helpful tool would be Little Bird. The latter is a bit expensive, but it gives very good results. The tools can show you the people or accounts which share content that influencers later pick up. These people may be easier to target and reach, and could have a higher response rate. They are more likely to respond and reply to you. If you never get to the influencer, your efforts will pay off as these people are followed by influencers, maybe even the one you would want to share your content.4. Similarity
There are a number of tools that you can use here:- RealTime
Another content marketing tactic is to identify influencers who share items that are similar to your content. You can also make a list of posts which are similar to yours. A great tool would be Realtime. It is a real-time discovery search engine by Bitly. It tracks all the clicks that go through the URL shortener. It also displays the links with higher click rates. This tool helps you to sort by actual traffic and identify the most trending posts in real time, especially those in your niche.- Popular posts
You can also search for famous blogs in your niche. To do this, enter the title of your post and a blog name, for instance, copyblogger. You will get to see popular posts on the same topic.- Topsy
This tool also helps you to find popular posts. It analyzes the index of tweets, giving you the most popular and relevant ones. It shows the most shared posts. To search for the most shared posts, just key in the related search term in the related search bar. To see all the tweets, change the time restraint to 'all time'. Look for the tweets with largest number on the conversation bubble. This means that that particular link was very popular.- The Content Strategy Generator Tool
It minimizes the time that it takes to generate ideas for content. With this tool, you can search for content that is related to any phrase on a great list of social media sites, question and answer sites and content aggregators. It also breaks down the information by title, publisher, time published, and description.5. The Search
After identifying content that is similar to yours, you need to look for relevant influencers. Bitly is a useful tool here. You will get to see the people who shared the posts, and even the means that they used to send traffic. Depending on your results, you could choose to contact them or not. When you finally settle on whom you want to contact, then reach out to them as discussed above.Conclusion
As we can all agree, content distribution is the hardest facet of content marketing. Utilizing the above tactics will help you get your content to the right influencers, eventually. It however requires research, persistence and patience.
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