Influencer Marketing

Once you’ve put all this time and effort into growing your list of LinkedIn connections, you might then start to think about how you can use them to market your business, your website or your blog.

This is where ‘influencer marketing’ comes in – a relatively new term in the world of internet marketing but also one of the most powerful and important strategies that you have available to you. Essentially,

influencer marketing straddles the line between conventional marketing and networking and combines them in a truly powerful way. What’s more, it can save you countless hours when it comes to promoting yourself and getting ahead on the web. As it happens, LinkedIn is actually perfect for influencer marketing and is perhaps the optimal tool for doing it effectively.

What is Influencer Marketing?

So how does this idea work? Basically, influencer marketing means that you’re going to stop trying to reach as wide an audience as possible with your marketing and instead you’re going to focus on the quality of the audience you market to. This might mean focusing on one individual and getting them to retweet or promote something you have to say.

So if you were to take conventional marketing on Twitter, you might spend countless hours trying to build your number of followers and then trying to create new content that would help increase your engagement. Over countless hundreds of hours spread over months or years, you would build enough of a following to become an influencer in your niche and to start getting more business each time you post.

With influencer marketing though, you would skip this step. Instead, you would focus on creating a relationship with someone who already had a huge amount of influence. Let’s take Richard Branson for instance. If you could somehow reach Richard Branson and get him to Tweet about your product (and to include your username) you would likely get thousands of new follower’s overnight and gigantic sales for your book or your services. In other words, you could leapfrog all of the competition by going directly to a key influencer who has the ears and hearts of your audience. This way, one single retweet, guest post or shootout could be an order of magnitude more effective than hundreds or even thousands would regularly be.

How to Reach the Big Influencers

Problem is, Richard Branson probably doesn’t want to shout out to you on social media and in fact you probably have no means of contacting him…

This is where that ‘degrees of separation’ thing comes in again. You see, if you could find someone who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew Richard Branson, then you would be connected by 3 degrees of separation. And anyone who is connected to you by that many people, will then show you your connection to them. In other words, you would be able to go onto LinkedIn and you would be able to see the two people who you need to go through to get to Richard Branson.

What’s more, if you’re connected to someone by three degrees, then you will be able to send them ‘InMail’. This is a message that they’ll receive in their LinkedIn inbox and which statistically has a higher chance of being opened.

Suddenly, it becomes all the more possible that you could reach a big influencer in your niche – especially if you’re working hard to grow the prominence of your website. Get big enough and you might be considered an E-lister. That might be enough to encourage a few ‘C-listers’ to contact you to potentially do business together. That in turn means that you now have the opportunity to directly contact some of the biggest thought leaders on the planet. This is powerful stuff.

Climbing the Ladder

Remember what we said earlier though: outright messaging Bill Gates out of the blue is not going to go down well – even if you have a vague connection by people neither of you really know all that well (imagine that!).

So how do you instead go about getting the attention of the big players? One trick is not to aim quite so big. Instead of looking to get

free promotion from the biggest names in your industry, instead try to make meaningful connections with the rising stars. Look at the people who are just ahead of you and try to work with them instead of trying to jump ahead. These people will have a much better chance of wanting to connect with you because they won’t be inundated with requests and because they have something to gain from the relationship as well as you do.

Even then though, you need to be careful about how you get in touch. Once you’ve made the connection, try to manage that connection by congratulating them on birthdays etc. and by sharing content they might find interesting (more on that in a bit). Then, when you do get in touch, make sure it’s with something that they will genuinely find interesting and avoid any thinly veiled motivations that are too self-serving. Think about the kind of message you would respond to and try to come across as genuine.

This is even more important if you’re emailing a big name in your industry. Instead of straight away telling them you want to do business with them, try just saying that you’re a huge fan and that you’d love if they checked out your website. Leave it at that for a while. Likewise, sharing something you think might be useful with them is another way to gradually build rapport.

Tip #1: Note that you may already have some very powerful contacts in your connections! It could well be that someone you know is now a big name in a particular blogging sphere and if they’ve already connected with you then this is almost like a ‘freebie’. LinkedIn makes life easy for you as well by actually highlighting the true thought leaders with an ‘Influencer’ badge right on their profile.

Be Persistent… But Not too Much!

Don’t be disheartened if you don’t get a positive response right away, you will likely find that these people have a lot on their plate and they as such won’t always have time to respond to your messages. The best strategy then is to wait a few months – even a year – and to try again. Don’t be bitter and instead just be friendly and outgoing, the result is that you’ll eventually become ‘known to them’, even if they don’t respond still. You can also try contacting them through other means – through Facebook for instance. Comment on their blog posts a couple of times too.

While you want to be persistent though, you also don’t want to be annoying or you’ll end up blocked and ruining any chance of a meaningful relationship in the future. Never e-mail more than once every few months (unless you get a response), don’t write overly long messages (these people are busy) and never come across as rude, entitled or bitter. Oh and remember that you’re trying to make a good impression here – spelling counts for a lot. The objective is not to come across as a rabid fan…

Ask for an Introduction

Better yet though, is to ask for an introduction in person. Here you will only be using LinkedIn to identify the people who are powerful connections in your network and you’re then going to do the rest in person. Once you see that someone you know is twice removed from a powerful business partner, you can then ask them to introduce you at a party or similar and this way you’ll have a much better chance of being able to make a good impression. People who we meet in ‘real life’ are far more memorable than the people who contact us on the web for obvious reasons and we’re far more likely to want to do them favors or to work with them if they can come across well.

Content Marketing

Influencer marketing was one fancy marketing buzz word, now it’s time for another: content marketing. Like influencer marketing though, content marketing is not just a ‘buzz word’ but rather an incredibly powerful marketing tool. In fact, content marketing is somewhat considered as the natural evolution of search engine optimization and is now an integral part of almost every business’ marketing strategy.

Essentially, the objective with content marketing is several fold but it all revolves around developing high quality content (not surprisingly). Traditionally, this content will then either be uploaded to your own blog or to the website of someone else in your industry (where it is known as a guest post). We’re going to focus here on uploading content to your own blog – and yes, even if you run a B2B or commercial business, you should still have a blog which you can use to add content to your site and to build a relationship with your visitors. This is also very important for your SEO and the more content you add to your site, the more there will be for Google to search through and index.

When it comes to LinkedIn marketing, content marketing is all about offering value to your visitors through your blog. Essentially, you’re going to add lots of new content to your blog or website and you’re going to make sure that it provides real value to your LinkedIn network. This means it needs to be interesting, useful, entertaining, engaging… or all four. Preferably the latter.

Again, think about the kind of content that you would want to read. Avoid anything that is derivative or done-to-death and instead ask yourself: if you saw that crop up on your home feed, would you click on it? If the answer is no, then you need to rethink the angle of the piece or you need to make the title more interesting.

Essentially, what you are now doing is converting your LinkedIn connections into potential fans and regular visitors for your website. This might also lead to some people signing up to your mailing list or even becoming direct customers/clients if your site is good at converting.

At the same time, if you keep posting great quality content to your LinkedIn network, you’ll find that they generally start to regard you as someone who knows what they’re talking about with regards to that subject or niche. This is the other huge benefit of content marketing – it allows

you to demonstrate your knowledge and give your visitors a ‘free taste’. Eventually, they should come to consider you as a leading authority in that field and as such they might seek out your opinion when looking for products, services and other ways to spend money. It’s at this point you become an influencer yourself and give yourself a ‘platform’ through which to launch your various business ventures.

Shareaholic

But why do all the work yourself? You can also let people share your content from your blog directly to their LinkedIn networks. To do this, you just need to install Shareaholic (http://www.shareaholic.com) on your WordPress site and they’ll that way then be able to quickly and easily share your content on a number of different social media sites

• LinkedIn included.

Note that you can also get your content to automatically be shared with LinkedIn through WordPress as you post it. This can save you some time as well when it comes to sharing it manually.

LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse is a great tool that essentially allows you to make ‘guest posts’ on LinkedIn. Normally, the idea of a guest post is that it will allow you to build a link back to your own website, while at the same time gaining some of the authority of the post that your post appears on. Guest posting also has the advantage of allowing you to

target a very specific market – that being the demographic that you are trying to sell to.

LinkedIn Pulse is essentially a ‘news service’ published right on LinkedIn itself that users can use to find interesting stories published by their connections, or that are within their areas of interest.

To see LinkedIn Pulse, you can go to http://www.linkedin.com/today/ or alternatively click on ‘Interests’ and then select ‘Pulse’. This will then show you three pages of curated content – content published by your connections (‘Your News’), content that is popular in your niches/areas of interest (‘Top Posts’) and people you should follow (‘Discover’).

As a reader, this is an excellent place to learn industry news and to get inspiration for your own content generation. In terms of networking, it’s an excellent way to find influencers in your niche. From a marketing perspective though, this is a great place to publish your content for SEO benefit and to improve your authority, influence and brand exposure.

To publish here, just click on one of the top stories to open ‘Pulse’ in the reader format and then click ‘Publish a Post’. This will make it easy for you to post your content and to get free links and exposure as a result. If you get lots of thumbs up, this could potentially appear in the ‘Discover tab’ to get seen by thousands and thousands of users, drastically increasing your connections and more. You can even use a LinkedIn Pulse post to directly sell a product if you do so in a subtle-yet-persuasive manner. This is a great asset and certainly something worth experimenting with.

Posting and Updates

Of course, on top of all this content marketing and influencer marketing, you can also use LinkedIn to just… post. This works the exact same way it would in Facebook or Twitter and whatever you post will appear in the newsfeeds of your connections and followers.

And as with Twitter or Facebook, each time you post, you increase your brand awareness and remind your connections that you exist. At

the same time, you can use this method to let people know about new product and service launches, about special offers and about all manner of other things going on with your business.

The rules of posting successfully on LinkedIn are the same as they are for any social media channel: make sure that you post regularly (but not too often), don’t say anything controversial or offensive, don’t promote yourself too much and always offer something that has value (people don’t want to know about your lunch). Moreso than other networks as well, make sure you stay professional and ‘on message’. If you are a car salesman, then you probably have

people following you who like cars and who are in the industry. So make sure your posts are on topic and that way you’ll be providing value and something that’s actually interesting to your audience.

Company Updates

Companies can also post by using ‘Company Updates’. These are similarly posts that you write ‘from’ your business and that will appear on your connections’ newsfeeds. This is once again a good way to make sure that people see your logo regularly and are reminded that your brand exists.

Better yet, if you create a Company Update and post it to your feed,

there’s a chance that someone will like it, share it or comment on it. And when they do that, it then becomes visible to everyone in their network.

LinkedIn doesn’t have the same potential to go viral as, say, Facebook. However, what it does give you the opportunity to do is to potentially get your content seen by Donald Trump. Again, if you have someone in your connections, who knows someone in theirs, it then only takes a couple of likes for them to be able to see what you’ve posted. And if it’s something that makes you look very good, that might then a) illicit a like or share from that influencer, or b) leave them more open to potentially business offers in future.

So don’t let the relatively small number of shares and likes put you off. LinkedIn is all about quality and you absolutely must be posting here as well as the other big social networks.

Targeted Company Updates

Note as well that you also have access to another very powerful tool – targeted company updates. These are basically updates that allow you to target precisely who sees your post on their newsfeed. Filters include company size, industry, function, geography, language, seniority and more. All of this means that you can target precisely who sees your message and thus avoid spamming all your connections with information and news that they aren’t likely to be interested in.

Company updates also give you a useful way to update your employees about changes within your organization. This demonstrates the power of LinkedIn as a business management tool for internal business dealings as well as for networking and marketing.