Ever since social media popped up on to the scene, businesses have been trying to find a successful way to utilize its power of influencers, the “awesomizers”, who have a significant following have a have a respectable voice in each of their industries. By having a mere mention from the right influencer could take your company from nothing to the forefront of social buzz.
How do you determine who to target? What do you do to enchant them and convert them into a brand advocate? Here are some steps that can be taken to developing and integrating personalized content into a digital marketing strategy.
Indentify Your Awesomizer
As the title suggests, you need to first indentify your social media awesomizer. This would be somebody with a significant social following, as well as a powerful voice in their industry. With one simple tweet or Facebook post, the awesomizer could create potentially create an unexpected, but powerful ripple effect.
Having a direct relationship with a social influencer will help you get a bigger foot hold in the industry. You don’t even have to worry if you don’t have a personal connection with them. You can still court them. All you need to do is find people that are in your industry that you respect, have a large group of followers and are viewed as influential thought leaders. Tell them how much you loved one of their blog posts, or reply to and share their posts. Make sure you’re sincere and see where things go from there.
Once you’ve established a solid relationship with the awesomizer of choice, you can then consider pitching your idea to them to develop personalized content for them to share with their followers. What’s the worst that can happen? They can say no. That’s not a problem. Everybody’s been rejected before. Just pick yourself back up and find another awesomizer to talk to.
Develop Personalized Content
When you find that there is great content that is compelling, you can do incredible things with it. You can share it across the awesomizer’s large group of followers, and this would help turn you into a brand advocate, while capturing attention for the awesomizer.
First of all, you will need to identify which format your content should take. One idea is the infographic. The reason for wanting to use the infographic as an example is that they’re a popular format for sharing easy-to-understand content. Think about the best vessel for your content, what you’re good at, and then allow your creative juices flow like a river. Make sure that it’s compelling enough to stand alone in case to your influencer doesn’t share it. Also, you need to be sure you invest a good amount of time to guarantee a great final product. Since you’re making personalized content for awesomizers, you should make sure that the final product is an amazing one.
Syndicate Content
You’ll want to provide your influencer with exclusivity in viewing and sharing your personalized content. By letting the influencer creating the first surge of the sharing wave will tell them that they are a valuable source, which is an important part of the process. Naturally, don’t rely on the for everything. You’ll want to make a double sided approach by investing in link building efforts to compliment the awesomizer’s reach.
Measure Results
Finally, the last step that you need to take is to measure the results of your efforts. The only way you can tell if your outreach experiment was a success is data.
Make sure you have analytics in place to track the success of your initiative. Even if your influencer shares your content with their social followers, you need to have more objective ways to measure success. Only the data can truly show how successful of digital marketing investment really is. Make sure you have an analytically driven, data focused reporting strategy in place to define what success really looks like.