10 Ways Influencer Marketing Improves Brand Visibility

Inbound Marketing Strategy

Influencer marketing campaigns and outreach are powerful strategies when it comes to improving your brand visibility.

Improving brand visibility toward your target audience by developing a stellar inbound marketing and content marketing strategy is nothing new. Your content marketing strategy may already involve blogs or social media.

Data compiled by Business 2 Community (B2C) suggests that 93 percent of marketers employ a content marketing strategy. However, adding influencer outreach to your existing marketing strategy will only maximize your brand visibility.

A Tomoson case study found influencer outreach to be, “The fastest-growing online customer acquisition channel, beating organic search, paid search, and email marketing.”

The study also found that 59 percent of marketers will increase their budgets to do more influencer marketing. In fact, influencer outreach can increase your conversions three to ten times. This adds value to your marketing work, increases ROI, and improves your brand visibility by driving a higher number of people to your site.

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Influencers are indeed marketing assets you can’t ignore. Their target market hangs on their every word, and their recommendation can improve your brand visibility, serve up high authority inbound links, boost ranking, and accelerate growth.

1. Enhance Marketing Efforts with Influencer Outreach

Developing influencer outreach assets will certainly enhance your digital marketing efforts. Influencers have the leverage to create content and serve up high authority inbound links that will improve brand visibility.

High authority links will also enhance your digital marketing work by boosting your search engine ranking. Links will increase monetization as well, according to Jayson DeMers of Forbes.

Having those authoritative inbound links will also keep your content safe from real-time Google Penguin penalties.

Valuable influencer outreach assets lead to organic brand visibility using a variety of engagement including:

  • Ongoing influencer partnerships that go beyond specific campaigns, adding to your overall content base.
  • Developing influencer surveys to gain valuable insights, compile opinions, and build on new ideas.
  • Gaining feedback that allows you to maximize your future influencer outreach efforts.
  • Cultivating long-term business relationships with key influencers, making them part of your team, or members of your board.

2. Let Influencers Tell Your Story

Before beginning your influencer outreach initiative, it is essential to ask yourself why you are doing it. You certainly don’t want brands and influencers to simply regurgitate content for the sake of analytics or for celebrity endorsements to feel inauthentic. You need to invest the time to find a good fit for your organization.

The Tomoson case study notes that “51% of marketers believe they acquire better customers through influencer marketing when asked to rate the average quality of customers acquired through the channel.”

If your influencer outreach strategy becomes spammy, you will lose potentially loyal customers. You want influencers to share content and tell your story to a larger number of people in order to truly improve brand visibility.

Key aspects to focus on include:

  • Your story told via quality content.
  • Your brand’s reach versus brand engagement.
  • Power of influencer outreach over endorsements.

According to travel marketing platform Skift, “Every brand planning their social media marketing campaigns considers reach versus engagement when deciding if partnering with an influencer.”

3. Invest in the Right Influencer Personas

You probably invested a sizable amount of time identifying buyer personas. Investing time in identifying the right influencers is just as important.

Finding the right influencers to represent your brand allows you to improve brand visibility among the right audience via. “A word of caution though: never select influencers based on their numbers or their ‘cool’ quotient,” Josh Rampton of Forbes explains. “They must match your brand personality.”

For example, if you are launching a new innovative tech product or service, your influencers should be in the realm of technology. This ensures maximum return on your marketing efforts.

4. Never Underestimate the Power of Micro-Influencers

When developing your influencer outreach strategy, don’t overlook micro-influencers. They may not have a high volume of followers, but their engagement rates will improve brand visibility.

On Marketing poses a powerful question in Forbes, “Is it better to find an influencer who can connect the brand to 20 or 30 really meaningful decision makers, or are 10,000 page views more important even if the vast majority aren’t really potential buyers?”

Micro-influencers have more leverage to improve brand visibility due to the meaningful relationship they have developed with their target market, according to Entrepreneur.

You can find micro-influencers by doing research across all social media channels. FameBit, FohrCard, and NeoReach are other ways to identify powerful micro-influencers that are a good fit for your brand as well.

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5. The “Outreach” of Influencer Outreach

The “outreach” of influencer outreach is often the most challenging aspect of digital marketing. But with a superb strategy that includes relevant content, relevant influencers, and a powerful pitch, high engagement rates are achievable.

This is an important step to improve brand visibility. Simply asking influencers to promote your content, products, and services will result in silence. Approaching influencers with their best interest in mind is certainly the best approach that will reflect upon your marketing strategy.

When you work with influencers you want to begin the relationship with an attitude of, “What can I do for you?” This means helping them achieve their goals first, gaining access to their followers later. Begin with social media touch points by commenting, liking, retweeting and sharing content.

After you have a solid foundation, it’s time for your influencer pitch. You want to craft a meaningful pitch that is individualized, according to Marketing Zen.

This is essentially your first date, so make it count with these pitch-perfect tips:

  • Keep it short. Influencers may not have time to read a novel, let alone your long-winded influencer outreach pitch. Keep it concise.
  • Be a pro. Convey professionalism and be authoritative to make your influencer outreach pitch compelling.
  • Transparency is vital. Be transparent about what you want, and what you can deliver. Think long term.
  • Get personal. You can craft a pitch template, but you certainly want it to have a unique element for each influencer.

6. Develop Industry Focused Content by Targeting Relevant Influencers

In order to improve brand visibility through influencer outreach, you need to showcase your content. After all, your pitch only gets you one foot in the door.

The compelling content you craft will get you’re the rest of the way. Influencers need your content to be relevant to the industry, and of value to their audience, according to marketergizmo.

Think about these questions and develop industry-focused content influencers can’t resist:

  • Will my content offer a solution to my influencer’s followers?
  • What will influencers gain from this?
  • Will everyone benefit from this content?

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7. Turn Influencers into Brand Ambassadors

Like any business deal, you want to build upon your influencer relationship to improve your brand visibility. Your influencers have become an essential part of your marketing strategy, now turn them into longtime brand ambassadors.

“Brand ambassadors are influencers hired by brands for long-term relationships,” explains Bill Sussman of Entrepreneur. “They differ from influencers, who might be used only for a short-term campaign.”

Schedule time for your influencers and continue to engage them across social media channels, and have several touch points. This will cultivate the relationship in a meaningful way.

8. Build Upon Public Relations

Having an influencer outreach strategy that goes beyond campaigns is a great way to improve brand visibility. Influencers are key content experts you can use for blogs, white papers, and even ebooks.

This boosts the quality of your content and showcases your influencers as experts for their own growth and gain.

Building upon public relations via influencer outreach can also get your content published across industry-leading websites as well.

According to Small Business Trends, “When people are looking for specific advice, they usually turn to Google, which, in turn, surfaces posts that are oftentimes written by these influencers who have a hyper-awareness of their specific niche topic.”

Improve your brand visibility by improving your PR effectiveness, and cut PR agency costs at the same time.

9. Influencer Outreach Expands Recruiting Efforts

The talent pool for any industry is certainly full of skilled high-value candidates. Attract these high-value candidates through influencer outreach while you improve brand visibility.

When job seekers are searching for their next big career move, they certainly do online research. And since influencers equal success, candidates will be attracted to the company that provides the best influencer content.

Influencers gain notoriety and exposure, candidates gain valuable career advice, and you fill your team with the best and brightest in your industry. Using influencer outreach as a recruiting tool is an undeniable win-win.

10. Repurpose Content and Improve Customer Relations

There is an excellent way to cut down your customer relations effort and improve brand visibility without sacrificing brand loyalty with your marketing work.

Repurpose content for a detailed FAQ page using past customer questions. A strong FAQ page increases SEO efforts as well, especially voice search optimization on the rise, according to Search Engine Watch.

Once your FAQ page is in place, you can repurpose the created content again using influencer outreach. Your influencers can answer the recurring questions, adding perspective and content authority.

Ellory Wells, managing partner at DwizzyWid Media told The Huffington Post that, “If you find yourself answering the same question over and over again, the chances are, that type of information would turn into a good blog post.”

There are a variety of ways to use influencer outreach to improve brand visibility. From developing meaningful influencer relationships to maximizing nearly every aspect of your content marketing strategy, influencer outreach is indeed powerful.

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