4 Content Activities to Help Build
Real Relationships with Influencers
Relationships are important in online marketing.
Developing relationships with thought leaders, influential bloggers, or other
site owners in your niche can:
- · Lend credibility and authority to your content and brand.
- · Amplify content distribution.
- · Build brand evangelists.
- · Augment link acquisition.
- · Lead to collaborative marketing efforts.
When it comes to relationship-building content, there
are four, specific, evergreen content marketing activities that are perfectly
suited to helping you connect with influencers in your niche.
The Group
Interview
Cold outreach is rarely effective these days. Plus,
it's a terrible way to connect with thought leaders. You need a legitimate
reason to show up in the inboxes of big-time influencers in your space. Running
a group interview is a terrific excuse to initiate contact.
If you're unfamiliar with group interviews, they
usually feature a panel of subject matter experts and their individual
responses to a specific question. They're effective for earned link
acquisition, can drive high-intent traffic and are also great for establishing
relationships.
Examples of group interviews include this one on Author Rank and
this one on creative link building.
When conducting a
group interview, some tips are to:
Reach out with a thoughtful, personalized email. It's
difficult to build relationships with anonymous, boilerplate emails. Explain
why you'd like the influencer to participate. Flatter them. Laud their work,
cite specific examples.
Ask them if there's anything specifically they'd like
to promote in their panelist bio. Once published, be sure to reach back out and
thank them for their time. Create a custom Twitter list with all your panelists
and include a link to it in the post. Let your panelists know about it too.
Going the extra mile helps leave an impression. It's also important to continue
the dialog even after the group interview project has ended, so you can sustain
these relationships. Try to:
Carve out a few minutes each day to continue to
promote the influencer's work on social media. Reference them or their content
in future posts on your site. As is often you case, you can develop a
mutually-beneficial relationship with reciprocal promotional opportunities that
will return dividends over time. But the key is to give before you receive. And
if you'd rather do something more exclusive than a group interview, you can run
individual spotlight type interviews.
"Best
of" Lists
"Best of" articles are collections of
quality resources on a particular topic that range from the best sites on a
certain subject, to a top tools or apps list, to a massive list of amazing
resources that your audience will find really helpful. Examples include this
one on educational technology tools for teachers and this one on Google Reader
alternatives.
From a relationship-building perspective, best of
lists are effective because you're showcasing and promoting the content of
others, and not really asking for anything in return.
You'll need to do personalized outreach to everyone on
your "best of" list to begin the relationship-building process.
Obviously, this is the case for any type of influencer-targeted content. Sure,
you can just @ them on Twitter, but that's pretty lazy and impersonal and not
nearly as effective for building a lasting connection.
When doing
outreach, you want to let them know that:
They've earned a spot on your list because they've got
a great site, tool, or app. Thank them for such a useful resource.
You're in the
process of promoting the list
If they're working on anything else—a new tool, app,
blog post—let you know and you'll be happy to help spread the word. With best
of lists, I'm of the mind that "the more the merrier" since the more
sources you include, the more potential relationships there are. Also, larger
lists tend to perform better when it comes to sharing, syndication, and
outreach beyond the folks on the list.
However, if you're doing targeted influencer nurturing,
you don't need to cast as wide a net and you can reduce the scope of your list
to a few select sources.
Expert Guides
Not only can expert guides help you position yourself
or your brand as an authority on a specific topic, they can serve as great
tools to help you connect with others in your niche. An authoritative guide is
generally a longer-form, information rich article on a specific subject that is
expertly-researched and written. Examples include this SEO guide and these
snowsports articles. When it comes to making connections with your content,
there are a few different approaches you can take like including:
Expert quotes: Work
in expert quotes within the guide to help raise the authority of your content.
You can either target specific experts you want to connect with, or you can use
a resource like HARO or SourceBottle to find quality experts if you're
time-constrained. This is somewhat similar to the group interview approach, but
more exclusive since you'd only include a handful of experts, which feels like
more of a privilege. If you value higher education relationships, reach out to
professors or university researchers for quotes.
Resource lists: The
approach here is akin to the "best of" list and you want to
incorporate a list of links to quality resources in your expert article that
either support your thesis or offer further information, like this and this.
Product mentions: An
offshoot of the expert guide is a consumer-oriented, buyer's guide that
features in-depth product reviews, or specific brand mentions. Recommending
brands and individual products can help open the door for you to establish
connections with the in-house PR or marketing teams of product manufacturers.
Roundups
Content roundups are curated lists of great articles
or posts from your industry or a specific niche. Like each of the content types
covered in this post, the common thread is celebrating others, their work,
their efforts, and not asking for anything in return.
With roundups, you have the opportunity to celebrate
and promote others on a pretty regular basis, since roundups are typically
recaps published on a weekly or even monthly schedule. Examples include this
one from Ahrefs and this one from Bruce Clay Inc. As for uncovering or
prospecting for content to seed your roundup, you can leverage a range of
reader tools or content curation tools to find fresh content each week.
Roundups are also a great way to help sustain and
nurture any existing relationships, since you can leverage them to feature
content from anyone you've already worked with in the past (e.g., group
interview panelists, influencers, allies, etc.).
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