4 Influencer Marketing Tips For Success

What you need to do to suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gate the two-way street of influ­ence mar­ket­ing.

Chad Koskie By Chad Koskie from LeadMD. Join the discussion » 0 comments

Lots of peo­ple have built their own per­son­al media empires with hun­dreds of thou­sands of fol­low­ers that they share and inter­act with dai­ly. Sounds easy right? Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s not. You can’t just be fun­ny and charm­ing. You have to pro­vide some­thing crit­i­cal to your audi­ence: val­ue. Those who do this best, who are able to sat­is­fy thou­sands upon thou­sands of peo­ple on a dai­ly basis, have mas­tered the art of build­ing trust, estab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion and pro­vid­ing val­ue. They are called influ­encers, and mar­ket­ing to them and with them has become big busi­ness.


A suc­cess­ful mar­keter will always align them­selves with influ­encers who’ve built their fol­low­ing by pro­vid­ing val­ue. Once aligned, you can share your influencer’s val­ue with your own fol­low­ing. But keep in mind, not all influ­ence is built equal­ly.

Here are four keys to con­nect­ing with influ­encers and launch­ing suc­cess­ful cam­paigns.

1. Popular vs. Influencer

For exam­ple, Kim Kar­dashi­an has more than 33 mil­lion Twit­ter fol­low­ers. Com­pa­nies pay her mil­lions of dol­lars to send a sin­gle tweet with a pic­ture of her wear­ing their prod­uct.

But in the realm of influ­encer mar­ket­ing, she is paid to pro­mote brands. Because of her pop­u­lar­i­ty, after Kar­dashi­an tweets a pic­ture of her­self wear­ing your sun­glass­es they will like­ly sell out. That’s because peo­ple want to be like her, and own the things she owns. It’s more about an image than pro­vid­ing any type of val­ue.

On the flip side, there are influ­encers who are engaged in a unique style of brand build­ing that savvy mar­keters can tap into. Here, you see peo­ple who have a large fol­low­ing, but the fol­low­ing is based on trust more than image.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, this type of influ­encer uses cred­i­bil­i­ty as a cur­ren­cy. They have cred­i­bil­i­ty on a top­ic or niche and have estab­lished them­selves as an expert through blog­ging, videos, TV, or have writ­ten a book.

Always remem­ber that true influ­encers aren’t much into self-pro­mot­ing; they exist to pro­vide val­ue to their audi­ence, and by doing so build some­thing crit­i­cal: trust.

2. It’s A Partnership, Not A Request Line

It’s impor­tant that you keep a gen­uine nature when it comes to con­tact­ing influ­encers to advance strate­gic goals.

Above all, don’t be self-serv­ing. Be sure that your approach focus­es on also bring­ing val­ue to the table. Sure, you may not have the fol­low­er count that they do, but always think of ways you can rec­i­p­ro­cate. Make sure that the pri­ma­ry rea­son you are reach­ing out is because you believe in what they are doing, and tru­ly feel that you can help them in pro­vid­ing val­ue. Monsters of Funnel

For exam­ple, my com­pa­ny is work­ing with six of the top influ­encers in the con­tent mar­ket­ing are­na for a cam­paign called Mon­sters of Fun­nel. These are peo­ple who have built ster­ling rep­u­ta­tions for pub­lish­ing good con­tent that pro­vides tons of val­ue.

While our com­pa­ny doesn’t have the mas­sive fol­low­ing of these six experts, we have the abil­i­ty to cre­ate and pro­mote this cam­paign. That’s how we’re rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing.

Nobody has said, “Hey, what’s our ROI? What will we get from this? How much lead cap­ture can we gen­er­ate?” All we asked for was an inter­view, then took care of the rest because we knew their exper­tise would pro­vide our fol­low­ing and theirs immense val­ue.

The end result is the col­lect­ed thoughts of these six lead­ers in con­tent mar­ket­ing com­piled in an eas­i­ly digestible and fun eBook that peo­ple will get mas­sive val­ue from.

If you’re cre­at­ing and shar­ing con­tent that helps peo­ple, you’ll sel­dom lose. It’s impos­si­ble to cre­ate extreme­ly valu­able con­tent and nev­er gain fol­low­ers or get new leads. The two always go hand-in-hand.

Focus on cre­at­ing and deliv­er­ing killer and the rest will come. Dream­ing about all the fol­low­ers you’ll gain by work­ing with an influ­encer is an easy trap to fall into. Avoid this at all costs. Focus on cre­at­ing val­ue.

3. Ways To Find Influencers

There are sev­er­al ways to find influ­encers. You can use one a tools designed to locate indus­try influ­encers, like Insight­pool or Linkdex’s Enti­ty Search. Or you can start with a sim­ple Google search and do some research.

Bot­tom line: you need to align your­self with an influ­encer with a sub­stan­tial fol­low­ing of peo­ple who trust that influ­encer’s sug­ges­tions. You will want to select influ­encers who build on your own mes­sag­ing and fill in the holes of what you don’t spe­cial­ize in. This will give your fol­low­ing a well-round­ed view of next steps after the use your prod­uct or ser­vice

Remem­ber, find­ing influ­encers isn’t just about what they can do for you.

It’s about what val­ue they bring to your fol­low­ing and what val­ue you can you add to theirs. As with any rela­tion­ship, it takes time and con­sis­ten­cy to build. Be patient.

4. Take The Right Approach

There’s plen­ty of advice out there about how to work with influ­encers and how you can get their atten­tion, like send­ing free stuff and call­ing them out on social media.

While this can work, you should instead place an empha­sis on true con­nec­tions. Send them an email, sched­ule time with them at an indus­try event, or refer them busi­ness.

Start by shar­ing their con­tent, and include them in your shar­ing. Always think in terms of build­ing a true part­ner­ship.

Some peo­ple will say, “I’ve tweet­ed this influ­encer sev­er­al times and they nev­er rec­i­p­ro­cate! Now what?” Again, this isn’t the best approach, nor is influ­ence mar­ket­ing a num­bers game. You have to come from a place of build­ing val­ue and go from there. You’ll see the most sig­nif­i­cant results by build­ing val­ue at the fore­front.

Bottom Line: You Have to Build

Influ­ence mar­ket­ing is all about build­ing val­ue, trust, and rela­tion­ships. If you keep these val­ues at the fore­front of your efforts, you will have no prob­lem con­nect­ing with influ­encers and launch­ing suc­cess­ful influ­ence cam­paigns.

Your influ­encer cam­paigns will do much more than just boost your mar­ket­ing efforts. They will actu­al­ly make a dif­fer­ence in the lives of peo­ple. And what’s cool­er than that?


You can learn more about suc­cess­ful influ­encer mar­ket­ing in our ebook, Influ­ence Now.

Chad Koskie

Written by Chad Koskie

Content Marketing Manager, LeadMD

Chad Koskie is content marketing manager at LeadMD. Chad has several years of experience in the realm of content marketing, and enjoys putting his background in journalism to use in crafting unique stories for brands. More of Chad's expertise can be found on LeadMD's blog.

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