Building strong relationships and industry experts is a fantastic way to generate leads and help to generate positive word of mouth too – a good business development agency will have all the tools to help generate these important leads but it’s also down to business owners and their teams to understand the process in order to find the most benefit. These steps will help with what’s as influencer marketing, by reaching those key individuals who influence your potential customers buying decisions.
Step 1 – Understand who the key players are
In order to target the correct influencers, it’s important to know who’s the most involved – check with speakers at industry events, article contributors to the largest journals and blogs, or particularly well-known authors or content creators. Whilst at first it may not be easy to generate meaningful conversation with these influencers, following the next steps may help to open channels and start a process of regular dialogue.
Step 2 – Research, research, research
After identifying the key players, now is the time to do as much research as possible – research who they are, what they do, and what they specialize in. Research the companies that they currently work for or have done in the past, and research their clients and customers too – not only will this help to reveal whether they’re the correct influencers to be followed, but also help to create a shortlist and create a list of what should be considered when contacting them.
Step 3 – Engage, and be relevant
You’ve now created your influencer shortlist and have double checked the relevancy, and so the next step is to engage with them – and this is where relevance is important. These industry influencers will receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of emails a day, all with the same subjects and structures and can be hard to differentiate – and this is where the research will come in handy, by doing some due diligence, and identifying unique interests or niches that others haven’t before it really opens the door where other individuals trying to outreach may be missing, and moves the outreach away from something that’s lost in the noise and more to something that’s interesting and new.
Step 4 – Repeat as needed
Once a formula for maximizing influencer outreach potential has been discovered and results have been obtained, it’s time to repeat the process to as many big names in any operating space as needed. Whilst this does mean a large amount of work and preparation, if the results come through then it gives a much bigger platform to work from and leads to fantastic opportunities in business development too.
