Influencer marketing, in its most basic sense, is about using your associations with niche experts, thought leaders, and “influential” users to sway the buying decisions of your target audience.
Influencer marketing helps brands build trust, credibility, authority, and engagement. If done well, it can generate solid leads and even sales. Typically, influencers create sponsored reviews, host giveaways, or promote branded offers to their followers.
All of these tactics help brands meet their sales goals and produce a concrete ROI from influencer marketing.
While most brands focus on social selling through influencers (as explained above), few are able to draw long-term benefits from it. The cash registers keep ringing only as long as the influencer-led campaigns last.
But, if brands are able to interweave influencer marketing with their core content marketing, they can keep driving traffic to their websites and ecommerce stores. And since influencer-led traffic has a high conversion intent and potential, you can extract serious business from it.
But how?
Influencers can:
- Contribute authoritative content to your blog.
- Post insightful comments/replies on your posts.
- Provide quotes and expert opinions to enrich your content.
But not all influencers have the requisite skills, intent, or potential to take on the additional role. That’s why you need tools to help you search for ace content creators, track their content, analyze their content quality, and collaborate with them on your content marketing campaigns.
When you put your influencer marketing and content marketing on autopilot, you save a lot of time, effort, and marketing dollars.
Sounds good, right?
Then, let’s take a look at five of the best influencer marketing tools that can help you get the most out of your influencer marketing campaigns.
5 Tools for Influencer-Driven Content Marketing
There are many strategies for content marketing, but not all work well with the inclusion of influencers.
For instance, influencers may not have the inclination or time to produce original research for case studies or whitepapers. But many influencers do blog, which has enough scope for diversification and experimentation.
To help you integrate influencer marketing into your blogging, here are some tools you can use:
1. Serpstat: Identify Content Topics
Keyword research is pivotal to content marketing. To find topics that attract good search volumes organically, you can use a keyword research tool like Serpstat. Among other things, the tool digs into the competition for each keyword on your radar.
Image via Serpstat
If you leverage advertising to grow your visibility and sales, you will find the CPC (cost-per-click) data very useful.
What else?
You can check out how well your competitors are ranking for your shortlisted keywords. If the competition is stiff, you can target the related keywords provided by the tool.
At $55 monthly, Serpstat’s Lite plan offers 20+ tools for SEO and competitor research. Plus, 24×7 chat support and tool updates every two weeks.
2. BuzzSumo: Find Content-Producing Influencers
Once you identify the topics you want your influencers to write about, it’s time to find content-producing influencers.
With BuzzSumo, you can find influencers who have their own blogs with established readerships. These influencers can put your brand in front of their followers and blog subscribers.
If you have your heart set on creating videos or podcasts, you can use BuzzSumo’s advanced filters to access influencers who have expertise in these content formats. Moreover, you can filter influencers by platform, niche, engagement numbers, and more.
Image via BuzzSumo
Want a pro tip?
Check out top blogging platforms like WordPress and Wix to discover respected authors. If you can hire one of these bloggers, you’ll gain extra traffic and visibility from these sites. Plus, you can highlight your author’s credentials to enhance your brand’s authority.
3. Traackr: Identify Influencers with Real “Influence”
While vetting influencers for collaboration, don’t be swayed by vanity metrics like follower counts. Rather, opt for influencers who have deeply engaged and responsive followers.
Use tools like Traackr to analyze influencer audience quality and engagement rates. The data-driven tool uses Machine Learning to analyze influencer-follower interactions. If your target influencers are inconsistent or uninspiring in their communication, the tool will indicate that by giving them a low score.
Using the tool insights, you can easily compare influencers on your shortlist and select the ones with real authority and engagement.
Image via Traackr
4. TEXToptimizer: Brainstorm Questions for Expert Round-Ups
Expert round-ups get steady traffic because people primarily browse the web to seek reviews and gather information.
If you need insightful and engaging questions to include in your influencer-based expert round-ups, you can use TEXToptimizer’s idea finder. With your results, you will see a visual depiction of each query’s search volume and publication sites.
Image via TEXToptimizer
Since TEXToptimizer uses semantic analysis to generate reports, you can rest assured of their reliability. Still, if you want to cross-check the results, you can use a tool like AnswerThePublic. It not only shows related search queries but also the precise language searchers are using to type queries.
5. SmarterHQ: Personalize the Experiences of Your Influencer-Led Visitors
Once your influencers drive traffic to your blog, you can’t get complacent and let those one-time visitors leave without converting. Retarget them on the social platforms they visit with enticing offers, upsells, and custom CTAs. Who can resist such dedicated efforts?
SmarterHQ lets you create an omnichannel personalized experience for your visitors and customers. It collects data from multiple devices and touchpoints, using which it creates custom brand journeys for each target.
Say you use influencer-driven content to sell your webinars or whitepapers. SmarterHQ studies the user actions of each visitor, combines insights collected from 25+ marketing channels, and prepares adaptive content to convert them.
Ready to Power Your Content Marketing with Influencer Marketing?
When you unleash the combined power of influencer marketing and blogging, you get multiple benefits. Influencers enrich your content with their intuitive style. They drive high-potential subscribers to your blog, which can eventually lead to increased leads and sales.
The tools in this post will take the hassle out of influencer discovery and content ideation. Plus, they will help you extract ROI from your marketing efforts and justify your marketing expenditure.
Do you need more tools and tips for digital marketing? Let me know in the comments below. I’ll be happy to assist you.