Content Marketing Playbook: Reflections on Influencer Marketing
If you are a low spending Adwords advertiser, chances are you just lost access to one of your main keyword research tools. Yes, the Google that giveth also taketh away, and keyword planner is now going to be largely useless if you aren’t committing to a big budget. While this is undoubtedly going to hurt many small businesses, there’s no reason to fret, because I’m here to say there is another way to get great content ideas. Social influence.
Now, this is hardly going to be the first time someone has mentioned mining social media for the purposes of coming up with a keyword list; however, it might be the first time someone has suggested an entirely new way of developing out a content plan based on the the identification of buyer personas, determining the key influencers to those personas, and measuring which content concepts resulted in the most significant engagement. Adapting such an approach not only provides you with something relevant to write about, but has the added benefit of being inherently more sharable directly to those influencers, and by extension, has a greater capacity of resulting in an intended commercial action than blindly using a broken PPC keyword planning tool from a search monopoly that doesn’t care much about its customers. To best explain how to do this, I’m going to pick on one of my favorite iPhone apps: French Girls.
With any product, we must determine who the core market is; from my own analysis, I can see two: casual + professional artists AND narcissists. Note: I use the term narcissist lovingly as this is the category I’d put myself under for using the app — I cannot and will likely never be able to draw a straight line to save my life. We care about getting the best buyer personas though, so as a subsection of narcissists are those that commission artists and then get prints made from the work. Hey, wait a minute, that’s me! Every few months I find myself getting a cute drawing put on canvas and parading it around the house.
Since I am able to use myself as a possible buyer, it isn’t sufficient to simply look at my tag cloud or consume what I tweet about; we need to see who influences me on matters related to art/print and then dissect those accounts to see when I like certain posts, as a measure of influence.
According to Tweepi and some other free Twitter analysis tools, I can see that my three main influencers on art/prints are Kris Jones, William Sears, and Dennis Goedegebuure. Digging into on what I liked the most, it was always some sort of summary of who the artist is, a description of who is in the picture, and then an image itself. Now that we have an understanding on both who my influencers are on the subject what the general topics are, we’re ready to expand into a broader content list and build a campaign around it.
Interestingly, based on the data of like distribution for imagery on the posts that I also liked from these three gentlemen above, the biggest content opportunity in this particular case seems to be an old trick sold as new: egobait. What this means is looking at the sum total of posts related to art/print, the ones I tended to identify the most with were those with an ego component to them, whether something referenced me or referenced the influencer that my ego projected upon. Knowing that, we can devise a short content campaign series without ever having to consult any other keyword tools.
Idea 1: Top commissioned artists (by week) — a round-up post series that covers what kind of art can be paid for, tagging each of the artists’ social profiles on Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram as well as who supplied the original photo. These type of ego posts have wide appeal, and since each week would deliver fresh and original imagery, the concept never tires. The best part is because artists and buyers are likely to share work they are featured in, the possibility of something like this getting in front of the buyer persona is much higher — high intent converting content for the win!
Idea 2: Up-and-coming non-commissioned art of the week. Similar to the first idea, this idea would serve to make use of the sharability of the post by playing to egos, but this idea has a dual purpose since it would serve the other possible persona user for the site, playing to the artist’s desire to impress other artists. By sourcing this based on internal like metrics, the idea has baked in viral component that helps to additionally highlight that it isn’t just the paid work that is of a very high quality, but some of the free drawings result in a fantastic outcome — this becomes key again to the narcissist persona that then wants to see if he/she can possibly get featured for a selfie, ultimately resulting in higher engagement, more commissions, and some % increase of prints.
Those two ongoing content concepts were made possible just from understanding what social influence was having the biggest impact on me as the buyer persona — imagine an entire content campaign composed of such evergreen ideas, sourced entirely from this influencer data…content that drives sales? You’d never miss the Adwords keyword planner ever again.
This post originally appeared on LSEO.
About the Contributing Author:
Joe Sinkwitz is co-founder and CEO of Intellifluence, which is a leading influencer marketing platform for businesses without big budgets. Intellifluence allows you to quickly and easily discover the right influencers for you, interact with them, recruit new influencers not in the network with custom landing pages, and optimize your campaigns over time with machine learning to maximize your ROI.
