Influencer Marketing: How to Work With Influential People

Do you reach out to influencers?

Want to create good relationships to increase your visibility and get more customers?

To learn how to work with influencers, I interview Doug Karr.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview conversion expert Doug Karr, the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies and founder of the Marketing Technology blog. Doug also co-hosts the Edge of the Web podcast.

Doug will explore influencer marketing and how to work with prominent people.

You'll discover how to identify and reach out to influencers, as well as develop relationships and campaigns that lead to sales.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher. How to subscribe/review on iPhone.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Influencer Marketing
How Doug became interested in influencer marketing

After Doug got out of the Navy in 1992, he started a newspaper and did direct and database marketing. Then about 12 years ago, he started a blog.

From a database marketing standpoint, Doug shares he's always been intrigued by the pockets or the gaps, and not the averages. In the direct mail days, the motto was "go after a certain age group, gender and neighborhood, and get 100% saturation." Doug found, over time, it was the smaller pockets of people who had higher conversion rates.

This is true in online marketing as well. People who do SEO optimize for huge keywords with massive search volumes. Maybe they rank, but they don't get any results (meaning business) out of it.

Influencer marketing is the same, in that people go after influencers. They spend a lot of money without seeing results, because they make significant errors as they select and research influencers.

Doug says he tells people who are transitioning from traditional to online media that he doesn't think a lot has changed. As marketers, it's all about building trust and satisfying clients.

Blogging and social media are great for that, because customers can now talk to people at different companies and get insight into their business through these channels. You build relationships virtually, then get those people to convert.

Listen to the show to hear what opportunities came to Doug from blogging.

How Doug defines influencer marketing

Doug believes influencers are people within our industry who already have established trust with an audience.

Let's say someone has an amazing audience you want to reach. The best way to get to that person's audience is to create an influencer marketing campaign and work with that influencer to help you promote your products and services.

The keys are audience (find an influencer whose audience matches what you need) and reach. Determine if the influencer's reach is wide enough to make your campaign sensible from a time and money standpoint.

Listen to the show to hear examples of good influencers to reach out to in the marketing and social media space.

The differences among reach, popularity and influence

Doug says half of the time, a company fails because they focus on reach and popularity, but not necessarily on influence.

Influence is not about retweets or shares. It's about conversions. If someone makes a purchase based on a person's advice, that person is an influencer.

When Doug works with an influencer, he looks at that person's target audience to see whether he or she has captivated their trust and made sales to them. One of the telltale signs that influencers are doing well is they've had the same sponsor on their site for 3 years; they don't switch them out every month.

Doug also cautions that before entering into a relationshi...