How to Use Influencer Data for Content Marketing

By Brett Henley

You need to tackle the same content marketing challenge every brand faces – creating content that leads the conversation, specifically through curating and sharing relevant, value-driven content (not just creating content for the sake of creating).

This is where influence and content marketing can work beautifully together. By using the insights gained from influencer data, you can:

• Discover topics that resonate most with your target market by measuring how your content spreads on the Web, instead of casting a wide and potentially irrelevant (and costly) net
• Identify publications and bloggers that are most influential on a given topic, and refine your content strategy; and
• Measure your influence on a given topic by determining the “Share of Influence” of your brand, team members and blog.

There are three specific ways that you can integrate influence measurement with content marketing across your brand’s owned media channels to amplify your efforts and improve ROI.

Amplifying Owned Media with Influencer Data

With owned media, you have an opportunity to engage directly with customers and consumers on channels that you as a brand control the voice, the experience, etc. By developing a framework for delivering highly relevant and valuable content (consistently), you’re building a direct extension of the brand’s voice that can be one of your greatest business assets, bar none.

So how can you use the insights gained from influence measurement to amplify content across owned media channels?

Curate Content On Brand Channels

Curating content – in this context – is about sharing useful and relevant content across brand channels and becoming a trusted resource for news and information on relevant topics to your industry/market.

Tip – Prioritize sourcing content written by and/or about influencers in your topics and distribute via social media (be a patron for your influencers). This will increase the relevancy and quality of the content you source, improving your chances to elicit action.

Guest Content on Influencer and Brand Channels

Guest posting is a fantastic way to make a connection with influencers and their audience, increase the credibility and quality of your content, and potentially amplify your brand’s story across influencer channels.

A guest posting relationship should extend to both brand and influencer’s domains if possible – a solid strategy for establishing thought leadership and leveraging platforms for brand and influencer.

Tip – Work with influencers to create a strategy for content creation and cross promotion. This will help establish trust with the influencer, but more importantly it can lead to long term investment in the brand.

Extend Your Content Core

Broaden your reach by developing content that extends your core content strategy. This entails generating additional topics for your influencer outreach strategy and identifying relevant influencers and conversations in these new topics.

The end game is to discover new influencers, new customers and new opportunities by broadening the reach of your content, but not in a way that dilutes the core strategy.

Tip – Analyze your brand’s share of influence on topics outside of your obvious core. By looking at real-time and historical influencer data, you can examine whether your content marketing efforts have impacted your audience, and determine where the gaps in your content and outreach strategies are.

Why Influence and Content Marketing Should Work Together

It’s not a matter of whether you can or should integrate influencer data into your content marketing strategy – it’s whether you can afford not to.

“Doing” content marketing is not enough: To earn the trust and permission of the prospects in your market, you’ll need to dig beyond the noise for insights into the type of content that drives more than traffic and “eyeballs,” and achieves specific, measurable results.

Influence measurement can provide those exact contextual insights you’ll need to identify topics that are moving the needle, and to create content that puts your brand right in the middle of the conversation.

Image credit: Christopher S. Penn