Content marketing can serve many possible purposes and for some of those involving influencers can prove beneficial. B2B content marketing consultant Michele Linn put up a video and some links about the role of influencers in a content marketing strategy.
In the video Lattice Engines’ Amanda Maksymiw, IBM’s Leslie Reiser and SAS’s Waynette Tubbs make the case for involving influencers in your content marketing strategy.
While Amanda Maksymiw advices everyone to involve the more traditional groups of influencers, as we know them (bloggers, authors, etc.), both Leslie and Waynette look more at the involvement of their corporate ecosystem such as customers, business partners, IT analysts and more.
Obviously it all depends on your goals and the needs of target audiences. In the case of SAS, for instance, loyalty and retention among core users are essential.
Remember that there is a huge untapped potential of ‘influencers’ that’s closer than you might think such as your customers and employees, again depending on your goals and the needs and goals of target groups. Of course you also need to take the preferences and drivers for participating influencers, whatever their role is, into account.
Amanda and Waynette provide some tips on how to involve influencers in your content marketing strategy, each from their own background. While Amanda looks mainly at how influencers can be used to spread content (reach), Waynette focuses more on the mix of content marketing and other marketing efforts such as user events, at customer-generated content and at community marketing, which seems like a more integrated approach.
You can watch the video below. More on the Content Marketing Institute website.
Also read: “Getting started with content marketing: Michele Linn’s 7-step plan“.
