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Why An Influencer Marketing Plan?

Being successful for our apps and brands means that we need to maximize the return on each hour that we spend. One of the best ways to do that is to leverage the networks of those people who are already trusted in a certain area. I’ve also posted some other helpful tips on influencer outreach.

92% of people trust recommendations from people over brand content. A trusted name speaking for you on the internet is worth a pack of blog posts and building a network of influencers is time well spent.

There are a number of tools coming online which can help with influencer outreach. In this post I am going to take one of the newest for a test drive.

ContentMarketer.io from Colin Mathews and Sujan Patel is a contact collection tool and an outreach campaign builder all in one. You can use it to collect the names of people that you want to promote your app/blog/content to and then use prebuilt email templates (write your own emails) to let them know about your latest masterpiece. If you spend any amount of time on influencer outreach I think this app can save you some time. The basic plan starts at $49/mo.

Building an Influencer Contact List

Before ContentMarketer.io was released I found this blog post featuring 55 SEO experts discussing some of their favorite link building tools. I manually built a list of influencers from the page by copying and pasting the names of each expert listed into a spreadsheet. Then I spent some time adding twitter handles and email addresses when I could find them.

Compare that to the list that ContentMarketer.io auto created for me by entering in the URL and letting the app do its thing. The application came back with 62 records. I had to do a little bit of manual cleaning up on the list. For some reason it added the email address of the author of the post to each of the records which were created for the list. Removing those took about 3 minutes. I exported the file to CSV and then I can import it into any CRM that I want.

Total time saved: 2 hours of cut and paste work. Pretty awesome.

Creating an Influencer Email Campaign

Now I want to take that influencer list and use it to test the effectiveness of  ContentMarketer.io’s outreach campaigns. Right off the bat I will say that we are giving ContentMarketer.io a tough challenge here because getting a good email response rate on this campaign is going to be tough.

These contacts are all in the business of influencer outreach themselves and they get an inbox full of these types of emails every day. The real test here will be to see if Sujan Patel, included in the list and one of the creators of the app, gets the email and responds to it. Just to make things extra hard I am going to send the email campaign out on a Friday afternoon.

The steps to creating the campaign were easy to follow.

Once I have a list, or a “project” in the apps parlance, I can then start an outreach campaign with a single click.

Building your influencer contact list

Next I choose a template for the email that I want to send to all of these people, I can choose a default template and then edit it, or I could write my own entirely new email. In the ContentMarketer.io tutorial they recommend using a prebuilt template because as Sujan Patel puts it, “I’ve tested them 1000’s of times.”

Starting an influencer marketing campaign

There are a few templates to choose from for different types of email campaigns. I chose the template most related to sending out a notice about a piece of content, “Recent Post”. The template defaults to a subject line which is unusable, “Recent Post”. Don’t use this as the subject of your email or you really will be wasting your time.

Email subject lines should be short but not that short. 6-10 words is ideal. Your goal is to make the recipient NEED to open the email. I’m going with, “The Smartest Keyword Research Tool You Haven’t Tried”.

I kept most of the default copy in the body of the email so that I didn’t spend any time on that. Normally writing out an email like this and testing different variations of it would take a ton of time. We are hopefully leveraging the experience of the application’s creators here and trusting that these templates are proven to work.

The application can also place some dynamic content into the email template like the first name of the recipient, further customizing the email and saving us more time over having to write a bunch of custom emails or doing a mail merge or some obscene thing like that.

OK, let’s send this baby out and see what kind of response we get.

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Total time saved: 4 hours of email writing and sending.

Influencer Marketing Strategy Part 1: Wrap-up

So far this app has saved us lots of time over a manual cut and paste list building process plus creating a custom email and sending it out to all 56 people on the list.

One feature I hope they add is the option to export my newly created list directly into my relationship management software.

In the next and final post in this 2 part series I will show you the results of this outreach campaign and we can see how much value we are getting from the app.

Have you used ContentMarketer.io yet? Let us know about it in the comments!