How to Develop a Topical Influence Marketing Strategy

June 28, 2012

In a recent post, Personal vs. Contextual Influence: What’s the Difference?, we discussed how to differentiate between the two primary ways of measuring digital influence, and why the difference matters to agencies and brands looking to build effective influencer marketing strategies.

While personal influence typically focuses on social networks to measure metrics such as number of followers/fans, frequency of mentions and follower ratio, contextual influence is all about the content.

This is where topical influence comes into play.

Measuring influence around a specific topic allows you to identify who is shaping the topics and conversations in your market, and most importantly, how is their opinion on these topics driving action.

Who are Topical Influencers?

Topical influencers are the often talked about “thought leaders” in your market and industry.

If you’re looking for deeper evidence of how conversations become influential, then topical influencers are the people you want at the core of your influence marketing strategy. These are the people who are impacting the conversations in your market and industry. In other words, they’re driving action, not just social spam and more noise.

By capturing subsets of rich, contextual data, you’ll build your strategy around measurable evidence of impact, not mentions of an influencer across social channels or the size of a potential influencer’s audience, neither of which gives you an accurate picture of how an influencer might impact your brand.

Even better, focusing on topical influencers will allow you to align your content marketing and social media strategies with ongoing influencer outreach – amplifying both aspects of your marketing plan.

How to Develop a Topical Influence Marketing Strategy

So you’ve set the standard for focusing your energy on measuring topical influence. Now comes the most important question:

How do you use this data to build an actual strategy for outreach?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Determine your core list of topics that will drive your content marketing strategy, namely a strategy that delivers quality, relevant content on a consistent basis.
Segment your engagement list based on these topics. The influencers you reach out to should be closely aligned with the core topics that you’ve determined are of the highest priority to your business.
Build an editorial calendar with monthly topics that are also aligned with these core topics, then focus your outreach efforts month-over-month on the influencers that are most relevant to a specific topical focus. Keep the calendar agile so that you can track and adjust topical focus according to market or industry shifts.
Build a PR distribution list that focuses on key publications in your market that are publishing content on the same or similar topics that formulate your editorial strategy. The key here is to be start small and selective with only the publications that are highly relevant to your topical focus.
Personalize your engagement campaigns to each influencers audience and interests. Make the connection on level ground by using your content as the initial handshake.
Determine where the influence gaps have the heaviest impact on your brand. Based on topical insights, you’re analyzing who should be talking about your brand – but are not. If you’re not driving the conversations around highly relevant subject matter, then who is?
Track where and how your content is shared across social and traditional media channels. Is it eliciting more mentions and shares across major social networks but not much traction through industry publications? The insights you gain from tracking the movement of your content should inform refinement of your editorial strategy .

What are your key benchmarks for developing a topical influence marketing strategy? Please share your insights and thoughts in the comments below.

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