How Influence Marketing Can Benefit Small Business

By Brett Henley

It’s no secret that small businesses must often stretch their limited resources to fund their marketing efforts. As a result, small businesses must decide which tactics are going to give them the best bang for their buck.

Although no business wants to waste money on scattershot strategies, it’s even more imperative for small-to-medium businesses who have less to spend. For small businesses that are typically stretching limited resources across multiple channels, you need smart measurement that empowers you to make critical business decisions with confidence. And, you need to select high-value tactics that will best amplify your marketing strategy.

Influence marketing is a targeted approach that can help small businesses reach more people with less money and effort. Let’s take a closer look at how influence marketing can benefit small business.

Amplify Your Marketing with Targeted Influencer Outreach

To put it simply, effective influence marketing can help you reach a larger network by engaging with people who have authority on a given topic and a captive audience that listens to what they have to say.

When you target relevant influencers in your market, your outreach efforts will amplify components of your marketing plan – including content marketing, social media, PR, advertising and more. As a result, you’ll marketing efforts will go farther and help you achieve greater results with your budget.

Here are some of the ways that influence marketing can help you achieve amplify your efforts (and help you save time and money in the process):

• Building a targeted PR distribution list of key influencers in media and releveant publications as opposed to paying costly fees to distribute press releases out on the wire.
• Save time by only pitching relevant influencers instead of reaching out to hundreds of people and publications that are not a match for your business.
• Determine higher ROI ad placements by discovering influential publishers based on topical relevance to your business.
• Stop guessing – gain deeper contextual insight into the topics that are impacting your market and build your content marketing strategy around them.
• Stop devoting limited time and resources to measuring top-level metrics like clicks, visits and pageviews that don’t provide true evidence of how your message is spreading, and whether it is increasing brand recogntion.
• Identify knowledgeable and credible influencers that may already be interested in your products and services.
• Learn to speak your audience’s language by listening to influencers who are already engaging key segments of your market.

An effective influencer outreach strategy comes down to context. Evidence of how conversations in your market become influential is the exact kind of context you’ll need to filter out social noise and source influencers that are driving action in your market.

Building your strategy around this measurable evidence of impact, not just audience size or social mentions, will help you paint a more accurate picture of how an influencer relationship could impact your small business.

Have you used influence marketing with your small business? How has it worked for you?

Image credit: winsordi