Page 95 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

businesses) and which of those leaders would be able to get true value from their
content and service. This is a critical step. Most influencers are deluged with
spammy requests for their help, so doing careful research up front gives you the
best shot at success.

2. Forge relationships. Influencers may hold the keys to the audience kingdom,
but simply making a cold pitch doesn’t work. Groove embarked on a plan to use
the social networks to connect with them and move beyond the relational weak
link. Their plan included tweets, blog comments, blog post shares, and emails.
Here are other ways to engage with influencers:

Ask for a quote you’ll use in your article.
Re-tweet them consistently.
Provide them with a recommendation on LinkedIn.
Interview them for a video or podcast.
Ask them for feedback on an idea.
Link to something they wrote about (they will generally see this
“pingback”).

3. The Ask (part 1). By this time, the people from Groove were on the radar of
their target influencers and it was time to make a move. But they didn’t ask for a
favor. They asked for help—a subtle yet important difference. Most people have
a hard time saying “no” to an honest request for help. This plea included a link
to their site, a request for feedback, and emphasis on potential mutual benefits.
Using this technique, Groove earned an 83 percent positive response rate from
the influencers. “Help” is a more benign ask, and more importantly, it helped
Groove start real back-and-forth conversations with industry experts.

4. The Ask (part 2). Now that the company was ready to launch their blog, they
needed a push from their new influencer friends. Since this group had been
involved in providing feedback to the Groove team, they had a built-in stake in
the company’s success. Groove sent these new advocates a link to the first blog
post with a request for help promoting it.

5. Results! Not only did most influencers promote the post, but almost all of
them also commented on the new blog. This level of response provided proof to
new visitors that the blog (and company) had traction. In 24 hours Groove had
acquired 1,000 blog subscribers, and by following up with consistent, high-
quality content, they attracted more than 5,000 subscribers and 535 trial sign-ups