4howMany marketing executives are pinning their hope on influencers, wide-reaching bloggers with a high number of followers, as they expect theses influential bloggers to spread their messages convincingly with authenticity.

A closer look at the different aspects of influencer marketing shows quickly why such a path towards the target groups is more successful than the more common, old-fashioned advertising promises, where the slogan “the customer is king” is nothing else than a good sounding statement.

Content- and influencer marketing practically implements the principle, as companies incorporate the needs of their customers in the product development and commercialization by entering into a dialogue with the target groups.

Influencer marketing in particular is for all intents and purposes a hope for the marketing environment, as an influencer can be used as a brand ambassador and translator for the marketing message to the masses. Influencers usually reach their followers and potential customers better with their unique and specific linguistic style than the companies themselves. Their articles seem more authentic and manage to pick up the target groups more quickly than, for example, a more complex produced commercial with a celebrity testimonial.

The selection and support are the two main aspects to consider when searching for influencers. Basically, influencers are highly popular people with a positive reputation in the social media. On the Internet, especially bloggers and individuals with a lot of relevant content on social networking sites have become opinion leaders. But the main criterion that differentiates a blogger from an influencer is the credibility they have earned with informative and above all independent contributions.

Just because of their credibility they get a huge number of followers and the potential for virality in social media. For companies ‘influencer marketing’ can therefore be a new channel to reach the target groups, since appropriate influencers can act as a facilitator and present brand messages or product descriptions target group-oriented in the spot-on language.

When selecting influencers, it’s advisable to get some help from useful tools, such as e.g. the search engine Traackr, LittleBird, BuzzSumo, Keyhole, or Influma, which can help you in finding the most shared articles in social media, identify wide-reaching bloggers, or prove opportunities to build blogger relations.

As with many other search engines, you simply have to type in a desired keyword to get a result that ranks the items according to their popularity, such as the more ‘likes’, retweets or favorites, a contribution receives in the social media, the higher it appears in the result list. Moreover, it is possible to work with different search filters and to target the search this way even more. Besides various time intervals even different media can be adjusted, like e.g. searching only for corporate blogs etc.

When looking for influencers, you should therefore define your audience and analyze the blogosphere first, as there are many different supporting tools out there that can help you in picking the most appropriate influencer.

By Daniela La Marca