Connecting with influencers could be instrumental for your online marketing success

Connecting with industry leaders has long been a way to amplify one’s voice in the marketing field. Influencer marketing provides a great platform for even the smallest of businesses to gain ground and connect with a pool of audiences.

What is Influence marketing?

When marketers gain the attention of leading voices in the field, and include them in their marketing efforts, it invites the term ‘influence marketing’

Why opt for Influence Marketing?

Including leading influencers in your field helps to boost brand awareness as well as trust for your business. Top industry influencers can, with the help of their dominance in the field, help you reach a far wider pool of targeted consumers. Search engines like Google measure the social influence of a particular page when determining its ranking. Using influential voices helps to gain the trust of your consumers and visitors, thereby making a firmer mark with customers than you would otherwise.

Finding influencers in your industry

There are three major methods through which you can find industry leaders.

1. Search Engines

As a marketer, you can use search engines to find out about the leading voices writing about your industry. You can filter this down by finding out specifically, the people who are using the same keywords as you are.

The most efficient manner of finding bloggers in your niche is to use Google to find out. You can identify the top bloggers by simply doing a Google search, and then using the results to analyse each blogger’s respective online influence and webpage ranking.

Apart from Google, can also use Technorati, a blog search engine. Marketers can use this to search for bloggers in a relevant field, as well as blog posts regarding an issue. As with Google, compile a list of the names you see here, before checking their influence and page ranking, and then go on to streamline the list for the names you want to keep. Apart from Technorati, other blog search engines are also prevalent for the use of such marketing analysis, including Blog Search Engine, Blog Digger and Ice Rocket.

2. Social Media Platforms

Marketers can also utilize social sites directly to find your industry leaders.

On twitter, you can use the search function to directly find new influencers. You can follow hashtags to understand what industry influencers are engaged in. You can use Facebook’s search feature to also scout for people in your industry. Tools such as EdgeRank checker can also be helpful in this regard. Liking and following these influencers can help. Facebook also allows you to join industry specific groups to amplify your influence and gain a better oversight.

In Google Plus, you can use the same search feature to find industry leaders. Joining relevant groups is also a good idea. For a further insight, you can check people’s Google+ ripples. Follow the flow on Google+ ripples to get a glimpse of new industry leaders. You can also use Google+ ripples to understand the influence of each particular person in their respective field.

Other social media sites include LinkedIn and Pinterest. Here too, the same formula can be applied to gain a grip of leading influencers. You can join groups, like and follow influencers for a better chance of being able to connect with them.

3. Social Influence Metrics

Social Influence Metrics are also a greatly powerful tool in understanding social influence in your industry. They help to analyze and understand the flow of interactions between bloggers and people, before determining their social influence. There are a large variety of such tools that you can use. Some of the leading ones includeKlout ,PeerIndex , and Kred.

Kloutcompiles data and examines the through algorithms, before giving each blogger a business score between one and one-hundred. PeerIndex on the other hand, determines social influence our interaction and dominance on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Kredis another important site that allows you to gain knowledge about key influencers and their surrounding details. Like the other two, itpre-ordains each person’s ranking through their social media influence among others.

How to get in touch with influencers?

This is done easily by sending e-mails to them, or even connecting through social media. Industry leaders are usually busy with their schedules, and a light prod with a follow-up email could be necessary if you’re request is met with no response. In the end of the day, there are a great range of names you could connect with, and if you persist on attempting to reach at least one of them,you are likely to succeed.

In the end, making connection with leading influencers in your field can propel you forward in your marketing campaign. Some of the most successful businesses have utilized the power of social influence to take them forward. Finding industry leaders online helps your brand to slowly raise trust among consumers, expand your reach and widen your sales opportunities in the long run.