Influencer marketing is an important part of social media marketing that allows you to drive authentic conversation about a particular topic or a product, drive more engagement and attract your target audience’s attention to your brand without talking to them directly.
Among the most authoritative industry influencers, you can find those who talk about your competitors and those who are not fully on your side. These influencers are great opportunities to turn into your brand ambassadors and improve your brand positioning online if you can connect with them in a meaningful way.
Using Semrush Brand Monitoring, you can quickly gather a list of your industry influencers and those who mention your competitors.
How can this be done?
To broaden a list of your industry topics, go to the Topic Research tool and enter any topic, select your location and click on the ‘Get content ideas’ button. Go to the ‘Cards’ section and prioritize topics by topic volume - you’ll see the most popular topics searched online first.
Find influencers in your industry
Go to Brand Monitoring and type in your industry topics (keywords). Select up to 10 countries you would like to track your mentions in. You can filter a specific language anytime after the mentions are collected.
Go to the ‘Twitter’ tab, check mentions and study an author’s number of followers on Twitter. Do the same in the ‘Instagram’ and ‘Forum’ tabs until you find authors with the most followers/subscribers.
Depending on your goals and industry, you can focus on big influencers (100,000+ followers) or micro-influencers (3,000-10,000 followers).
Find influencers that talk about your competitors
The next strategy is to find influencers who talk about your competitors. Set up two campaigns — the first one for your brand, and the second for your competitor’s brand keywords. Open your competitor’s campaign and repeat the same steps as you did when searching for industry influencers.
Find negative mentions and mentions with no links
Another strategy is to find influencers who talk about you, but don’t put a backlink to your website, or talk negatively. Open your brand campaign and repeat the same steps as you did when searching for industry influencers but use some filters:
- filter mentions by positive and with a link to your website,
- filter mentions by negative sentiment.
Next Steps
Your outreach strategy fully depends on your goals and should vary from influencer to influencer. Try using a unique approach for each of them.
Here’s a few strategies you may use when reaching out to them:
- Reach out to industry influencers or those who only talk about your competitors and tell them about your product or content.
- Reach out to those influencers who mention your brand positively but don’t put a backlink to your website, and offer them some benefits or a partnership to engage them to talk more about you or promote your content/product more often.
- Reach out to those influencers who mention your brand negatively and try to change their mind - offer some help or benefits of interest to them.