Influencers in just about every industry are shaking up the digital world with their access to big and highly engaged audiences. More than ever, brands, marketers, and PR pros are talking to their customers through these super-influencers. The reason for this is simple: customers don’t trust brands and marketers when it comes to making purchase decisions.
According to BlogHer, 47 percent of U.S. readers consult trusted peers or influencers to find new ideas, trends, and ultimately, to make their purchasing decisions. Customers are smart enough to read through a brand’s shiny marketing message, so consulting people with real opinions only makes sense.
As influencer marketing takes off, though, the people managing these campaigns are jumping in head first without any idea of how to organize the process from start to finish. While the very premise of influencer marketing is authenticity — and you can’t automate authenticity — there are a handful of tools that can certainly help you streamline the influencer marketing process.
From finding influencers and managing outreach to finding trending content and tracking success, below are 5 influencer marketing tools for managing influencer marketing campaigns.
Streak
Once you’ve found the right influencers to reach out to, you’ll need a system for tracking all of your outreach efforts (otherwise the whole setup will go haywire). The beauty of Streak is that it integrates directly with Gmail. Unlike most CRMs, you aren’t limited to specific categories to organize your pipeline.
Through campaigns, things like the blogger’s name, email address, contact date, notes, and publishing dates are tracked. Streak is so simple, no matter what you need to track, you can do it in there. Plus, you can also associate an email thread with a contact in Streak so you can keep track of every single conversation with an influencer.
Sidekick by Hubspot
If you’re planning an influencer campaign you will likely be doing a lot of outreach until you narrow down to the perfect bloggers. With that in mind, tracking email opens is incredibly helpful. While Streak does this as well, Sidekick by Hubspot gives you live notifications when someone opens your email.
This transparency means you can see who is interacting with your emails – if at all – and how many times. It allows you to make timely follow ups in hopes of getting a response from the influencer. You can even schedule emails for later so the influencer receives a follow up at the appropriate time.
Topsy
Once you start building partnerships with influencers, you’ll need to know what content is trending in your industry. Ultimately, you’ll want influencers to create content that resonates with their readers and your target customers.
Topsy is a brilliant tool for finding top performing content in your industry and even analyzing the sentiment of the content. Simply type in a keyword and Topsy will pull up the top trending content for it – including links, tweets, photos, videos, and influencers. You can even pull up mentions to see how customers are interacting with that content. Topsy is a great starting point for rolling out any kind of content campaign.
Mixpanel
Okay, so you’ve had some influencer articles go live and you want to see if readers are actually clicking over to your site and what exactly they’re doing once they get there. Measuring your ROI is essential, and let’s face it, Google Analytics just doesn’t cut it. Sure, you can track visits to your website, social shares, and engagement but what about tracking actions from individual visitors?
As Mixpanel says, “Actions speak louder than pageviews” and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. With Mixpanel, you can see how customers move through your funnel, whether they convert, or where you might lose them along the way. You can see live updates from individual users so you can follow along as they experience your site. All of these amazing tools help you fix issues in your funnel and tweak them to improve your conversion rate.
So there you have it – five influencer marketing tools for setting up influencer marketing campaigns, keeping outreach organized, finding top performing content in your industry, and tracking the success of each campaign.
What are your favorite influencer marketing tools for managing marketing campaigns?
Do you use Pinterest for your business? Want to know what works on Pinterest? To learn how to improve your Pinterest marketing, I interview Jeff Sieh. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover […]
Want long-term customers for your business? Have you used social media to increase customer loyalty? To build customer loyalty, you need to show your customers you care. In this article I’ll share how to use social media to embrace and cultivate loyal customers for your business. #1: Personalize the Fan Experience The key to encouraging […]
Want to improve your Instagram marketing? Are you interested in the latest tips and tools for Instagram? Instagram is a fast-growing platform and businesses are eager to establish a presence and encourage engagement on the network. We asked social media experts to share their hottest Instagram tips. Here’s what they had to say. #1: Shoot Square Your Instagram feed is only as […]
Today I’m going to walk through a step-by-step case study of implementing 4 content upgrades over the past 2 months on JeffBullas.com.
I’ll show you:
What a content upgrade is
How to make an irresistible content upgrade
How well they worked on this blog (conversion rates before and after)
How we chose which articles to prioritize
Why you’re in a better position than Jeff to take advantage of this technique.
Ready? Let’s get started.
What is a content upgrade?
A content upgrade, coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko, is a post-specific bonus given away in exchange for an email address in the post itself.
Before you say, “Oh, I already give away a free ebook/report/video/course/thing-a-ma-bob”, note the words I italicized: this is not a sitewide, generic opt-in bribe.
For example on the sidebar of this blog, Jeff is offering his ’8 key steps to blogging mastery book’. That’s not a content upgrade, because it’s offered site-wide and is not post-specific.
Right at the end of the intro, you see this note, formatted slightly differently to stand out from the main text:
When you click on the link, a LeadBox from LeadPages pops up:
When a reader opts-in, they’re sent the content upgrade for this post and added to the list.
That’s it!
But the magic is in what the bonus is.
How to make an irresistible content upgrade
Everything magical about content upgrades is in the specificity.
Let’s look at exactly what we offered in this 2015 strategy post.
First, we turned the post into a checklist of the 15 steps, so it’s easy to actually use the strategies in the post and start ticking off action items one by one.
Checklists are a great way to make posts actionable, so they’re useful for your readers. And for you, the blogger, they don’t require coming up with new content.
Just reduce your posts down into specific action steps.
Here’s the first page of the checklist:
Next, we noticed a few of the tips in the post were about Facebook marketing.
So a bonus on Facebook marketing makes sense. But instead of coming up with brand new content, we knew Jeff had a ton of content on Facebook already, so we found a way to leverage it.
But we added one more bonus in because we already had it made: a checklist of how to rank higher in Google (It’s still relevant because one of the tips in the post was about SEO).
So if you’re the reader, you’re reading a post on 15 tips for a digital marketing strategy in 2015, that includes 3 tips on Facebook marketing and one tip on SEO. You see an offer for a free checklist of action steps for all 15 strategies, and how to increase engagement on Facebook, and rank higher in Google.
How compelling is that?
Certainly a lot more compelling than a generic ask to “subscribe to my newsletter” and still more compelling than an ebook that is offered sitewide.
Like I said, it’s all in how specific the bonus is to the post.
That’s what makes the email conversions so high.
How high? Let’s take a look…
Actual conversion rates from Jeff’s Blog
In total, we implemented 4 content upgrades in the past 2 months.
Here’s how well they converted compared to the other top “regular” 20 posts that didn’t have a content upgrade:
Note: For the conversion optimization nerds out there, although this wasn’t a formal A/B test (we are comparing conversions across different posts), the results had 99.99% significance (p value <0.0001), with 106,000 sessions for the baseline and 17,000 sessions for the “variation”.
If you’re trying to grow your email list to say, 10,000, and you’re on track to hit that in 2 years (very achievable), if you improved your rate by 344%, you’d reduce that 2 years down to…
… 7 months!
That’s almost a year and a half of time saved to reach your goal.
So, it’s a big deal.
How to pick the perfect articles for high converting content upgrades
If you’re starting a new blog, listen up. You can use this section to craft the perfect articles for high converting upgrades.
If you already have a blog with articles that are getting decent traffic, use this section to prioritize which articles to make upgrades for.
I use a two step process to decide which posts to upgrade:
Step 1: Prioritize high traffic posts
Step 2: Prioritize in-depth posts
Step 2 is more important than Step 1. But let’s discuss both:
Step 1: Prioritize high traffic posts
This is obvious, so don’t forget it. If some posts started ranking in Google or exploding on social media and are getting a ton of traffic, of course it makes sense to turn those into email capturing machines.
To find your highest traffic posts, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in Google Analytics.
It should already organize your top pages by page views. Just be careful to select 3 or 6 months instead of 30 days so it doesn’t give too much weight to recent posts with a temporary traffic spike.
JeffBullas.com is obviously popular, so when we did this for Jeff there were a bunch of options of posts with a ton of traffic.
Choosing which to upgrade requires Step 2.
Step 2: Prioritize in-depth posts
Content upgrades work best on really in depth posts. The more depth the better. And, in my experience, how-to posts — the ones that teach people a process or technique — are the best.
That’s because there’s really no reason to opt-in to get more information if the information you already got was basic, or worse, trite.
You know those “top 10 diet tips of the spring” articles on the front page of Yahoo? Would you really opt-in to get 10 more tips like “Eat avocados! They’re delicious and healthy!”
I wouldn’t.
On the other hand, if you’re reading an in depth guide on the Paleo diet with step by step diet and workout plans, and the author is offering recipes and printable take-to-the-gym cheatsheets, would you opt-in? Probably!
We saw this trend play out in our 4 content upgrades on Jeff’s blog.
Here are their email conversion rates:
The two highest converting posts were the ones with the most how-to advice: building your marketing strategy for 2015 and ranking higher in Google.
They helped readers achieve a goal.
The two lowest converting posts were lists of facts (or photos) for reference, and, unsurprisingly, they didn’t do as well.
So, if you already have a bunch of posts: focus on building upgrades for your most in depth posts first.
New blogs: Why you’re at an advantage for email conversions
What about new blogs? What if you’re just starting and don’t have a lot of posts with decent traffic.
Well, you’re actually at an advantage in terms of creating extremely high converting posts:
Focus your time writing in depth how-to style posts in your niche.
Not only will that help get shares and links for traffic (because the content will be naturally better), but it’ll help you create obscenely high converting content upgrades.
Make content upgrades in 5 minutes (Checklists)
“This all sounds great, but I don’t have the time to make more content after I’ve written my blog post.”
I hear this all the time.
In fact, you might be thinking that right now. Don’t stress. You don’t need to make super elaborate content to get the benefit of content upgrades.
You just need to think of small items of value that help your readers take the first step on the advice you’re giving.
That can be a short screencast, links with more info, 10 example ideas, or, one of my favorites: A checklist of the advice in the post.
Checklists are a huge win-win for content upgrades.
Win for the reader: The reader wants to take action, but isn’t sure where to start. A checklist helps them with super clear, actionable steps.
Win for you: You don’t have to write a ton more content, simply summarize your content into a step by step list.
To help you quickly make checklists that look good, I’ve assembled a bonus area where I’m giving away 3 checklist templates, in PowerPoint, so you can customize them as much as you like.
Click on the images to get to the bonus area:
In addition, I’m also including my 5 top favorite resources on the internet on content upgrades: articles that show you how to implement content upgrades technically, ideas for what to give your readers, and multiple case studies to get your creativity flowing.
Questions about how to apply this to your blog? Ask below and I’ll do my best to answer each one.
Guest Author: Devesh Khanal is a conversion optimization consultant. He and his team focus on growing email lists and A/B testing high traffic pages. He writes about his successes and failures at DeveshDesign.com.
The bar of the future is here. And you might be surprised by the types of “drinks” it’s serving.
Café ArtScience is a Cambridge, Massachusetts, restaurant that serves alcohol in forms you’ve likely never seen before. The bar has a machine called Le Whaf, which transforms various liquors into clouds of consumable gas that patrons can simply inhale rather than drink.
It’s a strange concept to be sure, but it’s just the type of innovation that’s interesting enough to get curious consumers through the door.
David Edwards, the inventor and Harvard University professor behind Café ArtScience told Entrepreneur:
“The bar is a natural place for experimentation. People just have more fun at the bar, and the leading edge of creating the food and beverages of tomorrow has to be fun.”
Café ArtScience isn’t only innovating in the bar department. The restaurant also offers a variety of unique and sustainable food items, including glazed pig tails and barbecue Vermont quail.
But it also isn’t the only bar that’s creating new, innovative ways of consuming alcohol.
Chicago’s Aviary serves a drink called In The Rocks, which is basically an Old Fashioned served within an ice cube that patrons can crack with a small slingshot-like device.
And Barmini in Washington, D.C., uses a machine called an ultrasonic homogenization device that uses sound waves to add flavor to its drinks.
All of these businesses show a flare for the unique and dramatic. While some bars are able to get by just fine with standard menus, other’s are choosing to stand out from the pack. And as they continue to innovate, the future of the industry could well change what we all consider to be standard offerings.
From yesterday’s factory assembly lines to tomorrow’s self-driving cars, automation is the Holy Grail of efficient, innovative and scalable enterprises. It eliminates repetitive tasks, reduces manpower and saves money.
As a small business, however, it’s natural to feel that automation is just for the “big guys” — such expensive, cumbersome solutions just wouldn’t make sense for scaling small businesses.
Or would they?
Thanks to affordable cloud-based platforms, automation doesn’t have to be expensive or cumbersome. In fact, automating several aspects of the business cycle, including marketing, sales and inventory management, can give small businesses like yours a much needed boost to their bottom line.
Enterprise Resource Management (ERM)
Although enterprise resource plans (ERPs) are mostly appropriate for big businesses, even small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can take advantage of small-scale platforms for enhancing automation and resource planning. These can include workflow management systems and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
In fact, software makers are already targeting small business ERPs for use in a smaller scale, which should encourage entrepreneurs to take advantage of enterprise resource management. With SaaS-based cloud services, maintenance and management should not be too taxing on IT personnel.
In addition, using ERP automation platforms like Panaya for updates, patches, system management, and bug tracking can greatly help businesses running popular solutions like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce. This enables IT teams to focus on other core activities. This way, SMEs can better serve customers, even without a dedicated IT team.
Marketing
Social media marketing is a must-do for businesses of all sizes, but it is also time consuming and repetitive. Who has time to post to their business’s Twitter feed multiple times per day?
Automation to the rescue! Social media automation apps like Buffer can automate posting to networks including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. Meanwhile, Oktopost can provide added functionality, especially for companies that focus on B2B engagements. This app also provides analytics data so you can measure the impact of social media campaigns.
Scheduling your social media updates allows you to take charge of your campaigns, and make sure you have all the other marketing materials in place for promotions and special events. Automation of the major parts of your social efforts will allow you to take more time to respond personally to people who are talking about your brand, products and services.
Inventory and Point of Sale (POS)
Managing your inventory after the sale can be incredibly time consuming. With solutions like Vend, you not only have inventory management, but also an easy-to-use POS system that can work with any number of equipment setups. Vend tracks customer patterns so you know who to target with what promotions. It works across multiple stores and offers online and mobile payments, too.
Customer Service and Support
While you don’t want automation to completely replace the human touch for customer service and support, there are several ways to automate this critical aspect of your business. For example, using email automation with a service like GetResponse to follow up with prospective customers, send birthday promotions, remind people of an abandoned shopping cart, conduct post-purchase surveys, etc. can help you build stronger relationships with your customers.
Tools like ZenDesk can make support tickets easier to manage. Plus, ZenDesk can help you create an FAQ and knowledge base section to reduce the load of emails and phone calls to your customer service department.
Human Resources
Even if your small business is a one man (or woman) show right now, if you keep growing, at some point you’ll have to expand your staff. Whether you hire official employees or opt for independent contractors, post scenarios can quickly turn into an HR management nightmare.
Tools like Recruiterbox can automate the hiring process for you. This allows you to track and respond to applicants, manage your company’s job openings, and assign other people to handle various parts of the recruiting process. If your employees will be handling a lot of shift work, using a tool like FindMyShift will help automate the scheduling process.
Bottom Line
Small business automation doesn’t have to be a costly undertaking. Automating key points in your business saves time, money and resources — allowing you to focus on the things you do best without cumbersome logistics dragging down the creative process.
The less time you spend on marketing means more time to innovate products and services that resonate with your target market — and that’s smart business.
