6 Great Tips For Getting Industry Influencers To Talk About You

Marketing doesn’t have to be a struggle. Influencer marketing can be highly effective, and you don’t need a lot of money to get started.

If you look at what’s happening in the world right now, it’s easy to see how important it is to create a VITAL firm.

An accounting firm that’s full of strength and purpose is all the more important in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. People, including your clients, are worried for their well-being and their financial future.

To weather this storm, you’re going to have to pay attention to marketin

Here’s an example: Samantha thought that marketing was the same for all firms. She mistakenly believed that standing out would be extremely challenging.

That all changed when she joined Oomph Global in the Client Attraction Workshop.

“You suddenly realise how straightforward it is to do it, but how many different ways there are to do marketing,” she says.

Equipping yourself with a good understanding of how marketing works is the first step to creating a VITAL firm.

And now, we’re going to focus on a form of marketing that many accountants overlook – influencer marketing.

Partnering up with influencers can be especially effective. It allows you to Build Authority and Amplify Your Reach. These things are so important that we like to call them marketing and sales superpowers!

When influencers talk about your accounting firm, potential clients are more likely to listen.
But how do you reach out to influencers in the first place? Here are 6 tips for getting them to listen up.

1. Become a VITAL Voice First

Nowadays, almost anyone can do something to amplify their voice. This ends up creating a lot of white noise that only serves to confuse those in your market. Needless to say, it’s not going to do you any good to add to this noise, in the form of content or anything else.

Now, accountants have a habit of creating content that they believe will interest their audience.

The problem is, they don’t necessarily know their audience that well. And this happens more often than most would care to admit.

How do you find out what’s truly important to your listeners?

First, you need to shift your full attention to your audience. Listen carefully to your ideal clients and find out what they truly need. That’s how you can become a VITAL voice that cuts through the white noise and reaches the right people.

Speaking of which…

2. Develop a Strategy for Reaching the Right People

Do you outsource your marketing?

Some accounting firms task one company with SEO optimisation and another with PPC, for instance. These firms rely on referrals and more than one marketer.

The problem is that it’s easy to lose one’s sense of direction in all of this. More specifically, these accounting firms may not have a strategy for targeting their ideal clients. They favour a scattershot approach that wastes energy and resources on prospects that will never convert. As a result, they may not see the results they want.

Before you even think about working with influencers, you have to first figure out who your ideal clients are and how to reach them. If not, you might only succeed in getting more people to implement the wrong marketing strategy.

Here’s the deal. You’re going to have to do at least some of your marketing in-house if you want to develop a strategy for targeting your ideal clients. With that accomplished, you’ll be able to keep all your outsourced marketing efforts in line with this strategy.

3. Learn How to Spot the Influencers in Your Niche

Are you already following the experts and influencers who are prominent in your niche? You don’t want just any influencers. You want those who share your audience, which means they can help you reach more people in that audience.

The easiest way to do this would be to search social media hashtags. (And it’s free!) You can find those who use the most-relevant hashtags and spot the influencers among them.
The problem with this method is that it might not be the most effective. It can take you a lot of time to find the right influencers, for one thing.

However, you can bypass most of that with tools such as BuzzSumo and Moz. Both platforms have dedicated influencer tools for finding experts based on keywords, bios, and hashtags. You can order influencers by authority, engagement, reach, and more.

In the end, either BuzzSumo or Moz would be perfect for those who are serious about influencer marketing. Once you’ve found the right influencers, you follow them…and then move to the next step.

4. Share, Comment, and Link to Their Content (To Get Their Attention)

The fact that they’re influencers means they’re unlikely to notice or pay attention when you join their legions of followers. This is why you’ll have to find another way to get noticed.

First of all, you can comment on these influencers’ posts regularly. Influencers know how to engage with their audience and they often do it by responding to comments. The whole point of social media is conversations, as you likely know.

Furthermore, influencers always pay attention to their traffic sources. They want to know that they’re building the right links, not just any links.

This presents an opportunity for you to link out to your target influencers’ content. You can do this in your blog posts and articles and so on. When they see your domain name in their analytics, they’re going to want to know what’s in the content that links out to them.

Of course, you can also get someone’s attention by sharing their content. Odds are that these influencers are not going to be able to resist checking you out once you’ve shared their content. If they like what they see, they might even return the favour.

And they’ll be more likely to talk to you when you reach out to them later.

5. Be Personal in Your Engagements

As mentioned, you’re one of many in an influencer’s following. To get an influencer to notice you, you’re going to have to add a personal touch.

To begin with, you can look for the topics that the influencer is most passionate about. This should be simple enough to figure out from their posts. Then, when you engage with them, you can share valuable insights relating to the topics that they care about.

All the better if you can share something that surprises or impresses them. This is likely to get them interested in your work and opinions.

Bear in mind that it’s going to take time to develop a good relationship with an influencer. Rather than being overbearing, you’ll want to be tactical. This means not making comments for the sake of it, but only when you have something interesting or valuable to say.

6. Align Your Goals with the Influencer’s

What are you trying to achieve with influencer marketing? Are you looking to expand your reach? Perhaps boost your conversion rates?

Whatever the goal, you must be clear-eyed about what you’d like the campaign to achieve.

Defining a goal is best executed within the well-known SMART framework:

• Specific – Your goal should be as specific as possible so that you can formulate how to go about accomplishing it.
• Measurable – To measure your campaign’s progress, you have to be able to break down your goal into a set of trackable metrics.
• Attainable – Your goal needs to be achievable in a reasonable timeframe. Shoot for realistic goals and leave enough time for influencer marketing to work.
• Relevant – All of your goals ought to in line with your overall marketing strategy. It’s a recipe for wasting time and resources otherwise.
• Time-Bound – You’ve got to have a pre-defined deadline for achieving your goals. If it’s taking too long to achieve your goal, it might indicate that it’s time for corrective action.

It’s also important to make sure that the influencer you have in mind has no conflicts with your marketing goals and message. They’ll be more likely to work with you and will sound more authentic in doing so.

Boost Your Influence

Influencer marketing can be an invaluable addition to a VITAL firm. Influencers can help you tap into audiences you won’t be able to reach on your own. This can lead to more clients and higher conversions.

On top of this, you may become an influencer in your own right after teaming up with these influencers. You’ll be able to build a powerful brand that can protect your firm in uncertain times…and blossom once times are good again.

Now that you know what it takes to get influencer marketing right, it might be time to get to work.