Friday 31 August 2018
Wednesday 29 August 2018
How to Find Instagram Influencers
Need to learn how to find Instagram influencers for your marketing campaign?
Read further for a complete step-by-step guide of all the ways you can try to find Instagram influencers.
Essentially, it will include free and paid methods to find Instagram influencers, the pros and cons of each, and will be continuously updated as we come across new strategies.
This article will be pretty packed, so let’s get to it.
Ready to start learning how to find Instagram influencers? Let’s begin.
1. Search on Instagram
How to find Instagram influencers?
Let’s start with the free and obvious option: Instagram Explore.
- Pros: You can contact the influencer directly via Instagram’s direct message feature. This eliminates the need to manually research for an email address, and even gets higher open rates compared to email.
- Cons: No quick way to see if followers are authentic or if engagement is good. Qualifying a lead, messaging, and follow-ups can only be done manually, one by one.
- Tip: Best for small-scale, highly personalized campaigns. If you need to contact more than a few leads, skip this and move on to the next options on this list that are better for bigger outreach campaigns.
How to find Influencers via Instagram Explore:
1. Click the magnifying glass icon to search for profiles.
Searching for leads on Instagram can be tricky as Instagram displays personalized results per profile.
So if you use your personal account (where you spent time liking and commenting on cat pics) to look for car enthusiast leads, you might not see these show up in your Explore feed.
2. If you don’t see relevant results, you can type the keyword for the niche you are looking for right on the search tab.
For example, “digital art.”
You can then choose to browse through a list of top profiles, hashtags, or places associated with that keyword. Results will still vary per profile, so this
3. Results will still vary per profile, so you’ll be spending a ton of time checking each profile out individually to see which one fits your campaign needs.
4. Once you do find a profile you like, just click the send direct message option to contact the influencer manually.
2. Advanced Search on Google
Google is still the search engine to beat when it comes to serving the most relevant results for your searches.
You can make your searches even more targeted through Advanced Search Queries.
- Pros: You’ll get the most relevant results compared to any other search engine. You have the added flexibility to edit your queries and add location and date filters.
- Cons: No quick way to verify engagement rate, and if an account and its followers are authentic. You’ll have to manually review each result per page, and you can’t message them directly.
- Tip: Try this if you have no problem investing time and budget on other apps for finding emails and messaging your leads, and just need to generate as many of the most relevant leads as you can.
How to find Instagram influencers using Advanced search queries on Google:
1. Go to your Google search settings and set your location results. (Set your preferred results by location or select global if you’re targeting that.)
2. Tweak your Google settings to display 100 results in one page.
3. Go to Google search and type the advanced search query format:
[Your Niche keyword] +[ Your target location] + site:instagram.com
The advanced search query: Fashion London site:Instagram.com should show you results like these.
4. Open each profile in your search results as a new tab. Review each one closely, pick what you like, and send a direct message. You can also manually copy the link to the profiles you like and past them into a spreadsheet for list building.
3. Search On Influencer Platforms
An influencer platform is like a directory listing influencers along with the info that businesses need to contact them for brand sponsorship.
- Pros: It’s like browsing through an influencer catalog that contains all the data you need to easily pick the right leads for your campaign. You’ll have most of your research done for you.
- Cons: Not all influencer platforms are created equal. Free directories will list basic profile data but are still incapable of verifying engagement, account, and follower authenticity. Those that do, come at a cost. Either way, you still can’t automate mass emailing.
- Tip: Try this if you’re okay with spending a bit of money to save (tons) of time on manual research.
The best influencer platforms should list only curated, verified profiles, including the data you need to qualify and contact leads instantly.
At NinjaOutreach, we use advanced data science so our free influencer platform can include the following data:
- Category - instantly find influencers by niche
- Engagement rate
- Follower count
- Likes, comments, and shares per post
- Location info based on posting activity
- Brand partnerships
- Price per sponsored post - helpful for quickly determining which influencers you can afford to include in your campaign
But what makes the NinjaOutreach influencer platform stand out is the fact that it’s free. You can find all the information you need to qualify Instagram influencer leads, without having to spend extra time researching.
Here’s how to find Instagram influencers free on the NinjaOutreach Influencer platform:
1. Go to the NinjaOutreach Instagram influencers directory page
2. Choose the niche you’re looking to find Instagram influencers for. Niches are listed as Categories. Try the Mommy category, for example.
3. Set your preferred location. You can filter all the way down to the City level.
4. If you see an influencer you like, you can click their profile card to expand it.
5. Once it loads, click on the small Instagram icon to open the URL to the influencer’s actual profile on Instagram.
6. If you’re browsing through mobile, then you can head straight to the direct message option to contact the influencer you like. But, if you’re doing this at scale, you’ll need to use a specialized messaging app.
4. Use an App with a built-in influencer database and outreach
Influencer database and email outreach software are all-in-one solutions. These power-packed tools can help you, from finding and researching leads, to outreach automation. However, they are definitely not free.
- Pros: Comes with auto email finder, email + auto follow-up scheduler, templates with custom fields and dynamic text, ninjabot
- Cons: Since the profiles added in the database are evaluated first and also comply with the influencers’ wish for privacy, some pages/websites/profiles that do not meet our safety precautions or that wish to be excluded may not be present in the database and you’ll have to find some via other sources.
- Tip: If you want to save money on Instagram influencer research and emailing, then invest on a single tool that has all these specialized features.
If you need to find Instagram influencers for bigger projects, visiting profiles one by one just to send messages and follow ups is inefficient.
NinjaOutreach speeds this up by letting you arrange a list of all the Instagram influencers you want to contact.
You’ll see all their stats in a single page view, and you can can then send more messages without having to manually go through each account.
Here’s how to find and contact Instagram influencers through the NinjaOutreach influencer database and outreach software:
1. Go to Search tab click the Instagram Influencers search tab.
2. Type your niche keyword into the search box and click search.
3. Once that’s done, click Filter to narrow your search. For example, your search keyword is “blogging.” You can open Filter and click the Category “Babies” then filter location to “United States.” You can filter further down to the region/state and city level if you want. You can also set your required number of followers per influencer.
4. You can scroll through all the results of your lead search and view all influencer stats in a single page. You can also click each of the three icons to the left side of each profile card if you want to view the Influencer’s Instagram profile, contact them, or add them to your list of leads.
Conclusion
And that’s it!
Whatever the size and goals of your campaign, you have various options, both free and paid.
Are you ready to find Instagram influencers for you campaign now?
The post How to Find Instagram Influencers appeared first on NinjaOutreach.
source https://ninjaoutreach.com/how-to-find-instagram-influencers/
Tuesday 28 August 2018
Wednesday 22 August 2018
Tuesday 21 August 2018
Friday 17 August 2018
This Is Where To Find Blog Post Ideas: 10 New, Free Sources
Finding great blog post ideas isn’t easy. But once you do find content ideas worth writing about, there's nothing more frustrating for a content marketer than spending hours writing content only to have it fall completely flat.
It can be pretty demoralizing. Trust me, I've been there many times. Quite honestly though, it's a necessary part of the process in becoming a great content creator.
The fact is, for every one rockstar article you create, there will likely be dozens of other content ideas that get little to no traction.
On my primary business blog, which focuses on labels and packaging design, here's how the traffic breakdown looks.
I have one blog post that accounts for over 50% of the traffic. Another 41% is comprised of 4 other rockstar articles and 3% to another 21 posts. The other 1030 blog posts? Less than 7% of total traffic.
This is the classic Pareto Principle at work, which is commonly referred to as the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule says that 80% (or in my case 93%) of outcomes are caused by 20% of the work.
Chances are that you see this principle mirrored in your content stats too.
So why is it that so many articles don't work?
The typical method for finding blog post ideas (and why it doesn't always work)
Simply put, a lot of the content that is produced on the web is not really all that interesting or useful for a site's target audience. Now just finding a blog post idea isn't really too hard.
There are many great resources out there that show how to develop a relevant, well-trafficked topic list for content writing.
Unfortunately, while these topic lists target terms that have a lot of overall search traffic, there are often two roadblocks these topics have built in:
1) They are highly competitive.
2) They may not be what your target audience actually wants from you.
These strategies for building content ideas involve various methods of search engine monitoring, SEO/keyword research tools and competitor research.
If an article is put on the internet and nobody reads it, did it really happen?
Don't get me wrong. These methods shouldn't be ignored and can produce many valuable content pieces for your brand. If you want to check out a guide using these methods, here's a great one highlighting 7 Content Discovery Tools.
The problem is that most of these guides focus on finding what we, as content marketers, think are great blog post ideas. This doesn't always align with what our audience truly finds valuable.
As content marketers, we are typically far from the front lines of customer interaction. In fact, we often work remotely. Aside from an occasional company meeting or Christmas party, we don't usually have much contact with other departments like Customer Service or Sales.
So when we plan our blog post ideas, we use metrics like search volume, click-through-rates, and keyword difficulty.
What tends to happen is that in the search for these high-traffic blog post ideas, we miss a gold mine of content ideas that are readily available to us.
Ideas that our audience is dying for us to write about.
A new method: 9 Sources for customer-focused blog post ideas
This guide is about uncovering 9 underutilized sources of blog post ideas that your customers will absolutely love to read. They may not have the largest traffic metrics, but they are guaranteed to be helpful to your audience.
The content ideas you find from these sources will help position your brand as a true authority in your sphere.
1. Customer service emails
If you have a customer service email, this is a great place to check for blog post ideas.
Think about it, customers are literally writing to you telling you what they need to know. There couldn't be a better place to find valuable content ideas!
We get dozens of emails in our customer service inbox daily. While many of these are related to order statuses, shipping notifications, etc. it is rare that I can't find a more general inquiry that would make for a great article on a daily basis.
I just checked our webmail as I'm writing this post. After only about 5 emails I found a great question that would make for a fantastic article for our audience.
Actually, there are a few great questions that could be converted to content ideas here.
- Where To Get Custom Labels For topsOrtho Orthodontic Offices
- How Do You Use Custom Labels With topsOrtho Software?
- Templates for Custom Labels to use with topsOrtho Software
There probably isn't a huge amount of search traffic for these terms. But these are focused, bottom of the funnel questions where we can easily be an authority and write content that will convert new customers.
Not to mention these are great resource pieces that we can use in our email and social marketing with orthodontic offices that use this software.
Bottom line, this is practical content that our audience will find helpful.
The best part is it only took 30 seconds of scanning emails to find!
2. Live Chats
The same principle applies here. If your website has the option for customers to live chat with your customer service team, you as a content marketer should absolutely be reading them.
I've found that these are even more focused on product questions/how-tos than emails.
(As a side note, if your marketing responsibilities include more than just content marketing, like say user experience or pay-per-click, this is the perfect place to see exactly where customers have difficulty on your site.)
To access your chat logs, talk to your customer service manager. There are many chat software options out there that are commonly used.
They are each built a little bit differently, but they all contain archives. The archives are what you want to read through.
Chat software also typically includes the ability to tag archived chats. If your software allows that, meet with your team and show them the types of chats that are helpful to you. Then they can tag them as "content idea" to save you the time of sorting through them all.
Here's an example of what you can find when reading through chats:
Prior to this, I didn't even know that there were standard sized jars for cosmetic items. Turns out there are, and people want to know the best size label for their particular jars.
Now we have a great content idea that is useful information for our audience. Not to mention it's great resource content that will likely attract links back to the website.
3. Customer Service Phone Calls
Want to get more blog post ideas then you could possibly write in a month? Listen in to your customer service phone calls for an afternoon.
For every one customer that will chat or email in their questions, there will be a dozen that calls.
Here's a snippet from a call this afternoon that I listened in on:
Customer: Hello, I'm trying to order some labels, but I'm not sure what the best material is since they're going to be outside during the winter and we don't want them to fall off or fade.
CS: Thank you for calling. We would recommend a polypropylene label because they are tear-resistant, with an aggressive adhesive so it doesn't fall off. And you're going to want to make sure it has a varnish or laminate finish so they won't fade.
Customer: Okay, thank you. I see you have a lot of different polypropylene options though. What's the difference between them all? I also heard vinyl was a good option for what we need.
Our customer service team went on to explain the differences between the materials and help the customer place their order.
Right there we have at least half a dozen content topics that would be helpful to our customers. We could talk about materials that are tear resistant, ones won't fall off in extreme temperatures and how to avoid fading labels. We could also break down pros and cons of vinyl vs. polypropylene label material.
All of these are highly relevant, focused questions from our audience that we can provide quality information about.
While the types and volume of calls will vary based on the industry you are in, customers who are calling in are sure to provide you with some great content ideas.
4. Sales Team
Talking with the sales team can be an enlightening experience for a content marketer. They're out communicating with customers all day, every day, so they have a pretty good idea on what people are curious about.
Try asking them the following:
- What are the top 3-5 questions customers always ask?
- What are the most common rebuttals?
- What are the best selling points?
This will at least open the door to some ideas. Once you start discussing, the things they say should trigger more in-depth questions that you can ask.
Our highest trafficked blog post (regarding converting font sizes from points to inches) came from one of these conversations with a sales team member.
5. On-Site Search Queries
A really fun exercise is to see what your users are searching for on your website. Here's how to use Google Analytics to view on-site searches. To do this, you have to have site search set up in your Analytics account. It's really easy to set up, just follow these steps from Google.
Once your site search tracking is set up, here's how you can filter down to view the things people are searching on your site.
First, navigate to Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms.
Here you will find all of your site search inquiries. Which is awesome, but if your site is like ours, it isn't really going to provide any great content ideas right off the bat. Most of our customers are searching for products or services.
But, there are also a ton of customers searching questions on our site that I would never have imagined without diving deep into the site search.
In order to find these, I filtered the results by the classic Five W's, How and Does (those with a journalism background will find these to be familiar). Put simply, I filtered by question words.
This way, I could get away from all of the transaction related searches and find what types of content people expected to be on our site.
Here's how to do this in Analytics.
On the search terms page, go to Advanced Search > Include Search Term Begins With > (Insert Question word).
Here's an example of when I put "how" into the filter.
Check out all of these great topics!
And here's for "do" queries:
As you can see, this is a great way to find holes in your content and new blog post topics people really need information about.
6. Top Blog Post's Related Topics
One way to leverage your existing content to find even more content ideas for your target audience, is to view the related topics and search terms that correspond with your top posts.
For example, one of our most viewed and highest average for time on page posts is How to print Dymo labels from an Excel spreadsheet.
To find related topics that people are searching for is really, really simple.
Just go to a search engine and type in the title of your post.
At the bottom of the results will be related queries. For example, the post above yields the following related results:
There are multiple topics here that would be great fits. How to print dymo labels from Microsoft Word, how to import Excel addresses into Dymo Labelwriter, how to remove barcode from Dymo label - these are all fantastic topics for our site.
The best part about this exercise is that it can easily snowball into more and more blog post ideas for great topics.
7. Contact Forms & Comments
This source is similar to the Live Chat and Customer Service email sources we talked about earlier. Basically, you want to monitor any contact form field you have on your site to see what types of comments or questions customers are posing.
You also want to make sure you're being updated whenever customers comment on products or posts.
Oftentimes, once you sort through the trolls, there will be excellent questions posed in your product or article comments. These questions can be broken out into their own content pieces.
The most important thing here is to make sure that you have the ability for customers to interact and contact you in as many places on your website as possible.
8. Your Own Email Inbox
If you're anything like me, you're probably answering what seems like a million questions a day in your email inbox, both internally and externally.
I get questions all the time from other members of our team about specifics on a new product's description or capabilities, as I'm the one responsible for posting new products on the website.
Oftentimes, I'm asked questions from customers or business partners regarding product lines and services that we offer.
In order to capture all of these content topics in a way that I can easily find them, I simply set up a "Content" folder in my email inbox. Whenever I get asked a question or offer some useful information, I'll simply drop the email into the folder.
Note: In Outlook, you can create a "Quick Step" that moves the email to the folder when you select it:
The best part about these content topics is that you've already written out the content for them when you responded to the email!
It makes it simple and easy to convert your email answers into blog posts. Just a little formatting is usually all that is required.
9. Get Blog Post Ideas From Most Shared Posts
You can also get great blog post ideas from the most shared posts in your niche.
You can use an automated data mining tool to help you find trending posts in a few clicks.
Here’s how to do it with NinjaOutreach.
1. Sign up for a free trial and log in to your account.
2. Go to the Search > Most Shared Content tab.
3. Enter your search keywords. Use tags & quotation marks to lessen irrelevant results.
4. Go to sorting options and choose what social media or shares metric you prefer.
5. Now, you can review each result for blog post ideas.
10. Social Media (competitors too!)
Finally, once you've written hundreds of exceptional on-target articles using the methods above, you can turn to social media to find even more blog post ideas.
If you have access to your company's Facebook, Instagram or Twitter inbox, going through customer messages can be a good source for content topics.
An even better method is to make a list of 5-6 competitors in your industry that are creating good content that competes with your site.
Go to their social media accounts and mine their reviews, customer posts and comments on the company's posts, writing down any useful questions or comments that are raised.
The post This Is Where To Find Blog Post Ideas: 10 New, Free Sources appeared first on NinjaOutreach.
source https://ninjaoutreach.com/blog-post-ideas-sources/
Tuesday 14 August 2018
Get Inspired! 10 Innovative Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Influencer marketing campaigns are fast becoming an accepted business practice. It’s typically a simple, straightforward transaction that, if done right, should get you fast results.
If you’re interested in trying out this fresh and highly effective marketing strategy for yourself, take inspiration from ten real-world examples we’ve gathered.
Check out how various brands have boosted their campaigns through influencer marketing, and how this benefited them.
1. How Sony Reached Over 17 million Users Through Their Product Marketing Campaign
- Goal: Sony wanted to create hype to market its new product: the Xperia Z5s smartphone.
- Action Plan: Get fast traction by leveraging Instagram influencers. They focused on the best feature of the phone (the camera) by showcasing its zoom potential through real photos. They then partnered with influencers to share a variety of those images. To drive shares and extend their reach, they put in a secret code in each of the photos that users can redeem to take part in a contest.
- Results: This whole influencer marketing campaign ended up reaching over 17 million users.
- Takeaway: Highlight the best feature of your product to focus the influencer marketing campaign on a strong selling point. Then add some engagement device like a contest to incentivize people to get involved.
2. What It Took for Glossier To Reach 10 Million Views A Month
- Goal: Glossier wanted to build their influencer marketing campaign by focusing on fans and influencers that have smaller followings.
- Action Plan: When most people think influencer marketing, they feel that they have to seek out influencers that have tens of thousands of followers on social media. But Glossier proves that working with the little guys can go a long way. Instead of striking a deal with big influencers, the beauty company.
- Results: This grassroots approach made it easier for them to get the momentum for their small startup. The buzz around their products started growing through word of mouth. Eventually, the brand managed to translate this buzz into 10 million views a month.
- Takeaways: The idea here is to start out on the smaller scale with your fans and customers. Don't dismiss influencers that have small followings. Once you get momentum going, you can leverage your buzz to strike deals with more prominent influencers.
3. How A Four Minute Skit For The Walking Dead Got 13 Million Views
Goal: Many companies feel like they need to drive the entire marketing campaign when it comes to working with influencers. However, influencers often have a better idea of what kind of content to create for their followers. The successful show, The Walking Dead, decided to promote their show through a downloadable app.
Action Plan: They reached out to some of the biggest YouTubers in the game. Instead of making the decisions for these influencers, they let them take the wheel.
Results: The results? The influencers got together and created a four-minute skit that resulted in almost 13 million views.
Takeaways: The lesson here is that influencers have a better understanding of who their audience is and what kind of content is appealing to them. Collaborate with influencers in the right channel but allow the influencers freedom to create unique content for their specific audiences.
4. How Fiji Water's Content-Driven Campaign Led To Success
Goal: To many users, influencer marketing campaigns can be off-putting because many of them are downright ads that offer little or no value. So instead of doing what most brands do, Fiji Water decided to partner with blogger Danielle Bernstein to create a content-driven campaign.
Action Plan: They created workout videos with the blogger and a personal trainer to design an influencer marketing campaign around fitness. Many in the industry call this type of campaign “branded content,” and it works well when the product aligns with relevant content.
Results: By offering a significant discount for their water delivery service, they drove direct sales as well as promoted their brand.
Takeaways: The lesson here is to come up with creative branded content that adds value to your followers.
5. How Discount Codes Converted Into 15,000 For OshKosh B’Gosh
Goal: When OshKosh B’Gosh wanted to generate more customers, buzz, and sales, they came up with a simple campaign to run during the upcoming spring break.
Action Plan: They partnered with over 70 bloggers and started to promote a discount code for 25% off.
Results: The influencer marketing campaign did very well and resulted in over 15,000 engagements, hundreds of shares, and many new sales/customers for the brand.
Takeaways: The lesson here is to work with the right influencers whose followers are also your target audience. If you can find a proper timing to run your campaign (like a holiday or special event), it will enhance the results of your influencer marketing campaign. You also need to make sure that the discount code is enticing. People will be less likely to act on a 10 to 15 percent off code than a 25 to 50 percent off promotion.
6. Dorot's Winning Influential Marketing Campaign With Tutorial Based Promotion
Goal: When companies start to experiment with influencer marketing campaigns, they often wonder how they can promote their products and services without being pushy. A good tactic to use is to demonstrate how a product or service works.
Action Plan: In this example, a food company Dorot got influencers to create recipes using their chopped herb blends. To top it off, Dorot decided to add a $1 discount code to get readers to take action.
Results: Each blogger created a recipe and tutorial on how to use the products for their readers.
Takeaways: The takeaway is pretty clear. Instead of talking how great your product or service is, demonstrate how it works. Come up with valuable content that incorporates your product or service which communicates the value of your product far better than a standard promotion.
7. How 50,000 Likes Resulted From The Body Shop's Massive Giveaways
- Goal: Even smaller brands operating eCommerce stores can get excellent results by using influencer marketing campaigns correctly. The Body Shop, a vegetarian based beauty company, decided to promote their new product line through a simple giveaway.
- Action Plan: They got in touch with the influencers in Belgium to promote their giveaway through a collection of photos. The idea was to get local users to share the social posts using hashtags. All users had to do to enter the product line giveaway was make a post with the hashtag #HealthyMoment.
- Results: The influencer marketing campaign resulted in over 50,000 likes and more Belgian based followers for their social media pages.
- Takeaways: The takeaway here is to make it easy for users to enter your contest or giveaway and base it around a simple hashtag that becomes an efficient method to establish brand awareness. It will also help if you target specific influencers (in this case, Belgium based) to reach the right audience.
8. Major Brand Visibility From BoxedWater's ReTree Project
- Goal: BoxedWater is a company that sells water in environmentally friendly packaging. So, it was only natural that they build an influencer marketing campaign around an environmental cause. In this case, they partnered up with the National Forest Foundation to promote their ReTree Project.
- Action Plan: The project aimed to plant two trees for every photo that was posted by users on Instagram. If you can tie your brand to a relevant cause, then you can leverage it to extend your brand's reach.
- Results: In BoxedWater's example, their environmentally focused influencer marketing campaign brought about the support of many celebrity names.
- Takeaways: It tapped into the altruistic nature of people. All users had to do was post a photo and a hashtag in order for two new trees to get planted under the project.
9. How DJ Khaled Helped With Stride Gum's Buzzworthy Celebrity Takeover
- Goal: One of the best ways to generate buzz around your brand is to attach yourself to a popular celebrity.
- Action Plan: In this example, Stride Gum decided to reach out to famous hip-hop producer, DJ Khaled. The partnership made sense because DJ Khaled has a large and responsive following on Snapchat. But instead of the standard approach where a celebrity endorses a brand, they decided to make the campaign unique. DJ Khaled would regularly takeover Stride Gum's Snapchat page. The takeovers included everything from interviews and fun conversations.
- Results: The influencer marketing campaign resulted in his followers coming to Stride Gum's Snapchat page to join in on the event.
- Takeaways: Many brands can use the same takeover feature available on Instagram and Snapchat to force the influencer's followers to come to their social media page.
10. How Nikon and SXSW's Strategic Partnership Turned Into A Branding Success
- Goal: A strategic partnership isn't the first thing to come to mind when it comes to influencer marketing. However, the Nikon and SXSW's collaboration is a perfect example of a perfectly executed partnership campaign.
- Action Plan: Nikon was the exclusive camera used for all the photos in the SXSW music event. All of the social media posts prominently mentioned the two brands, and they would also cross-promote each other on their social media accounts.
- Results: In short, they leveraged with the entire network between the two companies resulting in an even greater reach.
- Takeaways: Strategic partnerships also have another benefit. If a partner already is working with several influencers, your social media posts will also trickle down to their followers. You want to use this example to think about potential partners that you can work with and how you can complement each other through social media content.
These ten examples take a different approach on how to utilize influencers and are ones you can model for your marketing campaigns. It is also important to note that you should approach these influencers in the best possible manner to create trustworthy and lasting relationships. Whichever method you choose will depend on your company's goals, but the important thing here is to focus on the details that have made these campaigns work successfully.
The post Get Inspired! 10 Innovative Influencer Marketing Campaigns appeared first on NinjaOutreach.
source https://ninjaoutreach.com/influencer-marketing-campaigns-ideas/
Wednesday 8 August 2018
4 Foolproof Steps for Cold Email Outreach That Actually Work
When you’re just starting out with no contacts or support group to back you up, cold email outreach is one of the most reliable ways to build your customer base.
Take Nathan Barry, for example. As the founder of ConvertKit, an email marketing platform, he was able to grow his company to $900,000 monthly recurring revenue by sending cold emails to professional bloggers (and he is still doing that -- that’s how powerful this strategy has proven to be for him).
But people typically see a very low open and response rate from cold emails. I would say that the typical reply rate is 1-2%. That is, out of 100 cold email recipients, only 1or 2 would reply and even then, those responses don’t necessarily lead to conversions. This is why many people typically avoid cold email strategies.
Here’s where this guide can help you.
If you want to do a successful cold email outreach campaign (just like any other kind of campaign), you need to have a strategy in place.
There are certain steps to cold email that have proven to be the most effective.
Follow along and you’ll find a step-by-step strategy that has worked for many A-list cold emailing experts.
1. Find the decision-maker
The first mistake you could make when doing a cold email outreach campaign is sending your email to the wrong person. Sending a pitch for a company-wide health insurance package to an IT manager is probably not going to have your desired impact.
Now depending on what you’re offering in your emails, the person you should target is different.
If you know who exactly to target, like the editor or owner of a blog, you’re all set, but if you’re selling to a large company and you don’t know the ideal person, you need to look for a specific role that’s responsible for acquiring your product or service.
Target the right role
Look for the roles related to your product. For example, if you’re selling a sales-related product -- like a sales management platform -- you should contact a sales manager or director. If you’re reaching out to offer your copywriting services, it’s a good idea to contact the content manager, rather than the CEO.
If you’re targeting a small company or startup, the right decision maker is likely the CEO. So, unless you find a different director or manager responsible for a section -- like a content marketing manager or social media manager -- you can confidently reach out to the CEO.
As a rule of thumb, you can guess the decision maker based on the company’s size:
- 0-10 employees: The decision maker is usually the CEO unless the company has co-founders in the vertical you’re selling into (e.g., CTO for Product, CMO for Marketing) or has experienced VPs.
- 10-50 employees: VPs generally have buying power here.
- 50-500 employees: At this size, look for specialized roles, such as Sales Manager, Business Development Manager, etc..
- 500+ employees: Find regional, specialized roles, such as East Coast Rep, North America Rep, New York City Rep, etc.
After you’ve identified the role you want to contact, you can check out their company’s website to find the page that introduces their team.
If you didn’t have any luck there, try searching their company in LinkedIn or Crunchbase to find the suitable role. You will probably find the specific role using these methods.
After you found the right person to contact, it’s time to find their email address.
How to find email addresses for cold email outreach
1.Search for the company’s website. In many cases, each role’s email address is included there.
2. Use NinjaOutreach’s email finder. Enter the person’s name and company domain to find the corporate email. Or, you can enter a domain and see all emails associated with that domain.
3. Alternatively, check if they posted their email address on the “Contact and Personal Info” section on LinkedIn.
4. Test various email formats in MailTester to find the one that fits. Typically, company email addresses are formatted in one of these ways:
- first@company.com
- first.last@company.com
- firstlast@company.com
- firstinitiallastname@company.com
- firstlastinitial@company.com
5. Once you find a valid combination, use a Chrome extension called Sales Navigator by LinkedIn to find out if an email address is associated with that LinkedIn account.
2. Craft cold email subject lines that work
At this point, it’s time to figure out a cold email subject line that will get their attention. To do that, you need to keep these some things in mind.
How to craft cold email subject lines
- Be relevant: Cite an article they’ve written, a person you both know, any new projects their company is working on, or a problem they’re facing (and how to solve it). This will make your cold email subject line more relevant.
For example, use cold email subject lines like:
- “We both know [a person]”
- “A word on your [name of the project]”
- “Could your sales team produce more leads? Here’s how”
- “How I lost your Sperry's ... and why you should meet with me”
2. Use your industry’s hottest news: If a personality, product, number, or practice is trending in your industry, use it in your cold email subject line. It will pique the receiver's interest and get a click.
Some examples:
- “Facebook dropped the ball—we picked it up”
- “The new Amazon feature rocks but there’s a catch”
- “AI helping you get more leads?”
If you’re not sure about how to position your product while entertaining the receiver, consider talking to an expert consultant.
Don’t use clickbait in your cold email subject lines
There is an insidious trend in email marketing that has been creeping up lately, and it’s a reputation-ruining mistake that a lot of people (even established marketers) make: clickbait cold email subject lines.
In other words, email marketers trick their recipients into opening their cold emails with gimmicky subject lines that only end up frustrating the receiver.
If you’re wondering what makes a clickbait title, here are some examples:
What is a cold email subject line?
- Deceptive about who the email is from: “Did I leave my jacket at your place?” seems to be from a friend, but it’s not.
- Deceptive about previous email exchanges: the blatant “Re:” type
- Deceptive about the urgency of a message: “Urgent -- Update your information.” You click on it just to find it’s a promotional email.
- Deceptive about an action taken by the subscriber: “Your Reservation Confirmation,” “About your order,” “Thanks for your order!”
3. Write a killer cold email copy
The killer cold email copy has three characteristics:
- It connects at a personal level
- It offers a single core benefit (not more)
- It elicits a simple response (not an awkward, complicated one that could have been better off avoided)
How do you personalize your cold email copy?
Know your recipient and the company he’s working for well. That is:
- Research your recipient well by visiting his social media feed and his website. Read his content, and check if they’ve been mentioned in the news or achieved something amazing. Research their (current and past) position in the company, find out who they’ve worked with and the challenges they’ve faced.
- Research the company. Find out the big challenges they’re facing and their recent achievements. Read their press releases or any articles they’ve published on reputable blogs, etc.
NinjaOutreach’s Chrome Extension helps to do this kind of research more efficiently.
As you browse the web and stumble upon potential contacts or some important information about them, you can use the NinjaOutreach extension to view their SEO and social data.
The extension also automatically crawls for emails and other contact info.
As you evaluate leads on the go, you can add them to a specific list and update their data in your database, or click the contact tab and go straight to outreach.
After you’ve done your homework on your target lead, be sure to connect your pitch with this information to make it personal.
For example, you can start by praising your lead for his/her recent achievements, then talk about the specific issues you’ve found (from your research) that he/she might be facing and offer your solution.
Offer a single core benefit in your cold outreach email
When offering your solution (or benefit), don’t overwhelm them. Many cold emails go unanswered because they leave the receiver in decision paralysis.
To avoid this, identify a single problem and offer your solution.
Keep these points in mind:
- An effective core benefit transforms the receiver's current self into a desired self. As Consulting.com explains, people are extremely driven by the desire to be transformed from their current self to an ideal self.
- Research your receiver’s pain points and potential needs and position your product as a solution to their problem.
- Prove yourself credible by citing relevant experience and clients that you’ve helped.
What questions should you ask in your cold email?
Remember, your goal is to remove barriers as much as you can to get a response from your recipients, so always end your cold email with questions that need a simple answer, such as:
- “Would this be a problem for you?” Assuming you’ve explained a possible problem they’re facing—such as having too many cold leads—in your sales pitch, ask this question to ensure you’re on the same page.
- “Interested in a free demo of how our platform can [cite the benefit]?” You’ve identified their problem and offered your platform as a solution. This is the most risk-free, benefit-loaded question you can ask. Once you receive a “Yes,” discuss if they prefer the demo to be delivered in person or online.
- “I think the best way to discuss what we can do for you is over the phone. Would you be interested in that?” Most busy business people aren’t a fan of this question, but if you’ve personalized your email, identified their problem correctly, and positioned yourself the right way, they should be interested in a phone chat with you.
4. Don’t forget to follow up
Sometimes, it’s not your fault that your emails have gone unnoticed. According to the most recent Email Statistics Report by Radicati Group, an average business person receives 97 business emails and sends 43 of them per day.
A lot of inbox activity right?
The best way to deal with this issue is by sending follow-up emails.
You might want to send a follow-up email a week after you didn’t hear from your recipient, then send another one two weeks later, then send one after a month, and maybe some months later.
This way, you can ensure that your emails will get noticed.
Schedule your follow-up emails
With the email marketing tool NinjaOutreach,, for example, you can automatically launch email outreach campaigns and even set logic rules to automate when a follow-up email should be sent.
As you’ll see in the image below, you can set a follow-up to go out on a certain date, time, or after X number of days.
In Conclusion
Cold email outreach should not necessarily be difficult or frustrating. I’ve already given you a simple, 4-part formula to start your next cold email outreach campaign with.
To recap:
- Find and target the right decision maker
- Write an attention-grabbing personalized subject line
- Write a killer email body
- Send timely follow-up emails
These tips have stood the test of time in my years of practicing cold email outreach, so I recommend that you try it out, and see for yourself.
The post 4 Foolproof Steps for Cold Email Outreach That Actually Work appeared first on NinjaOutreach.
source https://ninjaoutreach.com/cold-email-outreach-tips/
Instagram Influencer Case Study Engagement Analysis of Followers & Locations
In the last Instagram case study we analyzed the characteristics of a few metrics that can be used to gauge the quality of an Instagram profile, the most important of which are the engagement rate and the followers to following ratio.
At the end of the post we mentioned that we were about to add 6.5 million profiles to our database, a 130% increase from the 5 million profiles we had. However, in the meantime we also applied numerous improvements to our social engines and in particular we radically changed the way we discover new profiles. The result is that now we don't only have 13.5 million profiles, but 24 million profiles.
In this post we will investigate the geographical data associated to the profiles, the relations between some important hashtags, and audience metrics.
Locations
The geographical location of a profile is estimated by taking into account a variety of factors, like the biography of the profile, the posts and the location tags on each post. The profiles in our database are distributed according to the following choropleth map:
As can be seen in the image, the countries with the highest number of Instagram profiles are the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Right behind are Russia, India, the principal European countries and South American countries like Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia.
Location data can also be used to infer the language spoken by Instagram users (only official languages are considered):
English and Spanish are the most common by a wide margin. French is in third place thanks to Canada and all the African countries where it is an official language, and Portuguese follows with similar numbers, being Brazil's official language. Arabic, Russian and Indonesian also have a strong presence in the top ten.
These results are in line with the data provided by Statista, suggesting that our software collects profiles in a uniform manner:
In particular, we can focus on the profiles from the United States:
California leads the rankings with almost one-third of all the Instagram profiles from the US. Texas, New York and Florida follow at close distance. Once again we are satisfied with these results, since they mirror the population density across US states: if the population is concentrated in a handful of states, clearly the influencers will be as well. This is also the reason why there are so few influencers from the Midwest states.
Hashtags
Our software collects hashtags from all the posts it analyzes. So far we have collected more than 20 million unique hashtags. While a lot of those are obscure and fairly meaningless, the most frequent ones in our database are also the most frequent ones on Instagram: #love, #instagood, #photography, #summer and #repost are the first five.
In this analysis we focus our attention to the tags that signal sponsored or promoted content. The most used ones are #ad, #ambassador, #collab, #collaboration, #paid, #partner, #partnership, #sp, #spon, #sponsor, #sponsored. The next chart shows the number of profiles that have used these hashtags in their posts (note: the bars indicate the number ofprofiles, and not of posts containing a particular hashtag, which can be easily looked up on Instagram if desired).
We wondered how these hashtags were related to each other, and it turns out that the connections are extremely complicated. In the image below, which has been severely simplified in an attempt to maintain readability, one can observe which topics are most frequent with the most common promotional hashtags.
The blue circles represent the most frequent hashtags used in combination with the one that indicate sponsored content, but there is not enough space to label them all, so we just summarized the most common topics.
The #ad hashtag is used in pretty much all contexts, and the same is true, to a lesser degree, for the #collaborationhashtag. On the other hand, some less frequently used hashtags for sponsored content appear in very specific circumstances. In the beauty and cosmetics sector we see a predominance of the #collab and #collaboration hashtags. The #ambassadorhashtag seems to be used almost exclusively for fitness, sports and summertime topics. The #partner hashtag appears for the most part in posts related to photography, nature and fitness again.
The obscure #sp hashtag is a separate story. It is a shorthand for "sponsored" and it is used by some influencers to disclose promoted content (these practices have been deemed deceitful by the FCC in the US). However, we discovered unusually strong connections with Brazil, and it turns out that it is also used by Brazilian influencers to tag posts mentioning São Paulo, further adding to the confusion (similarly, #rj is used for Rio de Janeiro).
Posting frequency
We include a quick analysis of the posting frequency, since this update also included this new metric for all the profiles. We start with an overview of the distribution of the number of posts per week across all the profiles:
The great majority of the profiles post a few times a week on average. One may wonder if major influencers post more than regular profiles. That is indeed the case: the biggest influencers post 4.2 times per week on average, while smaller profiles have an average of 3.2 posts per week.
Lastly, we investigated whether posting frequency had a visible relation with engagement rate. Short answer: it does. In the scatter plot below, one can see that the engagement tends to get lower as the posting frequency increases:
The two charts suggest that for major influencers this diminishing effect is not as strong, but the inverse relation is still visible. As to why a higher posting frequency correlates with a lower engagement rate there could be several factors at play, like:
- more posting corresponds to lower quality overall;
- too much posting is penalized by Instagram's feed algorithms.
Bonus: audience metrics
This update also includes the long-awaited audience metrics. From this moment our scrapers will be able to estimate the demographics of the audience of an Instagram influencers.
The technology behind this is proprietary, so this post cannot contain too many details. However, we can present a very general overview of the way it works. The computing unit in charge of estimating audience metrics is essentially a machine-learning pipeline composed by three different convolutional neural networks that work together to estimate age and gender from a profile picture. Of course, this is only possible if the profile picture is a selfie. This is where the first neural network comes into play: we use the other two models for prediction only if we detect a face in the picture.
This process is repeated for the users belonging to a particular influencer's audience, and then the results are aggregated. The final metrics can be summarized in a chart like the following one:
These metrics are extremely powerful and can provide deep insights into the interests of an influencer's audience. Audience metrics will be rolled out in batches and at first only for the biggest profiles, since these metrics cannot be estimated reliably when the audience size is too small.
Conclusions
In this blog post we presented the results from analyses that we performed on very recently collected Instagram data. In particular, we observed that the Instagram profiles are distributed across locations as one would expect from third-party data, and then we explored the differences between the most common hashtags used to signal promoted content.
Our engineering team continues to improve the infrastructure for the data collection and analysis. We will provide new updates and analyses as our database grows further. Hashtags and their relationships seem to particularly interesting, so in the future we may post a blog post that goes into detail about that.
The post Instagram Influencer Case Study Engagement Analysis of Followers & Locations appeared first on NinjaOutreach.
source https://ninjaoutreach.com/instagram-influencer-case-study-engagement-analysis-followers-locations/