10 Yetis Insight Blog - How To Smash Influencer Outreach In Your PR Campaign

When you work in an industry as unique as PR, there are certain days when you have to stop yourself and really think about the best ways to approach different campaigns for different clients.

For examples, let’s say you’re working on a campaign for toy boats. You might find yourself planning your media lists and then stop yourself in the middle of your process and think...how can I truly reach the people that would genuinely be interested in this toy boat? What methods do I need to take to get people to listen to me? Well what better way to reach thousands of people then to go through an influential person who has thousands of followers who idolise them in specific niches.

Influencer outreach can be an incredibly powerful tool you will want to use in a myriad of campaigns. However it can be a cruel mistress. To get it right you have to push the correct buttons, because when it goes wrong, well...it goes really wrong. There are ways to avoid this terrible outcome though and you will want to learn them to optimise and truly get the love your campaign deserves.

• Influencer Identification

There is next to no point in sending a release or campaign idea about gaming to someone who bakes cakes and has followers who also like baking cakes. Everyone loves cake, sure, but each release or campaign idea you send will have its own niche. For example, if you’re sending a release out about a person getting paid to play video games and do nothing else for a year, you would send this to influential people who tend to concentrate on all things nerdy, this way you optimise your reaching capabilities to your desired demographic.

Finding these influential people is the most challenging part of this whole approach. You want to find influential bloggers who have thousands of devoted followers but if they have too many you run the risk of having to pay them to run any campaign ideas or releases you send to them. If you have the luxury to do this, then utilise what you can, however it feels far more natural to find bloggers who truly want to talk about your campaign without having to get paid off to do so. To find your desired group of influencers, Google can be your best friend. There are lists upon lists upon lists of influential bloggers and upcoming bloggers plastered all over the internet, this method is efficient however it can take you quite a while to sift through them all to find the blogs with a decent DA score and 1000+ twitter followers. Wesbites like BuzzSumo can help you with your search and may prevent you from having to search through the darkest corners of the web

• Entice them

When you find your influencers that you think will help your campaign reach its maximum potential you then need to entice them with all your might. If they are interested in the brand you’re representing through your campaign more often than not they will be happy to be part of it. However you might want to put on your most charismatic and charming face, just in case. Treat them like you would a friend, chat, joke and feed them snippets of details on your campaign which will lead to them wanting more from you.

• Socialise

It’s easy enough to find influential bloggers and drop them once you’ve rinsed all the coverage you could possibly squeeze out of them, but don’t do this. Keep your influencers close, always. This way when it comes to having to send out another release about toy dinosaurs you will have that mummy blogger you spoke to a few days ago to hand. It will prove incredibly beneficial in the long run and also increase your representation as a really friendly digital PR agency.

• Let the people talk

Everyone has their own opinion and you can’t stop that (although wouldn’t it be easier if you could?) so your influencer will say what they want and as scary as that may seem, it will be fine. They have agreed to be part of this after all and you have to put some trust in them. Forcing them to say what you want could (and probably will) backfire as you may really tick them off, resulting in them possibly blacklisting you and your client.

• Relax, don’t do it

You may feel the need to email and call your influencer if they haven’t replied in days and you feel like your campaign really needs them, but don’t do this. The unfortunate likelihood is that if they haven’t replied to you themselves in a few days then they just aren’t interested and no number of frantic calls and emails will make them change their mind. Instead approach your communications with influencers with a more relaxed demeanour. You can take them or leave them; there are hundreds more gaming bloggers out there anyway right?

At the end of the day, influencer outreach should be approached with a relaxed and friendly attitude. Bloggers are people too!