It is old news at this point that producing good content marketing strategy (e.g. blogs, ebooks, videos) that is valuable to your audiences is important. The newer(ish) news is that because this insight has been percolating for a number of years, the interwebs are stuffed full of good content. The difficulty now is getting people to read your blog posts. The world has changed.
When there is a proliferation of anything, natural locations emerge as central hubs where the best activity and information is disseminated. In every industry there are websites, blogs, and newsletters that are standard locations for everyone to go to get the best content. And while it was sufficient 5 years ago to start a blog and continuously populate it with quality content?—?it is no longer so. For content marketing to have the same impact and influence we must pivot and devote much of our attention that was once focused on the blog to influencer/amplification channels.
Discovering Influencers and Amplification Channels for Marketing Strategy
When you are looking for the best influencer/amplification channels you are looking for two attributes:
- Size
- Relevance
Only spend time on channels if they are both large and relevant. How you discover the size and relevance will depend on the channel so I will indicate that in each of the following channels.
One universal metric that is of Page Authority by Moz. Google is the largest channel and Moz has done the best and most scientific research on ranking factors (see their 2015 Ranking Factor Study). Their proprietary ranking index called Page Authority has the highest correlation to Google rankings from over 170 ranking factors that they studied. We will come back to this metric after we have culled the influencer/amplification channels.
Tools
There are a handful of wildly helpful tools to discover the best influencer channels.
#1 – Google
I know, I know?—?that is so obvious and non-complex. But don’t forget that Google has the most advanced algorithm for providing relevant and popular content. Over 90% of searchers will not go past the 1st page. So statistically, if you provide the most relevant keywords in your search query, the 1st page of Google will be the most relevant and sizable influencer channels.
#2 – Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a fantastic tool that allows you to search for a topic and see the top shared content on that topic. By specifying different time frames you can determine the most socially popular content distributers.
#3 – LinkedIn Groups
When you search on LinkedIn, you can search for many different things including job titles, people, or industries. To find influential channels search for your industry and then scroll down on to the left side and twirl open the “groups” section. There you will see the most popular groups in ascending order.
The Pitch
After you have identified the main influencer/amplification channels in your industry it is time to produce/write your content and pitch it.
Even More
If you’re interested in more ways to optimize your content, check out our free eBook:
