How To Use Influencer Marketing To Grow Your Personal Brand

Influencer marketing is a key strategy to growing your personal brand.

Recent studies show that influencer marketing is extremely effective.

Tapinfluence and Nielsen Catalina Solutions research concluded that influencer marketing generates 11x more ROI than traditional advertising annually.

Influence Marketing blows away other activities, creating $285 in incremental sales per 1,000 impressions.

Unlike advertising, influencer marketing content is available permanently online, increasing media value over time with no additional investment.

ROI has been shown to double after three months, with 2x as many impressions after the campaign ends.

So where should you begin to grow your personal brand using influencer marketing?

1. Set goals for your influencer marketing campaign - just like you would any other type of marketing activity. Your goals should include the type of people you want to reach and any specific subsets about the type of eyeballs you want to reach will help when it comes to shortlisting potential influencers, as you can compare your target audience with their fan base.

2. Create a blogging program to get influencer marketing started. A blogging program can sit as a page on your website and invite bloggers, influencers and agencies to get in touch with you. This page should set incentives and terms and act as a recruitment centre, so bloggers excited to work with you can easily get in touch with you.

3. Reaching out to influencers should be done on an individual, one-on-one basis, with tailored outreach that references the influencer's recent work. You can include collaboration ideas in the initial email but, it pay's to be open to the influencer's own suggestions. If you allow the influencer to be creative about the collaboration and put forward ideas that fit authentically with their own lifestyle and platform, there's a greater chance of creating something that stands out and breaks the mold.

4. You should also start creating your own shortlist of influencers. Keep your eyes peeled for names repeatedly cropping up in your industry and add them to your target list. Look for new and emerging blogs and be vigilant about spending time on social media, browsing through relevant hastags and monitoring accounts that regularly post about topics of interest to you and your customer base.

Personal branding is about how you use your influence. Remember, relationships take time to cultivate so set aside time to regularly invest in research, outreach, and identifying collaboration opportunities. This type of strategy shoudl be slow burn rather than an instant fix to build your personal brand.