SEO

The Fundamentals of Influencer Marketing

Published

5 months ago

October 23, 2022

The Fundamentals of Influencer Marketing

What exactly is influencer marketing? How does it differ from other forms of advertising? And why should marketers care?

Influencer marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses looking to reach new audiences.

Marketers use various strategies to identify influential individuals and gain access to their followers.

In this article, we’ll discuss what influencer marketing is and the variable for incorporating influencer marketing into a brand’s strategy.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing uses celebrities, athletes, bloggers, and other influential figures to market brands.

Influencers are those who have large social media followings and have the ability to influence their audience.

Brands use influencers to promote their product or service through paid advertisements, free giveaways, and endorsements. In addition, they can generate significant brand awareness and loyalty through paid or unpaid posts.

The goal is to get them to share valuable information and create excitement around a particular topic, product, or service. The key benefit for brands is that they reach a larger audience at a lower cost than traditional advertising methods.

The Right Influencer

However, this opportunity comes with some responsibility on the part of the brand.

Brands must be careful when choosing an influencer because it’s easy for them to fall in love with the idea of working with someone influential.

Unfortunately, without thorough background research, this can lead to a situation where a potentially ideal influencer promotes products that aren’t aligned with a brand’s values. Therefore, it’s important to ensure the influencer you want to work with aligns with your brand’s goals and values.

Influencer marketing also requires brands to pay influencers fairly. If you don’t pay your influencers what they deserve, they won’t promote your brand in the vision you want them to. Additionally, you can risk a potentially fruitful relationship.

Creating A Plan

When collaborating with an influencer, it’s essential to not just think of the total cost but the project’s goals and establish what you would like accomplished in the front end.

This can include a discovery call to plan out potential posts or how-to videos. Will you provide the content and supporting information, or will they? Of course, all this will affect the cost and time involved in creating the posts.

Influencer marketing has become one of the most effective ways to get people talking about your business online. It’s essential to know how to find the right influencers for your niche to ensure your message gets across.

**Why We All Need Influencer Marketing & How We Can Use It**

A study showed that in 2022 influencer marketing is set to reach $16.4 billion and 75% of brand marketers plan to include influencer marketing in this year’s strategy. This type of marketing is growing fast and doing well.

And this isn’t just for B2C brands, since 86% of B2B brands find influencer marketing a valuable strategy. That’s a considerable return on investment if you have the right approach.

If you’re only using traditional digital marketing (SEO, PPC, social media, etc.), you’re clearly missing out on a huge opportunity to increase your ROI.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an agency, brand, or business – everyone can benefit from trying influencer marketing.

Don’t believe me? You should. Influencer marketing is not “out of your league.” Here’s why.

Influencer Marketing For Agencies

How many clients does your agency have? That’s how many new influencing opportunities your agency has at its fingertips.

Agencies can use their clients, the ones they like and like them, to help promote their agency for them.

Think of it like receiving a referral or customer review.

If someone enjoys working with you and the business next door asks how they got so successful so quickly, they’re going to tell the next-door business all about your agency and how you helped them.

Case Studies & New Content

Capitalize on this process and ask your clients for video testimonials to become a part of your referral program (create one) and if you can use their results for case studies.

If you’ve been able to impact a client positively, they’re highly likely to approve you sharing the story of how you took them from one to 10.

Gather a dozen different case studies from your past and current clients to publish on your website, social pages, email newsletters, and ads. This isn’t only additional content but content your existing and new clients will appreciate.

You can also make the case study an appealing PDF and share it with the case study client for them to share among their peers.

If you help them reach their goals, they’ll love the PDF filled with graphics, charts, and impressive numbers to share with other business owners.

Trial By Error

Another way to utilize your clients for influencer marketing is to ask your clients to test out a new product.

If they’re a big client of yours, it’s appropriate to let them know that your agency is trying to innovate with all of the tech advances, and you want to try a new strategy or product with them as a test.

FREE Of Charge

If things work out with the test, woohoo! You’ve added another section to the contract. And you have a new service or product to charge for in the future.

If things don’t work out, you get insightful and honest feedback from the client and know how to fix the product or plan.

Brands

One of the most significant ways I see brands utilize influencer marketing is by partnering up with other brands.

Before I get too deep into this, I want to clarify that there are prominent corporate players like Sprint and Blue Apron. And they’re also individual brands like famous Instagram users and YouTube celebrities.

A brand can be an individual brand, like you trying to grow your role as a digital marketer in the industry. However, it can also represent a larger entity for cosmetics and skincare like Maybelline.

Now, back to the brands and the whole influencer marketing idea. Brands will partner together in campaigns to help widen their audience with influencer marketing.

They can use relevant brands in the same industry or reach out of the spectrum and partner with entirely different brands to increase their exposure to a new audience.

When you work with an influencer in a different industry, you get a level of influencer where you can capitalize on the new audience. Be strategic in who you reach out to and ask to partner up in a new influencing campaign.

Partnering with the wrong brand will profoundly impact your brand’s reputation and possibly ruin it.

Red Bull partnering with Coca-Cola for a new content campaign also wouldn’t be the best of ideas. On the one hand, Red Bull is heavily involved in extreme sports. But, they’ve chosen that angle due to their actual product, an energy drink named Red Bull that essentially “gives you wings,” to be extreme.

Sure, the Red Bull athletes could do an incredible stunt riding a mountain bike down the ledge of the mountain holding both a Coca-Cola and a Red Bull can, but what would be the point?

It wouldn’t make sense because, technically, the two can be seen as competitors. They both are on-the-go drink manufacturers.

Instead, Red Bull could partner with Nike and do a content campaign featuring Nike’s new apparel line, Red Bull’s energy drink, and summer sports.

Just because your brand is in the same industry as another doesn’t mean a collab will work. It’s important to research how your consumers will react to the ad.

Businesses

We can most commonly recognize influencer marketing when businesses do it.

If your business makes pipes for the plumbing industry, head to that list of the most famous plumbers and start reaching out.

Doing outreach is a huge part of influencer marketing. It almost feels like putting on a public relations or journalist hat for a second as you try and narrow down your influencers.

Once you’ve found an influencer who has agreed to help promote your product, don’t just stop there. The more influencers you have, the more brand exposure you get, as well as trust.

The word will get around if one of the most famous plumbers uses your pipes for repairs. Other plumbers will trust the renowned plumber and follow in their footsteps to purchase and use only your pipes.

When To Pay An Influencer

Sometimes, you don’t need to pay an influencer. Instead, samples of the product you’re asking them to promote, discounts, or free services usually suffice.

It changes and becomes a more costly strategy when you pick who the influencer is and depends on the type of content you want.

The bigger the influencer, the more they’ll want.

If you’re aiming for that Kardashian type of exposure, you will need to break out the wallet. And the credit card. And possibly your mortgage.

Influencers Who Cost, A Lot

If you’re a brand, business, or agency with goals like a Kardashian type of exposure and the budget to match. Then, by all means, reach out to your lawyers and start preparing contracts for when you lock in those influencers.

Make sure your contracts clearly state the expectations of the influencer. For example, if you want them to run the content by you before they publish it, specify that in the contract.

If you want the influencer to only be able to promote your plumbing pipes and not work with any other pipe companies, state it in the contract.

Influencers Of Little To No Cost

For the rest of us, focus on the more affordable influencers. These people may already invest much of their time promoting your brand because they love your product or what you do.

Death Wish Coffee is an excellent example of this.

People love their product, the ridiculously strong coffee that comes with a side of sarcasm. The brand speaks its customer’s language, making it fun for customers to engage and promote the product themselves.

This coffee company can monitor its hashtag mentions and unlock hundreds of potential influencers that would love to receive a free month of coffee for posting more about their brand.

Look at what kind of mentions your brand, business, or agency is attracting online and follow the conversation. You’ll quickly discover who’s talking about you the most.

Finding An Influencer

Then, look at their followers if they have a healthy following reach out and see if they’d be interested in partnering up with you on an influencer campaign.

Don’t stop reading. I know those of you who are rolling your eyes yelling, “NO ONE MENTIONS MY BRAND!”

Don’t worry. I’ve got a solution for you, too. Look at your big competitors. Think of the Red Bulls and Coca-Colas of your industry.

See what kind of mentions they’re getting and from who. Then, reach out to those influencers and pitch away.

You never know who will say yes unless you ask.

Plus, they may not want as much as you think or even be willing to promote for free after getting to know more about you and your business.

Nowadays, there are numerous influencer marketing tools out there that can help connect you with the right people and brands. So, if you’re having trouble finding people you want to work with, it can be beneficial to give one of the tools a try.

Final Thoughts

Influencer marketing has become much more than just a buzzword.

Marketers have been using influencers to promote their products for years, but brands are now using influencers to build customer relationships and create new revenue streams.

By leveraging the power of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, marketers can connect directly with consumers through influencers.

This can help to increase brand awareness and drive sales. It can also open your brand, business, or agency to new audiences.

As we get closer to the end of this year, try strategizing the influencer marketing opportunities you have out there.

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TikTok Updated Community Guidelines To Include AI Content

Published

46 mins ago

March 22, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

TikTok Updated Community Guidelines To Include AI Content

TikTok has updated its Community Guidelines, which will go into effect on April 21, 2023.

The updated guidelines introduce TikTok’s Community Principles, which guide content moderation to uphold human rights and international legal frameworks.

TikTok worked with over 100 organizations globally to strengthen its rules to address new threats and reduce potential user harm.

Key changes to Community Guidelines apply to synthetic media, tribes, and civic and election integrity.

AI-Generated Content

TikTok defines “synthetic media” as content created or modified by AI. While AI and related technologies allow creators to express themselves in many new ways, they can also blur the line between fact and fiction for viewers.

Creators must label synthetic or altered media as such to mitigate the potential risks of spreading misinformation.

To reduce potential harm, synthetic media featuring real private individuals is prohibited. Private individuals include anyone under 18 and adults who are not public figures. The use of public figures over 18 – government officials, politicians, business leaders, and celebrities – is permitted, but with restrictions.

Creators must not use synthetic media to violate policies against hate speech, sexual exploitation, and severe harassment. They must also clearly disclose synthetic media and manipulated content that depict realistic scenes with fake people, places, or events.

Public figures cannot be used in synthetic audio or video for political or commercial endorsements to mislead users about financial or political issues.

You can, however, use synthetic media in artistic and educational content.

Protection Of Tribes

TikTok policies already include rules meant to protect people and groups with specific attributes from hateful behavior, hate speech, and hateful ideologies.

With new guidelines, the platform added Tribes to the list of protected attributes, including ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation.

While TikTok allows critical content on public figures, as defined above, it prohibits language that harasses, humiliates, threatens, or doxxes everyone.

Users can consult resources and tools provided by TikTok to identify bullying behavior and configure their settings to prevent it from affecting them further.

Civil And Election Integrity

Noting that elections are essential to community dialogue and upholding societal values, TikTok recently emphasized its alleged efforts to encourage topical discussions while maintaining unity.

To achieve this goal, paid political promotion, advertising, and fundraising by politicians or parties are prohibited. This policy applies to traditional ads and compensated creator content.

TikTok claims to support informed civic idea exchanges to promote constructive conversations without allowing misinformation about voting processes and election outcomes. Content that includes unverified claims about election results will not be eligible to appear in the For You Feed.

Before these changes go into effect next month, moderators will receive additional training on enforcing them effectively.

Will Recent Changes Prevent More TikTok Bans?

TikTok’s refreshed Community Guidelines and explanation of Community Principles appear to attempt greater transparency and foster a safe, inclusive, and authentic environment for all users.

TikTok plans to continue investing in safety measures to encourage creativity and connection within its global community of one billion users globally.

TikTok’s latest changes to improve transparency, reduce harm, and provide higher-quality content for users may be part of efforts to prevent the app from being banned in the U.S.

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a full committee hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew on how congress can protect the data privacy of U.S. users and children from online harm.

Organizations like the Tech Oversight Project have also expressed concerns about risks that big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta pose.

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SEO

Google Launches BARD AI Chatbot To Compete With ChatGPT

Published

8 hours ago

March 21, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

Google Launches BARD AI Chatbot To Compete With ChatGPT

Google has unveiled BARD, an AI chatbot designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s chatbot in their Bing search engine.

In a blog post, Google describes Bard as an early AI experiment to enhance productivity, accelerate ideas, and foster curiosity.

You can use BARD to get tips, explanations, or creative assistance in tasks such as outlining blog posts.

With BARD, Google aims to solidify its presence in the AI chatbot space while maintaining its dominance in the search engine market.

Screenshot from: blog.google/technology/ai/try-bard/, March 2023.

BARD’s Technical Details

BARD is powered by a research large language model (LLM) – a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA.

It will be updated with more advanced models over time. As more people use LLMs, they become better at predicting helpful responses.

BARD is designed as a complementary experience to Google Search, allowing users to check its responses or explore sources across the web.

Operating as a standalone webpage, BARD consists of a singular question box instead of being integrated into Google’s search engine.

This strategic move is to adopt new AI technology while preserving the profitability of its search engine business.

Cautious Rollout Amid Unpredictability Concerns

Google’s cautious approach to BARD’s release is in response to the concerns over unpredictable and sometimes unreliable chatbot technology, as demonstrated by competitors.

Google recognizes LLMs can sometimes produce biased, misleading, or false information.

To mitigate these issues, Google allows you to choose from a few drafts of BARD’s response.

You can continue collaborating with BARD by asking follow-up questions or requesting alternative answers.

Screenshot from: blog.google/technology/ai/try-bard/, March 2023.

Google’s Race to Ship AI Products

Since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s introduction of chatbot technology in Bing, Google has prioritized AI as its central focus.

The company’s internal teams, including AI safety researchers, are working collaboratively to accelerate approval for a range of new AI products.

Google’s work on BARD is guided by its AI Principles, focusing on quality and safety.

The company uses human feedback and evaluation to enhance its systems. It has implemented guardrails, such as capping the number of exchanges in a dialogue, to keep interactions helpful and on-topic.

Screenshot from: blog.google/technology/ai/try-bard/, March 2023.

In Development Since 2015

Google has been developing the technology behind BARD since 2015.

However, similar to OpenAI and Microsoft’s chatbots, BARD has not been released to a broader audience due to concerns about generating untrustworthy information and potential biases against certain groups.

Google acknowledges these issues and aims to bring BARD to market responsibly.

BARD Availability

You can sign up to try BARD at bard.google.com.

Access is initially rolling out in the US and UK, with plans to expand to more countries and languages over time. It’s possible to get around the limited rollout with a VPN.

Google requires users to have a Gmail address to sign up and doesn’t accept Google Workspace email accounts.

Sources: Google, The New York Times

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SEO

Will AI Kill SEO? We Asked ChatGPT

Published

15 hours ago

March 21, 2023

EntirewebNewsBot

It happens every couple of years.

First, it was Jason Calacanis and Mahalo, then the early social platforms.

We saw it again with voice search and smart assistants. For a minute, it was TikTok’s turn. Then the metaverse jumped the line.

Now, it’s ChatGPT and AI.

I’m talking, of course, about “SEO killers.”

Every now and then, a new technology comes along, and three things inevitably happen:

Thousands of SEO professionals publish posts and case studies declaring themselves experts in the new thing.
Every publication dusts off its “SEO is dead” article, changes the date, and does a find and replace for the new technology.
SEO continues to be stronger than ever.

Rinse, repeat.

It would seem that search has more lives than a cartoon cat, but the simple truth is: Search is immortal.

How we search, what devices we use, and whether the answer is a link to a website will forever be up for debate.

But as long as users have tasks to complete, they’ll turn somewhere for help, and digital marketers will influence the process.

Will AI Replace Search?

There’s a ton of hype right now about AI replacing both search engines and search professionals – I don’t see that happening. I view ChatGPT as just another tool.

Much like a knife: You can butter bread or cut yourself. It’s all in how you use it.

Will AI replace search engines? Let’s ask it ourselves!

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

That’s a pretty good answer.

Many SEO professionals (including me) have been saying for years that the days of tricking the algorithm are long gone.

SEO has been slowly morphing into digital marketing for a long time now. It’s no longer possible to do SEO without considering user intent, personas, use cases, competitive research, market conditions, etc.

Ok, but won’t AI just do that for us? Is AI going to take my job? Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s ask ChatGPT!

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

AI Isn’t Going To Take Your Job. But An SEO Who Knows How To Use AI To Be More Efficient Just Might

Why? Let’s dive in.

I still see a lot of SEO pros writing articles that ask AI to do things it’s simply incapable of – and this comes from a basic understanding of how large language models actually work.

AI tools, like ChatGPT, aren’t pulling any information from a database of facts. They don’t have an index or a knowledge graph.

They don’t “store” information the way a search engine does. They’re simply predicting what words or sentences will come next based on the material they’ve been trained on. They don’t store this training material, though.

They’re using word vectors to determine what words are most likely to come next. That’s why they can be so good and also hallucinate.

AI can’t crawl the internet. It has no knowledge of current events and can’t cite sources because it doesn’t know or retain that information. Sure, you can ask it to cite sources, but it’s really just making stuff up.

For really popular topics that were discussed a lot, it can get pretty close – because the probabilities of those words coming next are really high – but the more specific you get, the more it will hallucinate.

Given the extreme amount of time and resources it takes to train the model, it will be a long time before AI can answer any queries about current events.

But What About Bing, You.com, And Google’s Upcoming Bard? They Can Do All Of This, Can’t They?

Yes and no. They can cite sources, but that’s based on how they’re implementing it. To vastly oversimplify, Bing isn’t asking for a pure chatbot.

Bing is searching for your query/keyword. It’s then feeding in all the webpages that it would normally return for that search and asking the AI to summarize those webpages.

You and I can’t do that on the public-facing AI tools without hitting token limits, but search engines can!

Ok, Surely This Will Kill SEO. AI Will Just Answer Every Question, Right?

I disagree.

All the way back in 2009 (when we were listening to the Black Eyed Peas on our iPhone 3Gs and updating our MySpace top 8 on Windows Vista), a search engine once called Live was being renamed to Bing.

Why? Because Bing is a verb. This prompted Bill Gates to declare, “The future of search is verbs.”

I love to share this quote with clients every chance I get because that future is now.

Gates wasn’t talking about people typing action words into search engines. He meant that people are trying to “do” something, and the job of search is to help facilitate that.

People often forget that search is a form of pull marketing, where users tell us what they want – not push marketing like a billboard or a TV ad.

As digital marketers, our job is simple: Give users what they want.

This is where the confusion comes in, though.

For many queries that have simple answers, a link to a website with a popup cookie policy, notification alert, newsletter sign-up popup, and ads were never what the user wanted.

It’s just the best thing we had back then. Search engines never set out with the end goal of providing links to websites. They set out to answer questions and help users accomplish tasks.

Even from the earliest days, Google talked about how its goal was to be the Star Trek computer; it just didn’t have the technology to do it then. Now, it does.

For many of these queries, like [how old is Taylor Swift?] or [how many megabytes in a gigabyte?], websites will lose traffic – but it’s traffic they were probably never entitled to.

Who owns that answer anyway? These are questions with simple answers. The user’s task is simply to get a number. They don’t want a website.

Smart SEO pros will focus on the type of queries where a user wants to do something – like buy Taylor Swift tickets, get reviews of her album or concerts, chat with other Swifties, etc. That’s where AI won’t be able to kill SEO or search.

What ChatGPT Can Do Vs. What It Can’t

ChatGPT can accomplish a lot of things.

It’s good at showing me how to write an Excel formula or MySQL query, but it will never teach me MySQL, sell me a course, or let me talk with other developers about database theory.

Those are things a search engine can help me do.

ChatGPT can also help answer many “common knowledge” questions, as long as the topic isn’t contested and is old and popular enough to have shown up in the training data.

Even then, it’s still not 100% accurate – as we’ve seen in countless memes and with one famous bank being called out for its AI-written article not knowing how to calculate interest properly.

AI might list the most talked about bars in NYC, but it can’t recommend the best place to get an Old Fashioned like a human can.

Honestly, all SEO pros talking about using AI to create content are starting to bore me. Answering questions is neat, but where ChatGPT really excels is in text manipulation.

At my agency, we’re already using ChatGPT’s API as an SEO tool to help create content briefs, categorize and cluster keywords, write complicated regular expressions for redirects, and even generate XML or JSON-LD code based on given inputs.

These rely on tons of inputs from various sources and require lots of manual reviews.

We’re not using it to create content, though. We’re using it to summarize and examine other pieces of content and then use those to glean insights. It’s less of an SEO replacement and more of a time saver.

SEO Is Here To Stay

What if your business is built around displaying facts you don’t really “own”? If so, you should probably be worried – not just about AI.

Boilerplate copy tasks may be handled by AI. Recent tests I’ve done on personal sites have shown some success here.

But AI will never be capable of coming up with insights or creating new ideas, staying on top of the latest trends, or providing the experience, expertise, authority, or trust that a real author can.

Remember: It’s not thinking, citing, or even pulling data from a database. It’s just looking at the next-word probabilities.

Unlike thousands of SEO pros who recently updated their Twitter bios, I may not be an expert on AI, but I have a computer science degree. I also know what it takes to understand user needs.

So far, no data shows people would prefer auto-generated, re-worded content over unique curated content written by a real human being.

People want fresh ideas and insights that only people can provide. (If we add an I to E-E-A-T, where should it go?)

If your business or content delivers value through insights, curation, current trends, recommendations, solving problems, or performing an action, then SEO and search engines aren’t going anywhere.

They may change shape from time to time, but that just means job security for me – and I’m good with that.

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