Ads cost money, whether we are talking about traditional or digital media. Search engine marketing (Pay-per-click) and targeted ads in social media among others are efficient ways to reach your target audience, but this all costs money, which some companies do not have. Spamming emails to large email lists is popular in Russia, but email marketing is less effective than in the West, and you can hardly reach 250 000 people unless you have been heavily investing in collecting quality email / CRM databases (or have bought one). This also costs money.

When talking about content marketing, the idea is to provide value-added content that is useful for the target group, which will then encourage people to engage with the content and complete social actions such as start following the company in social media and other properties. Unfortunately, creating value-added content is not free either; you need to have someone to create the content, and hiring people (or paying salary to existing employees) costs money.

So what is the answer? The answer is very simple: we need someone who already has this audience to help us out for free. This is where influencers come into the picture. Influencers are individuals who have the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of their (real or perceived) authority, knowledge, position, or relationships (definition according to businessdictionary.com).

In today’s world, basically each person on this planet is potentially an influencer. People who have access to the Internet may become publishers simply by starting a blog or a social media account. These people become influencers when their audience grows and more people follow their blog / social media profile. Why do people start following the so-called influencers? Because the influencers are contributing something valuable: useful, relevant and interesting content.

Why would these influencers help us? Let’s start first by identifying them. There are companies that help identify influencers such as Klout, but usually this also costs money. The same is true if you want to identify influencers in social media. What can we do then?

Step 1 – Identify the Most Popular Blogs

WordPress is the most popular blogging site in the world, and it’s free to use. One can find the most popular blogs ranked in the site and filter them by language (most popular blogs in Russian: http://botd.wordpress.com/?lang=ru). Technorati.com is an international directory of blogs measuring the authority of the blogs listed there (www.technorati.com). One can view top blogs with the highest current authority and segment them by category. 

Back to Russia. Let’s start by looking at the most popular blogging site in Russia, Livejournal (www.livejournal.com). It is free to use this site. You can find other popular blogs by using Yandex Blog Search (blogs.yandex.ru).

In Livejournal, we can rank the top bloggers (journals) of all time / today by social capital, social capital by 24 hours, and page views. In practice, this means that we can identify influencers (top bloggers) for various themes and topics by manually browsing this list of top bloggers. It is also possible to view certain categories of bloggers such as Travel, but one cannot rank these in the order of popularity (and categories are limited).

Let’s focus on top bloggers of all time and on page views, as we are looking to reach a potential audience of 250 000. Page views include every time someone can see the specific journal or entries. We need to decide the theme that we will focus on. Currently I am consulting a client who has a five star hotel in Cyprus, and they are looking for ways to promote this new hotel and spa resort to Russian consumers. This means that we need to identify top bloggers who are blogging about travel and related topics, as they have a relevant audience whom we want to influence (people are usually reading the blogs they are interested in).

I start by manually going through all-time top bloggers (see picture below) by page views to select the bloggers that have been writing on travel themes: http://www.livejournal.com/ratings/users/authority/?country=cyr 

What I found was that some people blog in general about their life and experiences and one thing often blogged about is travel and leisure. So I include this as one category. Another category which I include is the bloggers who focus on only travel themes, the core travel bloggers.

Popular bloggers who have been writing about travel themes, but do not focus on them:

1. Artemii Lebedev, 111 102 page views http://tema.livejournal.com/
2. Valery Petrov, 38 595 page views http://masterok.livejournal.com/
3. Michail Nefedov, 38 280 page views http://nemihail.livejournal.com/
4. Sergey Nikitsky, 22 344 page views http://nikitskij.livejournal.com/

Total: 210 321

Bloggers focusing entirely on travel themes:

1. Sergey Dolya, 25 265 page views http://sergeydolya.livejournal.com/
2. Daria Sirotina, 16 594 page views http://darsik-dasha.livejournal.com/
3. Alexander Lapshin, 12 544 page views http://puerrtto.livejournal.com/
4. Pavel Kosenko, 4489 page views http://pavel-kosenko.livejournal.com/
5. Victor Borisov, 4448 page views http://victorborisov.livejournal.com/
6. Igor Shpilenok, 4343 page views http://shpilenok.livejournal.com/

Total: 67683

As a result, by focusing on 10 people, we can potentially reach more than 250 000 people who are our relevant target audience and interested in our services / products. Isn’t this great?

Step 2 – Convincing the Bloggers to Write About Your Product

Now that you have found them, what’s next? How do you convince them to write about your products / service for their followers? Let’s get back to the customer case, the five star hotel in Cyprus, which is looking to promote the new hotel and spa resorts to Russian customers. Now that we have identified the influencers, it’s time for action.

The best way to get the influencers to write about the new hotel and spa resort is obviously to invite them there to experience it. If your offer / service / product is relevant to the topics they are writing on, this should not be a problem, as they get good quality content for the blogs and followers by accepting your offer (you wouldn’t imagine how hard it is for bloggers to write interesting content sometimes).

My customer has just recently opened the spa resort, and there is a lot of space available. Thus, it will not eat my client’s budget if 10 bloggers will stay there for couple of days or a week, trying out all the treatments while enjoying and writing about their exciting experiences for their audiences, thereby doing marketing on your behalf.

The same thing applies for a recently opened restaurant or a new Sunday brunch in a luxury hotel (or the hotel itself opening) in Moscow. Invite the influencers (bloggers) to try the fantastic brunch for free and perhaps add something else in return for reaching their audience. The same goes for other industries -, ship your product to the influencers for free in order to incentivize them to try it out and write about it.

As the saying goes, there is no free lunch. Well, that is true, and this is as free as it gets. Use influencers to promote your business, recommendations from trusted people are much more efficient than simply advertising.

92% of consumers report that word-of-mouth and recommendations from people they know and trust are the leading influences on their purchase behaviour (according to thesocialmediamonthly.com)