While many companies are spending budget money “buying” relationships with “influencers” chasing KPIs of “social reach,” others (including myself) are including the concepts of influencer marketing in their day-to-day organic social media and content marketing activities.
This is done through the simple concept of utilizing content to engage with social media users.
Once you understand this concept, and have the right tool in place, you can see how there are many things companies can be doing organically to engage with influencers through content on many different levels.

A Content-Centric Approach to Influencer Marketing
Savvy brands have included content marketing as a core part of their influencer marketing strategy efforts for some time now.
In essence, we can divide a content-centric approach to influencer marketing into two initiatives:
- Using curated content from influencers as a way to make our own content marketing more effective through building trust and thought leadership with our own audience while at the same time engaging and building rapport with influencers.
- Inviting and recruiting influencers to become integral parts of our own content creation process
Who is Influential to Your Audience?
Once you’ve bought into the content-centric approach to influencer marketing, the next step is to find those that are influential to your target audience that you wish to engage with.
Holistically speaking, the easiest way to do this is not just to search for people who are talking about a keyword (or #hashtag) that your target audience would naturally be interested in, but to find the influencers that are actually publishing content on the subject.
While there are exceptions, in a majority of cases content creators will always yield more social media influence and actual conversions from inbound traffic to those that simply share in that they receive the website traffic and potential conversion, not the sharers.
What is important to understand is that there are two types of content creators that are potentially influential to your audience in social media:
- Content Creators: People who are authors of influential content.
- Publishers: Sites that represent the publishers of the influential content.
Curate Influencer Content
Regardless if you’re a consumer-facing or B2B brand, unless you are a celebrity or one of the few premier brands, no one wants to follow a company that is talking about itself all of the time on social media.
This is where content curation comes in: It gives you the ability to maintain a conversation and a social media presence without always being self-promotional, building trust and community with each piece of content you curate and publish that is aligned with your company’s perspective.
If you’re going to curate content, don’t just randomly curate it: Strategically curate content from influencers to get a bigger bang for your content curation efforts. In this way, we are both building greater trust with our audience by sharing great content and also building rapport with an influencer.
What’s important to remember, though, is if you are sharing content from an influencer, so are countless others, many wanting to build rapport with them as well. Separate yourself from the crowd by carefully crafting your messages and tagging the influencers to make them and their content look as good as possible. Take it one step further by actually commenting on their blog posts, something that very few spend energy doing that can truly separate you from the pack.
Building rapport with an influencer is a marathon, not a sprint. However, sharing their content in a meaningful way over time will slowly build recognition for your brand in their eyes.
Not all influencers will engage back with you, but the more influential you become and thus the more traffic you send to the influencer’s content, the more some influencers will slowly begin to reciprocate your engagement.
Extend Your Influence to Influencer Domains
With each influencer that reciprocates your engagement, you build more and more influence with your own community. In addition to curating content of both authors as well as domain publishers, it’s now time to spread our wings and see how we might become publishers as well on influential domains.
There are two different types of influential domains that exist, so note that not all of them will accept guest blog posts from anyone. Specifically, they are:
- Individual authors or business websites, many of which might not accept guest posts
- Industry-wide or aggregated content domains, many of which will accept guest posts under conditions
With the above lens, look for a “contribute” page on each of the influential domains, and offer to write a guest post and provide relevant and educational content with limited self-promotional content mixed in.
Each website has its own guidelines for this, so your best bet is to actually read and apply individually to each website instead of sending a blanket email as part of a spray-and-pray approach. Having authorship outside of your domain is a great way to turn an author into an expert and build up your portfolio. You can also consolidate your work around the web on one page. Linklab lists some of the tools you can use to build this page.
Invite Influencers to Your Domain
Many influencer marketing campaigns include a component of a blog post being published on the website of the influencer and thus naturally reaching their audience. A more natural way of engaging with influencers just might be to invite them to share their views and perspectives with your audience. You can invite them to write the whole expert article or contribute a quote to the content you are working on. You can collect quotes from several influencers and create an expert roundup on a topic. You can also repurpose it into an infographic which will be easier to promote if there are well-known influencers featured on it. Social Media Sun lists some more ways to do that.
Of course, the more influential you are perceived as being the easier it will be to convince influencers to spend time on your request, but if done right, this might be the easiest way to get influencers to organically share content from your domain because they are a part of it!
The beauty about this organic, content-centric approach to influencer marketing is that although it might take time to build the relationships you need to see the fruits of your efforts, the results will be long-term ones that will benefit your company for months to come (if not years) instead of the one-night-stand influencer marketing that might only offer you a very temporary bump in traffic.
Being associated with well-known (personal) brands is a great signal for Google and it helps build EEAT signals. Ann Smarty explains more on this.
A content-centric approach to influencer marketing offers a sustainable and effective way to build genuine relationships with influencers and their audiences. By curating valuable content, actively engaging with influencers, and offering opportunities for collaboration, brands can establish themselves as trusted resources and thought leaders.
About the Author

Ann Smarty is the co-founder of Smarty.Marketing. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon.