Female publishers are the most actively engaged group online. Nonetheless, it is extremely difficult for brands to find the right publishers. There's a solution.
Female publishers are the most actively engaged group online as over 80% have a presence on Facebook and over 30% are Twitter users. Although they are the most influential brand ambassadors on social media, it is extremely difficult for brands to find the right publishers for their social media campaigns.
There are the three key hurdles companies face: access to publishers, finding the right influencers, and working with them.
1. Access to bloggers
Even though there are 20 million women publishers in the US alone, it is still not easy to find them. It is a highly fragmented and niche-based market where only the top 100 are known and rest are hidden in the Internet black hole.
The Digital Impact Conference recently conducted a survey highlighting that about 10% of publishers have been pitched more than 100 times a year, and about half of them accept less than 20% of the pitches received. In other words, brands keep pitching to same publishers multiple times without much success.
2. Finding the right influencers
If limited access to publishers is a problem, then it is compounded by the lack of ability to find the right ones. A deal site approaching a publisher focused on high-end fashion has little chance of getting her attention and connecting with her blog audience.
The key is to find the right publisher that fits your product or service for a win-win partnership. While many sites are trying to create a database of publishers, an ideal solution would be a user-curated, deep and accurate classification of influencers for brands to find and connect with the right influencer for their services.
3. Working with bloggers
Finally, if you are fortunate enough to find the right publishers, the remaining challenge is how to work with them. While big companies can hand off all communication to their PR firms or inside specialists, the small and mid-sized brands struggle to manage and measure such relationships. How to pitch, what to expect, and how to measure results continue to be a challenges in working with publishers.
A solution
Brands can reach thousands of customers, optimize spend, and improve ROI by leveraging brand-publisher relationships, if theses hurdles can be removed. Such service is for example provided by Sverve; they bring thousands of publishers on their platform, creating a deep and accurate classification of influencers based on their areas of influence, and providing brands a platform to collaborate and communicate with influencers, and also track their social media campaigns.
