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Content marketing is a tricky thing to get right. For every great success, you’re going to have just as many, and probably more, failures. And the thing is that when your ideas just don’t stick, and you can’t get potential customers to engage, it can be frustratingly difficult to tell why.

So if you’re looking for a few new sneaky tricks that can help you engage and win over more customers for your brand, you’re in the right place. Let’s do this!

Take advantage of user-generated content

User generated content, if you’ve been living under a rock, is essentially where you help create and distribute content involving your brand, which was created by one of your legion of passionate fans. So if you haven’t tried it already, UGC could be the next big step in your content strategy.

Why? Because people are tired of being marketed to- they’re tired of feeling like you’re trying to grab their attention with yet another pitch. And crucially, UGC doesn’t feel like yet another pitch, which is what makes it work so well. If done right, it feels like something a friend would post, which boosts engagement and brand image.

If you need an example of UGC, there are hundreds you can find from a quick Google search. But we particularly liked Starbucks’ efforts on Instagram and other social media platforms. They use their annual Red Cup Contest- where customers decorate seasonal Starbucks cups- to create and promote dozens and dozens of high-quality posts.

It works because each post not only looks good, but it shows a regular person enjoying a coffee, not somebody who’s obviously a highly paid actor. It’s also fun and crafty because you can decorate your cup however you like. Each post gets hundreds of thousands of likes, so they must be doing something right!

Use Hunter.io to track down influencers’ email addresses

Alright, next up we’ve got a little practical tip for breaking past the stage of initial contact. On YouTube, your influencer might have listed their email address or some other contact details in their About Me section. Or on Facebook, it might be possible just to shoot them a message. But what if they get dozens of messages on Facebook every day, or you can’t find their contact details anywhere?

That’s where Hunter.io comes in. Hunter.io proudly proclaim that they help you Connect with anyone, and find the emails of the people who matter most through a quick search on their website. Basically, their search tool finds any email addresses hidden away in a corner of a website. But more interestingly, it also finds as many names as it can and puts together some basic potential email configurations.

So if Hunter.io finds the name Noel Edmonds on the Channel 4 website, it might suggest you try emailing [email protected], or maybe n.edmonds@channel 4.com. It isn’t too difficult to come up with some configurations of your own for a potential email address, but Hunter.io does it as quickly as a Google search.

Go for quality, not quantity

The digital marketplace seems to do nothing but expand. More people are making more money than ever before through the internet, and practically everybody is a part of social media. Because of this onslaught of content, consumers are getting what’s called content shock- the reluctance to spend any time engaging with content, be it from a marketer or their friend, because there’s simply too much to look at.

That’s why we say you should go for quality over quantity. Rather than trying to connect with dozens and dozens of influencers, try and pinpoint just a few who really suit your brand. Analyse the demographics they can reach: are they a perfect match, or just not so bad? What we’re trying to say is that you’ll see more return on your investment by spending more time on one or two influencers who suit your brand down to the ground, rather than trying to find as many as you can.

And while we’re on that subject, you should also try to…

Attract ‘power middle’ influencers, not just big names

If you know anything about SEO, you know that you shouldn’t necessarily target the highest volume keywords. It’s exceptionally difficult to crack into even the top few pages of Google if you pick keywords as broad and popular as ‘Blackjack’, or ‘air conditioning’ or ‘content marketing’. That’s because everyone else and their mother are trying to dominate those keywords, or have for a long time already.

In response to that difficulty, we started to look for the long tail. So rather than trying and failing to dominate the search results for ‘air conditioning’, we try ‘air conditioning installation near Bournemouth’. Not only do we find customers more suited to us and our location but because they’re already searching for somebody to install, sell or do something we can assume they’re further along the sales process.

The same applies to influencer outreach. You are absolutely free to pop off an email to Taylor Swift, Peter Andre or Noel Edmonds, whatever floats your boat, but you aren’t likely to get anywhere. And while if you did manage to convince Noel Edmonds to big up your new skincare range, who’s to say that his followers are going to engage with that?

Power middle influencers aren’t global mega stars like Michelle Phan or Zoella. They typically have around 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers, friend or followers either on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook: not as much as the big players, but enough to be more than useful. This usually translates to around 2.5k to 25k monthly visitors, but crucially these visitors engage with their posts and feel like part of a family of fans. They listen and listen good, to what their favourite online personality has to say. And that’s why you should target the power middle.

Izaak Crook is a Digital Marketing Executive for AppInstitute, a SaaS App Builder platform that allows anyone to create their own iOS and Android app without writing a single line of code.