Recently, influencer marketing has become an enormous word of mouth marketing tool.
Brands who want to expand their presence with endorsements from win-win partners have leveraged influencer marketing to do just that.
Traditionally, influencers were celebrities or large publications who told us and showed up what was rare, unique and upheld a certain class within our society.
With the emergence of social media, now we have more insight into what these influencers are doing on a day-to-day basis behind the scenes.
This leads to more exposure of their lifestyle and brands which they naturally use within their lifestyle.
People have also turned themselves into influencers by creating great content and resonating with their target audience. Doing so gave them lots of authority in what they say.
So how do you connect with these influencers so that your brand can be featured and socially endorsed by celebrity names?
Today I’m going to show you the 8 steps to getting an influencer to post about your brand. Here we go!
Is influencer marketing right for you?
Before committing to spending any time or resources on influencer marketing, you want to gauge if influencer marketing right for your business.
The way you do this is to see what kind of “influencer marketing” activity is happening in your business already, without you putting any time and resources into it.
You can do this by extracting key data from review sites and social media sites.
Once you have your data, you can set a fine line between who you should pay and who you should provide for.
You should only pay for people who have potential reach over your average organic influence reach right now.
That means that out of all of your social media influencer posts right now, take the average.
Anyone that has under that, don’t pay them. Anyone that has over that, you can consider paying them.
These are your terms that you set and some influencers may try to negotiate with you. I strongly suggest that you stand firm on your guidelines because if you start making exceptions for some of your potential influencers, you might just make exceptions for them all and you will end up spending more resources than you need to.
1. Know Your Target Market
Do you have a specific avatar that you want to focus on reaching?
It is important to know what person in what area or community you want to reach.
If, for example, you see that most of your current customers follow the same influencers, you could deduce that those influencers can help you reach even more of the right customer.
2. Set guidelines for influencers and what you expect to give or pay
It’s important to set a budget for influencer marketing.
It’s even more important to set guidelines on what you expect to provide or pay to influencers based on their reach potential.
The first guideline you should have is to know when you should provide or pay.
To provide to an influencer is to give them any of your products at no cost.
Then, if you pay, you should set ranges of guidelines for what you feel you should pay.
New data actually reveals that nano-influencers with followers between 500 and 5000 followers make $114 per video, $100 per post, and $34 per story.
The same data reveals that power influencers, those with followers between 30,000 and 500,000 followers, make $775 per video, $507 per photo and $210 per story.
These are just average and example figures in the market today. You shouldn’t have to force yourself to pay these amounts if you don’t think that you will profit.
3. Make a list of influencers based on your target audience and influencer guidelines
Now that you know exactly what you want, you can find the influencers you might want to work with based on your guidelines.
First, you need to translate your guidelines into ways to find people on Instagram who match your guidelines.
For example, if you wanted people who had a potential reach of over 10,000 people, then it would make sense to find people who have over 10,000 followers.
Then, if you also wanted people with high potential reach and
The standard way to search for influencers is to look through Instagram for people who have been to specific places or who have used specific hashtags.
It works pretty well but there’s an even better way to search.
You can use boolean search on Google to search through Instagram while also filtering out influencers within a specific follower range, whose posts are within a specific engagement range and more.
[guide for instagram search with google boolean]
4. Reach Out With Relevance
When you message influencers, take into account who they are, what situation they might be in and how you can help them (before they can help you).
Usually, influencers are great at making content. That’s why they are great at building audiences.
The bigger the audience they have, the more value they add to their brand and in turn, the more people are willing to pay them for promotions.
So, if you know that you can add value to their brand somehow, message them using that angle first.
5. Follow Up If/When Necessary
Just because a potential influencer doesn’t answer you the first time doesn’t mean they don’t want in. Influencers (especially the legit ones) could have checked your message but forgot to answer.
Send up to 7 follow up messages to them because it takes about 7 touches for someone to become a partner.
For each of the messages, try a different angle of peaking their interest. Here are some other reasons why influencers might want to work with you (besides money).
If they don’t respond after 7 follow up messages, you can be confident that it’s not the right time for you to partner with them.
You can easily move on to the next influencer since you have a big list of them anyway!
6. Come To An Agreement
It would be in both parties’ best interest to generate and sign an agreement. That way, both of you know exactly what you get.
You can consult a lawyer to get your agreement made or you can get free templates from companies like RocketLawyer.
7. Let the influencer do their thing
Now that you’ve come an agreement on the date, time, place, product/service, and promotion, you can wait for the date and time to see how the influencer does.
You’ve worked pretty hard to get this influencer, and for good reason. The work you saw them do so far with their media has been impressive to you. Which means you shouldn’t try to change the way they produce media or else their media and messaging just might sound off when they publish it.
8. Measure results & re-invite
Once both you and your influencer hold up your ends of the deal, you can put the campaign to a close. Once you do, keep an eye out on the influencer’s work with you.
The influencer should be able to send you a report on how much reach, engagement, etc was on the post.
With that, you should ask yourself:
- Did the influencer reach as many people as I’d hope?
- Did that reach translate into sales?
- Was the influencer a pleasure to work with?
- Should I work with this influencer again?
That’s the full step by step process of finding and measuring influencer performance. Did you find any great influencers while using this method?
