Robolike’s Guide to Finding the Perfect Influencers for Your Small Business
Influencer marketing has proven to be one of the most profitable marketing methods for big and small brands alike.
Finding the right influencer can dramatically increase your ability to reach new audiences, build awareness about your brand and make sales without having to spend a ton of money on traditional advertising methods.
However, it’s not as simple as finding an account with a lot of followers and asking them to post about your product. Influencer marketing is a science, and today we are going to break it down for you.
Let us begin.
1. Identifying unique goals for your influencer marketing campaign
Before you start handing out marketing dollars, you need to know exactly why you are undertaking an influencer marketing campaign. What is your end goal – do you want more followers? Do you want to build a branded hashtag? Drive traffic to a landing page?
Setting clear goals for your campaign will guide you towards taking the right steps and finding the right people to partner with.
2. Strategically researching the market to find influencers
There are a lot of ways you can go about finding the right people for your influencer campaign. One of the easiest ways you can employ is looking at your comments to see if people with an engaged following are regularly commenting on your posts. These people are already interested in what you are doing which will probably make them a better fit for your campaign.
Another thing you can do is research some of the top hashtags in your niche and see whose posts show up in the Top section on the search results page.
If you have a little more technical know-how, you can employ tools like Social Blade and People Map that are designed to help you find influencers for your campaign.
3. Establishing contact with the people you have shortlisted
Once you have selected a few people you want to reach out to, you need to keep a few things in mind before you message them.
First and foremost, you need to ensure that you have the correct contact details. Look beyond Instagram if you aren’t finding the right email to reach these people.
Emailing is almost always the best way to initiate a conversation with a prospective influencer. If you can’t find an email, then you can use Instagram DMs.
You can ask influencers for their media kit if you are considering multiple people and would like to see how each one can help.
4. How to be transparent in your communication with potential brand partners on Instagram
There aren’t any established guidelines right now for what influencers should be paid, but you should have a clear idea of how much you are willing to spend before you get into a negotiation.
Secondly, you need to make the influencer aware of exactly what kind of content you want them to create (e.g. 2 Stories and 2 posts) and when you want them to be delivered by.
Make sure you have a clear scope of work documentation and contract/agreement for your influencers to sign before you get the campaign started.
5. Sharing the right resources to bring influencers up to speed
You need to make it as effortless as possible for your influencers to work with you.
Consider setting up a Google Drive or OneDrive folder which includes all of the information about your brand that the influencer might need – your style guide, logos, color palettes, fonts and any guidelines about tonality and messaging.
6. Establishing KPIs and tracking performance metrics
Tracking the success of your campaign is crucial if you want to understand how well your influencers are performing.
Instagram has a Paid Partnership feature which allows brands to gain additional insights about their sponsored content campaigns.
You can also set up UTM tagging if you are driving traffic to a page, so you know exactly how much traffic is coming from a particular influencer’s post.
Over time, you should share these campaign results with your influencers because they are ultimately your partners. This demonstrates a level of trust and increases accountability for people you are working with.
7. How to reward influencers and build long-term relationships
Just like any business, you want to make sure that good people want to work for you over the long term. Saying thank you or rewarding your influencers in some way is a great step towards establishing a long-term relationship with them.
A gift could be as simple as a personalized thank you card or one of your products from your collection.
Running an influencer marketing campaign as a small business doesn’t need to be confusing or burn a hole in your wallet. With a few simple guidelines and proper tracking, it can quickly become your most lucrative marketing method.
We hope you will use this tried-and-tested 7 step process to find wonderful influencers that will help you spread your brand and business far and wide. All the best!