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Reading Time: 6 minutesYou’ve heard of influencers dominating every social media site, and you might be wondering how to work with these personalities to attract more followers and gain leads. The fact is, you can use influencer marketing to boost the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. But to start, you must find the right influencers to grow your reach. How? Here are some tips to discover totally on-brand influencers!
What is influencer marketing, and how can you apply it to your marketing campaign?
Influencer marketing is a promotional strategy involving collaboration with influencers – social media personalities with a sizable following. The deal is similar to a celebrity endorsement, but it’s a lot cheaper, and you’re not targeting traditional media like TV, radio, or print. The scope of the agreement is limited to online promotions, particularly on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.
Influencers are popular online because of their perceived authority or expertise in a specific niche or industry. With thousands to multi-million followers, influencers can shape opinions, persuade, and affect buyers’ purchasing decisions.
When working with influencers, the goal is to tap into these popular personalities’ targeted audience to spread brand awareness and potentially drive more sales. Influencers are trusted by their loyal followers, and having these people promote your business boosts trust and credibility for your brand. Also, influencers know how to communicate marketing messages in an authentic and relatable way so they can effectively influence their followers.
The success of your marketing campaign depends on the influencer you choose. That’s why it’s critical to find the right influencers to collaborate with. Choose influencers whose values and target audience align with your brand. How to find the right influencers for your marketing campaign? Here are some tips:
Social media sites are the best places to find influencers. A targeted search topic by hashtags, keywords, social media searches, influencer platforms, or referrals will help you find relevant conversations and discover personalities with a great influence in your niche or industry.
You can start with influential people and see which ones they are having conversations with. Look deeper into the most active followers, check how many people are following these people, and take it from there.
You can also use paid tools to identify influential people in a specific industry. Tools like Topsy or BuzzSumo, for example, enable you to find influencers by their page and domain authority, followers, tweets, and re-tweets.
You don’t need to look very far to find the right influencers to team up with. Start with your own followers, particularly the most active ones. Look into their profiles to see which ones have a large following or are following influencers in your industry.
If you’re not using any tool, you can manually check your most engaged followers one by one. You can also automate this process to check out who are the influencers that your followers love, then take it from there.
There are tools and marketing services that can analyse your niche or industry and then send a list of the best influencers for the job. If you have the budget for this service, sign up for it. That said, hiring a marketing agency will cost more than signing up for tools like BuzzSumo, Hootsuite, influence.co, and Upfluence.
If you’re using social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest, we highly recommend using hashtags to come across influencers. Influencers are using hashtags to spread the word about their brand, so searching for them is easier this way. We also suggest using location-specific, brand-specific, or industry-specific hashtags to get the most accurate results!
Influencers always want to be seen at social events to widen their reach, and so should you! From workshops to launches, summits to workshops, scour the internet for invites to different events and connect with content creators for future marketing opportunities. The best thing about attending these events is learning more about trending marketing strategies to improve your promotions.
Before you start hunting down influencers to team up with, it’s critical to determine what your marketing goals are and what metrics to measure for success. Do you want to boost your website traffic, generate leads or widen your reach? Are you after higher sales or brand loyalty? Identify the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll track to find out if teaming up with an influencer will genuinely help your brand and boost revenues.
How well do you understand your ideal client’s needs? Do you know their pain points? What are their interests or preferences?
You have to learn and understand your target audience’s customer profile to choose the right influencer to team up with. It starts by knowing what content your readers find exciting and what platforms they follow. Then, you need to determine their interest and pain points to develop a compelling copy.
Tools like Google Analytics provide all the data you need to determine your audience and niche. You can also offer surveys or request customer feedback to gain valuable insights on everything related to your audience and niche. Once you have a clear picture of your audience and goals, you can start looking for the perfect influencer to market your business.
After defining your goals and understanding your ideal client’s needs and expectations, you can start searching for the best influencers that fit your needs. There are many ways to check for influencers online. You can go into some of your most engaged followers and check the influencers they follow.
You can also analyse the metrics, find out what social media platforms your followers frequent and search for influencers in these places. You can search by platforms using hashtags or keywords to look for popular personalities in your industry.
Create a list of potential influencers. Check their profiles, content, and reputation to see which ones make the best fit. Choose only those that offer high-quality content – influencers who make genuine interactions with their followers. Most importantly, the influencer you chose should have similar values to your business and a warm, friendly tone to match.
Once you have a shortlist of influencers that fit your brand, write a sales pitch and contact each one. You can contact these influencers via email, social media, or direct message to reach out to them and propose a partnership.
In your proposal, introduce yourself and your brand, tell them you’d love to team up with them and present an attractive offer. Your intention should be clear, transparent, and mutually beneficial. Be professional when interacting with influencers and give them a list of terms and expectations. Leave no room for confusion or misunderstanding, so your campaign is off to a great start.
After contacting a few influencers (or just one, to be on the safe side), you might receive some replies. Most will discuss the terms and scope of the agreement. At this point, you’ll discuss the type of promotions you want, the timeline, payment/payment method, creative control, and other factors. This will take a while to sort out, but once it’s done, put everything in writing.
Create a contract defining the terms and other details related to the agreement. Sign it, let the other party sign it, and then make the necessary preparations to begin the campaign. This will involve prepping the product, marketing materials, copies, and other content related to promotions.
The final step of your campaign is the start of the actual promotional run. Roll out the collab on your website, blog site, or social media sites, then start analysing the metrics and KPIs. Check if your marketing efforts are generating results. As you measure the metrics, you’ll have a clear idea if your marketing efforts are reaching the engagement, traffic, and conversions you expected from the partnership.
Don’t forget to calculate your ROI to see if the partnership is worth all the effort. After the campaign, continue maintaining a relationship with the influencers for future promotions.
Finding the perfect influencer for a collaboration will take a lot of planning, but your efforts will be worth it once you start seeing the positive results. Apart from being selective of the people you work with, it’s vital to know your audience well so every piece of content you publish will be well-received by your followers, including the collab with influencers!
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