Influencer marketing and outreach is done with the goal of getting more sales and leads for the company.
Influencers are people who have big audiences or small audiences and are ones who have a social following relevant to what you are doing. Influencer marketing is getting thrown around a lot and influencers are on all different social media networks as well. It’s important to develop clarity around influencer marketing, what it can do for you and who to approach for this.
When you work these guys to promote a product is called influencer marketing. When you reach a deal with them after reaching out to them that’s called influencer outreach.
With increase in number of leads, you’re going to see an uptick in revenue. That makes influencer marketing a great strategy to use when growing the business
59% of marketers are planning to double the money spent on influencer marketing in the next 12 months.
The poll showed that influencer marketing was the fastest growing customer acquisition channel there is.
There are plenty of other reasons for you to get started with influencer marketing.
The rise in use of technologies like ad block means advertisers are finding it more and more difficult to each out to actual people.
Adblock usage is only going to go up as time pases and that is more bad news for marketers. Online ads are not the best use of your marketing monies.
There are only few strategies that you can find where you might enjoy as much success as with influencer marketing.
Every dollar spent in influencer marketing returns $23 in returns. Banner ads produce $4.5 in returns. There’s one other channel, I know of that produces more which is email marketing. But that’s for another day.
Finding the right influencers and getting them to work with you is the next step.
Start a project
Engagement from influencers is hard to come by if you spend your time creating and working on a project that looks like any other there is. If you want to make a dent, stand out.
You won’t get engagement from influencers otherwise.
How to create a mention worthy project.
A great idea, executed well and moving in the right direction are some of the ways to make sure you win.
Being creative helps. In the early stages of planning don’t abandon processes.
Struggling to find ideas? find what others are doing and motivate yourselves based on that. There are hundreds of money-making ideas and the internet is chock full of these ideas you can start using.
Browse these ideas and write them down to find out the ones that seem to be best.
Then when you see the list you will find a winner emerging. For instance Banner Bear does 100k in annual recurring revenue by just making it easy for people to create social media images.
Also the planning stage should cover how you plan to collaborate with influencers to stand out. In 2014 when Hubspot asked influencers to contribute some advice always stood out.
BY taking advice from influencers what they could create was a pleasing infographic. That helped them stand out from the vastness of content that was already there.
Here are goals you might want to set up for your project
The influencer campaign should improve conversions by xxx
The campaign should run for 3 to 4 days for instance and stay active for these many hours during the day.
Make sure the efforts you spend match the needs of the project, needs of the influencer and goals you have set for the brand.
Once you picked the goals it’s time to choose the format you’re going to use for the finished content.
Think of the angles and ideas you’re going to use to create the final piece of content.
Say you want to create an infographic, a blog post, a presentation, an eBook among others?
Then throughout continue to find out if influencers you choose to work with can accurately express the idea you want to send out.
At the end of the process this approach will help you create something that complement each other as content assets
This was the best way to provide value to audiences.
Finding the right influencers
It can be excruciatingly overwhelming to track down influencers.
When beginning your outreach strategy, odds are you were told to use few tools to find leads.
But you’re not so sure and are still ironing out the details.
THe key to target the right influencers is to know as much as you can about the target. Then create a pitch that engages and sells to them on the idea.
Say you’re creating an article that would do well with expert insights. All you need is 50 people to give you insights. That makes the content useful and full of insights. This would be something most people would love to get their hands on.
Say you’re solving a big enough problem: like which content optimization strategies to follow. The questions would be to which seo tactic you use.
- If there are 50 different responses, adding those responses turns the post into a guide chock full of ideas that others find practical, engaging and easy to implement.
- Such a guide attracts social shares.
The guide would help plenty of people
You can simply Google keywords you are targeting plus influencers to generate a target list of sites.
These people can be bloggers or Instagram influences. You can also look at lists of influencers to track and find these people and get hold of usable ideas from these guys.
Since you find so many lists with many people incommon that’s actual proof that these influencers are truly influencers.
Use an influencer search on Buzzsumo and use the amplification tool to get more influencers.
With Buzzsumo its’ easy to get more influencers quite easily. Get access to their social profiles, media pages and website details.
If you go for even tinier keyword volumes you get micro influencers. They may not have many followers, but if they are relevant, that counts.
This is great since large follower counts don’t automatically translate to equal engagement levels.
How to find the right influencers for your brand
Comment activity is one thing to look at. The second? Follower numbers between 10k to 100k is the right spot.
With this you might be able to generate buzz and conversation with your target audiences online.
According to expertvoice micro influencers improve the odds of conversions.
The study revealed that micro influencers get you upto 22.2 times more conversations when they recommend products to an audience online.
It’s impressive.
82% of customers reported they weremost likely to follow through a recomemdnations made by a micro influencer.
This particular channel only has 23,000 subscribers, but Jord’s Jord uses micro influencers to get reviews of their products. One such influencer had only 23000 subscribers but led to 13000 views on her video.
The videos were informed about the brand and become interested parties in few minutes.
And the likes of these influnecers are not going to appear with a quick search on influencer aggregator platforms. That means you’re losing thousands of more people who could watch your videos.
The focus isn’t absent on one group either. There are hundreds of reviews for the brand.
By relying on micro-influencers they created lot of brand news for the brand.
They also provide influencer giveaways and announce unique promo codes that they give to these influencers.
They are incentivizing purchases from teh audience by adding a promo code.
The benefits to the influencer? A nice free watch. This is a good example of using micro-influencers as part of your campaign.
How to find these influencers? For microinfluencer search you can use a platform like Hypr.
You can target them by age, gnder,location, ethnicity, follower counts and so on. You can search by audience or by influencer and track by several dempraphic parameters.
If you want influencers who are talking about health and wellness you may enter that keyword and search,.
You’re looking for people who have a tiny but targeted following. Refine the parameters by looking at influencers who have low number of followers.
You want to keep the limit from 10k to 100k and not more.
This gives you a list of people who aren’t the biggest influencers you can meet, but they have enough of an audience to meet yoru goals and you just need to click on the profiles and reach out to them.
This gives you an idea of the specifics behind the audience and how active and engaged they are.
This information lets you determine if they are a potentially great fit for a micro influencer or not. You can choose these micro influencers and become as successful as jorde became with their YouTube promos.
How to contact the right influencers
The next step is to contact the right influencers. The more you know about the influencer, their niches, engagement and habits, the better way you will be able to communicate with them and offer them something that seems valuable.
Finally think of a plan you’re going to execute that helps you determine how you plan on doling out compensation to these influencers. Exposure is great but they need more. Influencers also tend to like monetary compensation for their time and effort.
If someone is saying great things abouht your brand,, ensure they get something out of it.
However if you don’t have those deep pockets, there are still ways to make influencer marekting work for your brand.
Here are list of ways to make it work:
- Shout out – To attribute advice to industry expert is through shoutouts. This is recognition of the experitise and our license of using their content.
- Offer a discount for services especially when you are a micro-influencer, this builds relationships and gets you brand exposure.
- If an influencer leads to bigger and bigger sales, offering them commissions will be good idea.
Ther are more creative ways to succeed. Sometimes talking to the inlfuencer might help in discovering ways that aid the both opf you.
The pitch
There is tons of advice on pitching influencers. Not all advice is going to be beneficial to your brand. How to find if the advice is going to help your cause.
Each pitch you send is slighty different. If you want to follow templtes that’s a good starting point but never copy paste directly.
The route you take should consider this: Customize the pitch to your audience. You can even spend time crafting unique pitches to each influencer.
Perosnalize the pitch. Don’t start with a random salutation. Start with their name. It’s also not golden to keep talking about you or how big the opportunity can be for them. Instead, build a relationship with your influencer.
Once you do, start sharing what you feel about their content, work and overall expertise. Reference post or podcast that resonated well with you and how that led to reaching out.
Keep the pitch simple. Write down a clear offer and what you expect them to do.
Tell them about the work they are expected to do. Don’t be vague or let them make assumptions. The easier you make it for them, the better your odds of getting a postie response. You can include sample content and images as well
Then follow good email etiquette which is
- Get to the point quickly
- Don’t mass spam
- Pique their interest
- Tell them why you need the endoresement
- Spell out the benefits they stand to get.
Crafting the perfect pitch doesn’t happen overnight. You may start off looking bad with overly long pitches and it can be too preachy.
It’s easy to see later what works and what doesn’t work at all.
- Keep the subject line a bit vague to get their interest piqued. Then address this person by their name so that the intro and email seems personal
- Greet them. But keep the email short and friendly.
- Start by introducing you at the beginning or simply sign off at the end with the name and your company name.
- Research the person you’re reaching out to and make the pitch personal. Don’t just copy paste a generic email tempalte/ These guys are experts.
- The pitch should be only few sentences at most. Don’t ramble. No one wants to read through a mile-long pitch.
- Offer the person what they want. Odds are the marketer you reach out understand the value of being featured.
It might take some persistence to get their attention and probably receive tons of emails all of which vy for attention.
Check for spam
The emails you craft with so much work and patience might end up going to the spam bin. Major brands too find themselves in hot water.
To check for spamming tendencies here’s what you can do
- No follow up or way too many emails
- No clear ask so that people dump it to spam
- Using a mass email servie
- Failiure to develop the relationships.
The problems in yor approach can land your email in an influencer’s spam folder.
There are however ways to direct your email to reach the target influencer.
- Try and build a relationship
- Go above and try and anticipate what the influencer wants.
- Try and discover the reason behind why the influencer didn’t want tow work with you.
Be persistent in your efforts
Most experts you are going to reach out to are too busy that they don’t respond. It might be charming to imagine getting responses from all of them. That never happens.
However that doesn’t mean you should betray your efforts. If you give up after the first round of emails the expert tips collection would have been way shorter.
Most people get tons of emails daily, so the pitch might get buried somwhere. Persistence is the key.
With a follow-up email you may be able to convert few non responders. Or you can try and reach them via Tiwtter or Instagram.
Tiwtter is a fun way to remind people that you sent them an email.
Whenever someone tweets that they replied to their email you’re going to have to score one more win.
You quill face rejection. Don’t give up. If one strategy falls flat that’s no reason to not try again and possibly again.
It’s challenging and that should be the excitement of it all. Try different channels to get in touch with the person.
For every tulip you get you will get more ocntent.
How to create the content for influencer marketing
Steps to create content
With influencer outreach you need to be able to help the uinfluiencer visualisze the benefits of working with you.
Simply offer the best you can an offer they can’t seem to be able to refuse.
Most marketers are going to be super-happy with a backlink to their site. Promotion is a great prize for them. You can deliver the promise in a way that it appears better than anticipated.
Cut away the non-essentials
In every answer you’re going to receive by the deadline you must have requested the influencer contribute a couple of sentence but they ended up writing a mini article.
What you want to do is ideally keep the most relevant sentences you can gather and delete the rest
These parahgaohs that the influencers listed are not all necessary and essential to move the post forward.
Create the design of the content
How the content looks and feels is super important. Once you design the infographic and the eBook, you need to be able to work with several influencers.
The process might take a few weeks for you to succeed with it.
The infographic could be created within Canva or you could contract someone out of Fiverr itself.
You can use online tools like Canva alternatives to design. It’s a great source to source designs anad imagery for your art work.
When you have the information, create the infographic. Canva has a bounty of templates to nail the look and feel.
The templates are eays to edit and get them to the desired shape and size.
Click on the template you want to use and use this template from the top right corner.
Frm there theediting tool will let you change colors, imagery and copy to suit your needs.
Revise what you create
Don’t skip this part. You need third-party reviewers and editors to go over your content and edit teh work work for you.
Create content rich in visuals, has the right amount of text and something that makes you excited about publishing it.
The eagerness can wreak havoc on your efforts and stop short your content marekting efforts.
You will always come face to face with a number of eros that need to be fixed.
If you use a tool like Grammarly you can fine tune these mistakes, grammar and spelling and finally chekc the content.
Don’t make the mistake of posting your content and then notice the misspelinngs, the wrong pictures. Be thorough.
OUtreach again
Now that you reached out the first time, you can’t simply wait for the shares and backlinks to go skyhigh.
Her you need to conduct a second outreach. This is outline in the skyscraper technique.
The process is simple create link worthy content, create something better and then reach out to the right guys.
With influencer marekting you need to ask potential marketers who’d be most excited by your content and tell them before you publusht the content.
Build anticipation towards your content.
1. Contact all the experts who participated
Sart by individually mailing all participant members.
You hae greta chance of getting traffic to your post by getting people to spread the world
They will share posts from their personal social media accounts.
You get 200 social media shares. Or more.
- Zemail all particioants individually
- Remind them of the study and add a link
- Explain to them how you helped thank for the easiatnce.
Then email everyone else
The next round emails will be sent to people who showed interest by using the skyscraper technique.
You want toe mind them theat you are folliowng them as per the qureqat. Indivudlaly contact each of these peopel.
Once that is over you an email a bigger database and use your own subscribes aswell.
With a few days you are going to get several links to the post and you will start ranking for some terms.
You are going to get more and more people linking back to the content.
Use successes to build long-term relationships
When this is done this can be the precursor of long-term relationships with these guys. These influencers and long-term relationships with them are always going to benefit your brand and also the influencers.
The focus is on relationship building.
Consider how you can work with these influencers as part of a long term strategy. Align these influencers with your overall content marketing strategy, reach a new audience and create epxeriences worth sharing.
Conclusion
If you were ever worried about influencer outreach, this guide is going to help you rediscover your way. Influencer marketing is going to help build stronger relationships with individuals who can help and grow your niche.
These people can also help you accrue more customers who find value in products and services.
With the right project finding the ebay influincers is going to be easy.