Start Influencer Marketing in 7 Steps

One of the fastest ways to scale up your social media is to partner with established influencers who already have the scale you want. The problem is, how do you find them? If you can find them, how do you persuade them to work with you? Influencer marketing is actually easier than you might think.

Influencer marketing can seem pretty intimidating. To pull off a successful campaign you’re going to need to work with the right social media influencers, so you might be asking yourself “how do I reach out to influencers?”. “How much is it going to cost me?”, and “is it actually going to bring me sales?”. Today we are going to walk you through how to set up an influencer marketing campaign from start to finish. You don’t have to be a massive business to set this up. This is pretty straightforward.

How To Build A Powerful Influencer Marketing Strategy

These are the steps that we’re going to look at in creating a successful campaign. First you are going to set your goal and your budget. Then you will do some research on your influencers. After that you will reach out to them. Then you will negotiate the terms. Then you will put your plan into action. Then you will review to see if your campaign actually worked. Let’s look at these steps in detail.

Step 1: Set Up Your Campaign Goal

The first step is to ask yourself what your goal is. Why do you want to work with an influencer? Obviously making more sales is a big one, but there are other options that you might not have thought about. Examples of more common goals are to build brand awareness, and strengthen brand image. You may also want to increase your social media engagement, or you could focus on improving conversions, like newsletter subscribers, free trial sign-ups, and email list building.

So the first step here is to write down your campaign goal. Keep it simple. Use a Google doc or other text software. Let’s say your goal is going to be more sales, be specific. Let’s set the goal to be two times return on marketing investment.

Step 2: Define Your Budget

Next you’ll want to set aside a budget. If you’re an independent business owner, it might be really tempting to just skip this step, but keeping track of your expenses is going to help you understand whether your campaign left you in the red or in the green. If you want to pay your influencers in product, it is really easy to calculate your campaign budget by figuring out your cost per influencer. So let’s say your average rate to ship a package is thirteen dollars, and your product cost you twelve dollars to produce, then you can put aside twenty five dollars per influencer. Perhaps you would like to work with ten influencers. To start I would recommend starting small, so that you can see if influencer marketing is the right fit for your business. You may not be paying the influencer in product. We will talk about all the different ways that you can compensate an influencer later, but just make sure that you do have a rough idea of how much you want to spend at this point, and be honest with yourself. How big your budget is really isn’t that important, but the important part is staying on top of your numbers to ensure that you’re getting a return on your investment.

Step 3: Finding The Right Influencers

You are going to have to decide whether you want to use nano or micro influencers, mid-size influencers, or large influencers. There are pros and cons to each. Nano influencers are good because their audiences don’t expect to be sold to. Brands like to work with them because their audience is super dedicated, and they trust them through and through. Now the downside is that nano influencers don’t usually do this for a living, so they may lack the time or the experience to work with you.

Mid-tier influencers may show great results, since at this size they’re still going to have that genuine two-way connection with their audience. The only thing is that these people will quite likely want to receive monetary compensation, and we do have to respect that because that could be the way that these people are earning their living. This could be their full-time job.

Working with top tier influencers is exciting because their reach and their content could immediately impact your business positively. Only if their audience is engaged and relevant to your business of course. Keep in mind as influencers grow they do tend to lose connection to their audience, and their niche might start to dilute, and also just because they have a large audience it doesn’t necessarily mean that their audience will convert for you. If their audience is primarily in Australia and you don’t even ship there, then their 1 million followers aren’t much use to you. So don’t just look at the numbers to make sure that it’s the right fit.

You can ask for screenshots of their analytics. You can look at the demographics of their audience. You want to make sure that you’re doing this no matter what size influencer you’re working with. Influencers get asked for these stats all the time, so you don’t need to be shy about asking. That’s what you can expect from certain size influencers, but how do you actually find them? You will need to use these tools to find the right influencers. Obviously you can just go on instagram, type in some hashtags, and search through the top section, but the results are pretty limited. A tool called Dovetail is a pretty robust platform to help you find Instagramers and YouTubers, and you can search based on specific keywords, locations, niches, and audiences, and you can even send Influencers a message straight from Dovetail. This saves a lot of time. They have a 14 day free trial, so it’s easy to get started. Unfortunately you can’t search for TikTok influencers on Dovetail yet. For that you can check out Hypetrace. Let’s say that you have used these tools and decided on an influencer. Now you need to make sure that his audience is authentic. Outside of the numbers you are also going to want to validate that this content creator can create the type of content that you’re looking for, so to do this make sure that you are just checking their past work. You need them to be able to review your product, so if they have tons of YouTube videos doing that this could be a perfect fit. The next step is to reach out. Draft up a message to see if they would be down for a collaboration.

Step 5: Start Reaching Out To Influencers

So here is the part where a lot of people get tripped up, because they get nervous. They don’t know what to say. They feel intimidated by the fact that these people have a lot of followers. Here is a little piece of advice. The hype is always less than you think it is. If someone has 50,000 followers, and you’re imagining that they’re getting 100 direct messages a day, they’re probably getting only five direct messages a day. You need to be fearless. Don’t let something like a follower count discourage you. When you reach out you need to be friendly. You are clear about what you’re asking, and you’re firm. Tell them you admire their work, point out some particular example, and ask if they would be interested in trying your new collection. Ask if they are accepting collaborations at this time. Offer to send them samples, reviews and point them to your website or social media so they can check you out. They will understand that you know who they are, what they do, and that this is not a mass email.

A common pitfall of an intro email is making the email too long, and making it all about you. The email should be about them. We need to put the focus on their work, and that’s going to help warm up the conversation. Don’t worry, if an influencer is interested in doing work with you, they will find you online and learn more about you on their own time.

Step Six: Deciding How To Create Content

Next you need to negotiate the terms of the relationship. This could happen in an exchange of friendly emails back and forth. It doesn’t have to be anything serious like a contract, but as long as you have a paper trail that’s enough if you’re just starting out. If the relationship is fair in the sense that the trade-off is equal, you can have a list of requests for the influencer to fulfill, but if the relationship is skewed in the sense that the influencer is more doing you a favorite to help promote your brand, then you will have to forgo some of that creative control. At that point you might have to tone down some of your requests. Either way give them creative freedom. You chose them because you liked their work in the first place, so try to trust them to do a really good job for you, because a script usually comes across as inauthentic and stiff. Just keep that in mind as you’re working with your influencer. You will also want to discuss where these things are going to live. Do you want a feed post? Do you want a story post? Maybe you want some blog content? It’s really up to you, and what makes sense for your business and the influencer you’re working with.

Next you’ll want to discuss a timeline. If you want to see a first draft, just set the date for when that would be due, but generally speaking it’s usually enough just to have a date of when that thing would be going live. Come to an agreement as to how they will mention you. Do you want your name to show up on screen. Maybe you want to be tagged in the photo, or maybe you want them to include a link to your website in the description box. In the best case scenario the influencer will have a very clear call to action. Ask them to leave a link to shop with you.

To see a higher return on investment you’ll also want to agree on compensation. If you have a budget to pay for their time, then you can just simply ask what their rates are, or can they send you their rate card, but if you don’t have a budget there are ways around this. You can give them something of value that’s not just a simple money exchange, but just keep in mind if the roles were reversed and if you were the influencer, would you be happy with the deal that you’re about to offer them? You could exchange products for content. This is a very popular way to carry out influencer relationships. You could exchange professional opportunity for content. You might want to invite them to design a custom line in exchange for them talking about it on their social media. This could be a win-win because for them. It adds to their experience as an influencer, and you get to add a new collection with a face behind the line. You can exchange ad spend for content. What you would do is send the influencer your product, get them to take a photo or a video with it, and post it to their social media as usual. In this case, you would get them to send you that content, and then you would run it as an ad on your end. The reason that this works is that you’re getting exposure from the content that they’ve shared and they’re getting exposure from your ad. Sometimes people fail to remember that influencer relationships are still relationships, so if there’s respect and you are both happy with the end product, then you’re going to want to continue this relationship. If you are able to establish a genuine connection and you both have an emotional tie, then both of you are going to want to be more accommodating towards one another and you’re going to want to help uplift each other.

The next step is managing your relationships and tracking the results to see if your campaign worked.

Step Seven: Stay Organized

Manage your campaigns and track your results. You need to start small at the beginning, to see if influencer marketing is even going to work for your business. Managing 10 relationships at a time is still a lot to keep track of. If you’re maintaining relationships with many influencers at a time you can use a tool to record your projects. Make notes of people’s social media handles, shipping addresses, and when shipments were sent you can write down the results that the influencers brought to you here as well. I recommend that you also input contacts that you’ve reached out to so that you’re not accidentally reaching out to someone more than once.

Now how do you know if your influencers actually brought you return on investment? Remember in the beginning how we said we wanted to make double our money back? We set aside $25 for the influencer, now we want to make sure that we are getting $75 back. To track results we are going to ask the influencer to use a special link that we made, here in his YouTube description box. That way we can see how many people clicked the link to go buy our stuff. This link is called a utm code. A utm code tracks the performance of campaigns, and they’re easy to make at utmaker.com. Alternatively you could make a special discount code for them, and have them ask their audience to use it at your checkout. When you see how many people used his code, you can track how many customers they brought in. Once your campaign is over measure the results against your initial goal. At this point you can see if you want to work with these influencers again, and keep those relationships going. You might also notice that your campaigns didn’t bring you in the results you thought, in which case try working with different influencers and try different types of content. Some industries will be better suited for influencer marketing, and some will be better suited for Facebook ads. No two industries and no two businesses are the same, so if you find that influencer marketing isn’t really working for you then just make sure that you’re keeping up to date with your digital marketing education.

Congratulations on getting started with influencer marketing. We hope that it’s going to bring your business that boost that it needs, and maybe you’ll make some friends in your industry along the way.