Tapping into influencer marketing is a great way to leverage the exposure of your offering. The internet is full of potential customers and influencers can help you reach that audience. Partnering with an influencer seems like a simple process, but choosing the right influencer can be difficult to execute.
In this blog, we share some of our top tips on approaching key accounts and how to work with influencers effectively to ensure a successful collaboration in the long run.
How to find the right influencers
There are many benefits of working with influencers including brand awareness and increased conversions, but choosing the right influencer for your brand is crucial for success. Here are some of our top tips to finding the right influencer to work with:
Remember to consider your budget
The type of influencers worth contacting will depend on your marketing budgets. If you’re trying to work with influencers without sponsored payment and instead through gifting, then you will need to look at those with a smaller following. This is when it’s worth contacting micro influencers. If your budget is much higher and you have the ability to pay influencers on top of the gifting, then it’ll be easier to work with much larger influencers.
When searching for these influencers, you’ll need to spend time manually looking for those who are relevant to your brand. You can outsource this task to influencer directories, where you’ll be able to find influencers from chosen categories and find their contact details.
Check their following and engagement
It’s easy enough to find out someone’s following, but it’s worth finding out what their engagement is like too. You can find these details by either asking the influencer directly, as many will already have a document together with those details, or you can get an idea of their engagement when looking at their profiles and their posts.
There are many people out there with tens of thousands of followers, but they have little to no engagement. This is usually due to people buying followers, which aren’t real accounts. If you come across these kinds of influencers, don’t waste your time or money on them.
Reach out to your following
If you’ve already got a really engaged following on social media, you could do a brand ambassador call out. This can simply be done through a post across your social media channels, offering your followers an opportunity to work with you in promoting your brand. You don’t need to accept everyone who’s interested, just pick out a select few that you believe have potential. Particularly those who may already be successful bloggers or social media stars.
How to work with influencers effectively
Once you have established that you’re working with an influencer, there are things you need to make sure you’re doing to make the collaboration worth your while. Here are our top tips on how to work with influencers effectively:
Keep it lawful
If you are paying for an influencer to feature your products or services on social media or on their blog, they must disclaim #ad, #spon or write a personal disclaimer within their blog post stating this. It’s now an advertising law and must not be forgotten.
Be sure to build a relationship
Building a relationship with influencers you’re connecting with is really beneficial. Let them become your friend, as this will increase the chances that they will like to work with you again in the future. It also builds a stronger trust and a positive view of your brand.
Create a schedule of their content
It’s important to find out when your influencers are planning on posting their social posts, blog posts or videos. This is so you can track the exposure and measure the benefits you may receive from it as you may notice an influx of followers or new engagement on your brands accounts as a result of their post. It also allows you to be ready to react to their post once it goes live and to be able to make sure that they’re posting what they have promised for the collaboration. If you’ve got multiple influencers, this will help you manage all the content that’ll be coming your way!
Let us help with your influencer marketing
Working with influencers opens up an exciting time for brands, and lots of opportunities for fresh new content that leads to further brand awareness. But we know getting started with influencer marketing can be daunting, so why not let us help you?
We’ve built strong relationships with countless influencers and affiliates to help build your brand and your offering. Be sure to get in touch with us to find out more and check out our digital PR services for other ways we can help promote your business.