Influencers are those social media accounts that have a huge following and are a great source of marketing investment for businesses. Because of these humongous devotees, an influencer has the power to persuade or sway people into using the products and services accordingly. These days, Instagram has emerged as the number one soot for influencers to host thousands of followers on their feed and businesses are quickly tapping into this previously unknown marketing world.
More than 80% of the marketers have tried some sort of influence marketing in a different way, which brought proven results to the table. According to a report published by AdWeek, for every $1 spent on social media influence campaigns, there’s $6.85 ROI generated, making it a significant source of income. For sure, there’s a huge value while working with the influencers, but the cost can be huge, and not every business has such kind of funding to carry on their digital marketing operations. Nevertheless, you can pick and choose your influencer based on your budget and targeted demographic.
1. Establish A Two-Way Goal
When you want to team up with an influencer for your business marketing at no cost, you need to offer something in return as well. Set a goal for your business and have something in hand to offer the influencer as well, so that he/ she will help you in achieving that goal. These days, many make-up artists are collaborating with lesser-known modelling agencies to market their products. It essentially also gives an additional push to the model’s career and promotes the agency’s public image.
Utilize the time to follow the social media influencers that share content relatable to your company, and their audience enjoys, engagement and do ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing. There are many powerful tools (Buzzsumo, Followerwonk, Buzzstream) that can help you to find such kinds of influencers because it can be an overnight success to gain 500-1000 followers for an unknown person once he shares something that reaches the interested audience. Once you list down all the best influencers in your industry, don’t rush and contact them. Wait. Give yourself and your business a bit of time to choose the ones that can be best for your company. Notice what you’re pinned down names on the list are sharing on their social media channels, the topics they are covering; what kind of products/services their followers are enjoying more; the total time they spend in answering their followers etc. This will help you decide if your values match that of the influencer and you can go ahead with chasing your desired goals.
2. Understand What They Are Looking To Achieve
It will be easy for you to understand the set goals for the listed influencers, once you start tracking their accounts.
It’s not only you that are looking to achieve something from the possible partnership but the social media influencers, too, who are always craving to enhance their personality and audience by offering the real value and benefit that would further help them to broaden their image and face value in the market. Hence, the value of content increases for your potential future social media collaborator who wants to offer relevant information about the new products in the market to keep the followers engaged and visited the profile(s).
When you know what truly matters to your influencer, you will find yourself in the driver’s seat and do better collaboration based on mutual interest.
3. Gratitude Is Important
Imagine a person having no logo for his/her brand but still doing good promotion of the products, and you send the influencer a real well-designed logo that would become the face of his/her company, how good the person will feel for your business exchange? If you can, send them an assortment of your products to use and review for their followers. If you are dealing with services like Consultancy Services or a Web Designing Agency, then in such cases, you can send them a light note saying ‘Welcome’ and ‘Thank You’ and what you feel for them and their importance for your business expansion.
4. Work On Building A Team Of Influencers
Promote Social Media Influencers on Your Social Media Channels (professional as well on personal accounts) as a sign of goodwill. They will reciprocate the attention and this way, you can recruit more than a couple of influencers with a meagre budget.
Offer some reciprocal love to your influencers. Share their posts with their names tagged on your company’s official social media channels, and try to share them on your personal social media channels as well. The best thing you can do is to ask your office employees to give the social media influencers as a shout-out on their social media handles and ask your friends to do the same. It will help the influencers to extend their reach, ultimately help you to reach a bigger audience and the likeminded people altogether by creating a chain reaction in a well-planned manner.
5. Keep Testing and Monitoring
A lot of people engage more when they see someone’s birthday, achievement, event etc. related post. It’s a great opportunity to grab if you know the events dates and are considerably prepared to develop creative content to rejoice in your influencer’s happiness. Since the influencers have a character, aura, and charisma, the audience finds it relatable to connect with them and to hear and listen to what they say. Keep an eye on their posts related to your business. You can offer special discounts to your influencer’s followers and see the ROI. Keep testing the offers and shout-outs to your company and continuously monitor your conversion rates related to your influencer’s social media posts.
Your job doesn’t end with sending influencers a gift or sharing them on your social media profiles. Partnering with a social media influencer or influencers is a continuous process that involves a lot of networking, diplomacy and specializing, which can take its toll because to produce excellent results, you have to give your 100%.