Do you want to gain more visibility for your business and increase your product sales? Yes, I already know the answer, but then I want you to remind yourself of why you ventured into that business in the first place.
You must have tried out all the available tips, pros, and cons related to marketing by now. But just like Oliver Twist in Charles Dickens’s book, “You need some more”. You need that extra power, that solid technique that will skyrocket your business and massively increase your sales.
The truth is that no matter how hard you try, the common tricks you are familiar with aren’t enough to fulfill your business needs and wants.
What if I told you that an influencer could actually do the job? Surprised, right? I also was, when I first learned about this.
You may not have realized this, but influencer marketing will definitely help you increase the visibility of your products and services to both new and existing customers. Their positive review of your products can help drive massive sales and increase your brand awareness. You don’t want to joke with this, do you?
How do I find these influencers? This and many more may be running in your mind right now.
In this article, I will be teaching you how I find, connect with, and engage influencers to promote my business through influencer marketing.
Shall we?
Who is an influencer?
When you go online and see a person talking about a particular product, promoting it, and stating its benefits, what comes to your mind? Who you do classify such a person as?
We won’t make headway if you do not understand who an influencer is, and what role they play in the marketing field. An Influencer is a person with a large online presence and audience, who has the ability to persuade his or her followers, subscribers, customers, etc. into purchasing a specific product or service.
I have had cause to view the pages of some influencers and celebrities when they are promoting a particular product, and have also seen how their fans due to their love and loyalty to these influencers purchase the product or service even if they don’t relatively need it. That’s huge, isn’t it? Under such circumstances, I begin to wonder what they are doing that I’m not doing right and how best to rectify my errors.
Influencer marketing is very massive now and every business and entrepreneur now turns to these people for help regarding their brand awareness and product sales. So, how can you engage an influencer?
For an influencer marketing campaign to be successful, you have to engage the right influencers i.e. influencers in your niche with good reputations. Imagine what working with an influencer with a bad reputation will cost your business. Trust me, you don’t want to tow that lane. You also have to ensure that the kind of products and services your choice of an influencer promotes aligns with your industry and that he or she has successfully promoted such products in the past.
Never forget that relevancy is key. Now that you know who an influencer is, let’s talk about what they can do for your business.
Benefits of having an Influencer
When it comes to influencing products and services, there is no limit to the methods an Influencer can undertake to introduce your product to the audience. By carefully monitoring an Influencer I’m quite close to, I was able to decipher some tactics they use in their marketing campaigns, some of which includes adding a link to your product, service, or blog post on their website, writing a blog post reviewing your product or service, and promoting your product or service at events.
I also noticed that this acquaintance of mine sometimes shared social media posts about several brands she was influencing. She did this for me countless times and I know how it greatly impacted my business.
You must have witnessed these in the past, but never really paid much attention to understand that such a person was indirectly promoting a product.
As a blogger, you can involve an influencer during the creation of content, as the tendency of them sharing and telling their audience about the content will be high since they were a part of its creation process.
The benefits of having an influencer promote your business or content are endless. All you have to do is ensure you build a mutual business relationship with the influencer to further harness your business growth.
This will take us to the next part of this article which is concerned with finding influencers.
How can you find influencers?
One truth that needs to be told is that not every person with a large audience can influence your business. I for one cannot tell a lifestyle coach to come influence my food blog. It will definitely come out disastrous as we aren’t in the same niche. You need to determine the tactics to include in your search for influencers and your influencer marketing campaign.
There are five primary influencer types according to Quey which are PR influencers, Connectors, Authority influencers, Micro-influencers and celebrity influencers, and they use platforms like discussion forums or social media to reach their audience.
Social Media Influencers
If you have ever longed to showcase your business to an audience via social media, this is definitely for you. Begin by identifying influencers with a large audience on your desired social platform. Their reach may vary across social platforms, so you would need to engage the ones most popular in your desired platform. For example, you can’t engage an influencer with a low reach on Instagram and a high one on Facebook to come influence your product on Instagram. You already know what would be the outcome of such.
You can search for keywords related to your products or services on most social media networks to identify the most popular posts and their influencers. I recommend you use Facebook as it offers the largest social media audience and a range of advertising options.
If opting for other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, etc., you can also find and get a list of their most popular influencers. I recommend you bookmark these influencers across your social media platforms for easy retrieval.
Blogging Influencers
If you are searching for an influencer to use his/her blog to write about your product or service and reach the audience, begin by identifying the most popular blogs in your niche or industry using Google ranks. You can also find authoritative blogs in your niche when you search for the latest news in Google search. Also, if you are looking to discover the top blogs on specific topics, I recommend using Alltop. You can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to search for popular blog posts based on social shares.
You need to keep an eye out for the authors writing the blog posts as they are the influencers we are looking out for, as well as the regular contributors ranked as Most Popular. Finally, you can also scroll to the end of a post to get the necessary information about its author or blogger.
Event Influencers
You may not know it, but speakers at events like conventions, conferences, seminars, etc. also make the best influencers. I have had the opportunity to attend events where the guest speaker in the course of giving a speech, promoted a product or service so well that people patronized or promised to patronize the vendor. That’s the power of having an influencer who speaks eloquently at events and can command respect and admiration from the audience.
You can find this type of influencers in your niche by searching for events and looking at their speakers list. If lucky, you just may find the contact information of that influencer you admire and hope to work with.
How can you connect with influencers?
Once you have been able to draft a list of influencers across platforms, it’s time for you to connect with them, and make them love your product or service. You can do this by making a pitch, but ensuring it is top-notch and good enough to leave them in awe. When making a pitch, try to make it convincing enough to make the influencer want to use your product or service. You also need to ensure that the pitch gets the influencer excited enough to want to share it with their audience.
Whenever I want to enlist the service of an influencer, I try to make a pitch explaining the benefits the influencer will gain from my product or service, while helping the influencer use the product or service. I also try to work with the influencer on a plan to promote the product or service. One thing I never forget to do is to give them the product for free. It’s easier appealing to them this way. At least it has been working for me.
You may not be able to accomplish all these at once, as you may need to subsequently discuss and arrive at a conclusion via emails.
Once you are satisfied with your pitch, reach out to your target influencers. You can reach out either via email, through outreach tools like Hunter.io, or via the social media platform, they are most active on. But then, you need to remember they get tons of messages and thus avoid getting worked up when you don’t get a response. Always follow-up on your emails or look for an alternative channel. Once you get positive feedback, work with them to share that experience with an entirely new audience.
What to do after an influencer marketing campaign
You need to help the influencer manage the conversation immediately they start sharing your product or service with their audience, as their posts will likely attract comments and questions requiring answers from their audience. Ensure you closely follow the comment section to promptly answer questions that may be asked, as this will also be a plus to you when the audience decides to patronize you.
Outside this, try to measure the success of the influencer marketing campaign. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to do this, only if you created a link that can be tracked for the influencer to share with their audience.
Winding up
You should make Influencer marketing a part of your marketing strategy. Locate and connect with influencers capable of promoting your product or service seamlessly. Identifying the platform and influencers capable of generating traffic and conversions for your product or service is ideal, and will help ensure your future campaign is better planned.
I will conclude by reiterating that your reach can only go so far, and marketing today is a group effort. Try influencer marketing and enjoy the numerous benefits attached to it.