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– 5 Minute Read – by Guest Contributor Kevin Hsu –
The average American spends up to 2 hours a day on social media. It’s no real surprise that large companies are spending millions on social media campaigns to capture the attention of tech-savvy millennials. However, small businesses can access their piece of the pie with the promises of great return on investment and branding with their own influencer outreach. This practice is known as micro-influencer marketing.
More resources + links below on examples, ROI, campaign briefs
But first, what is a social influencer?
A social influencer can be considered to be anyone on social media who has a sphere of influence over a target audience. With millions of influencers and channels, it can be difficult to know where to start. When looking at micro-influencers they may have as little as 1,000 dedicated followers to 50,000. For small businesses, you most likely want to search for someone local if you already work off a lot of foot-traffic. Or if you can sell your goods online, you want to look at your ideal customer or some of your best customers as an influencer.
Influencer Marketing Hub categorizes most influencers as celebrities, industry experts and thought leaders, Bloggers and content creators, personality/micro influencers.
Top 3 Ways Small Businesses Approach Social Influencers
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Instagram
Perhaps the modern holy grail of social media marketing. Whether your product is shoes, skincare, or organic cupcakes. There are ways to incorporate the Insta-famous into your marketing campaign.
The first step to finding the right influencer for you is to understand your brand’s target audience. If your product is food prep and delivery services, it makes sense to reach out to fitness models and food enthusiasts. Free Instagram marketing tools such as SocialBlade make it easy to find influential accounts. Otherwise, a simple Google of “top Instagram accounts for (your product)” or search our content creators will do.
When choosing an influencer, the greater the number of followers the greater the cost for a post or product mention. Therefore, quality is always over quantity. Some tips include looking at follower engagement. Are people liking their photos? Leaving comments? Doing a little research can give you the best bang for your buck.
Now that you found your potential influencers what do you do?
Influencers usually have business emails in their bio for business inquiries. Otherwise, shoot them a direct message to determine the number/frequency of posts and compensation.
Read here on how to create great content on Instagram.
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Twitter
Twitter stats: users have a 2.7x increase in purchase intent when exposed to brand tweets, but up to 5.2x increase when exposed to a brand and an influencer. Additionally, Twitter influencer recommendations are valued almost as much as those from friends.
Take advantage of this statistic! Sometimes having an expert with a 25,000 follower count on Twitter can be just as effective as one with 100,000 on Instagram. After all, people trust experts and Twitter are often used as a news source.
Again, you want to check fan base participation. Paid sites like Buzzsumo can connect you with Twitter posts based on keywords and provide influencer statistics. Alternatively, you can use a free site called Kred before messaging your influencer directly. Or you can talk to us about using our platform.
When establishing term conditions:
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Make it clear whether they are expected to provide a backlink back to your website.
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Know that you don’t always have to offer cash compensation. Sometimes free products or trials can work just as well.
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If you’re providing them what to say take note of a Tweets 280 character limit.
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Blogs
Reaching out to bloggers can be a great way to get links back to your site and if you approach the right people, it can even be free.
Check out our last blog on turning site visitors into new leads.
What you want to present:
A blogger media kit makes it easy to share relevant content about your company. Plus, it can be reused! Some things you want to include:
Who? – a history of the company and CEO
What? – a little about the product
Goals? – what’s the 5-year plan
Call to action – why should the reader buy the product and how?
Using paid sites such as Top Bloggers or JustReachOut can connect your blog proposal with bloggers who will reply back with publishing offers. Otherwise, a little personal research can find you smaller blog sites writing about your product niche. With a well-developed blogger media kit, it’s possible to obtain free exposure from authors in return for new content.
Further Resources:
So now you know how to reach out to an influencer, what is the best way to optimize their platform? How do I build a campaign? What do influencer campaigns look like and how can I detect ROI?
You can see an example and gain a template of a brand reaching out to an influencer here.
You can read more about the different influencer partnerships and how to read ROI for them here.