What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing is a great way to benefit from another’s brand awareness and relationships.  Growing a business or a brand is a time consuming process that does not happen overnight.  Once you have established your business and you want to create growth at speed, working with other key influencers within your niche, can be a fantastic way to do just this.

 

Essentially you have get build yourself into a credible position first, no-one worth their salt is going to work with or promote you if it could possibly have a negative impact on their business and undo all of their hard work.

So the first step is always to build your business into the right position.  But once you have done this you will be able to do your research into your particular niche and look for others that you already participating and have captured a community of engaged customers.  You only want to work with credible influencers as you are looking to work with them to create unique content together, promote your business or offer free giveaways to their audience.

Once you have carried out your research you then need to contact these influencers either via email or through their social media channels, add value to them first and then ask for them to share your business with their audience, be it via an offer, a product, a review or a promotion etc.  This can be done in a variety of different ways and a varying degrees of cost depending on the influencer and their brand, which is one of the reasons why it is worth researching many influencers ideally around 50, so that you can really scrutinise and identify the similarities and suitability for your brands.

Top Tip: Work with the influencer to create content that you can mutually benefit from e.g create an article, infographic or content piece that you have both worked on so that when they promote the work they are promoting their work, even though it will ultimate promote and help sell your business or product, they are still promoting themselves.

Process:

1. Research Influencers in your preferred social media channels.
   • Count and note down how many views, followers, likes etc. they have.
   • how engaged are they with their following and what type of audience is it.  Is it your target audience?
   • Select the best top 50 (amount will vary on niche).
   • Note down their contact details (search until you find what you can)
   • Note down 1 or 2 things completely unique about the influencer or what they have created that you particularly like and why.
2. Create a template email (introduction, write something completely unique about why you like them or what you found interesting, why you feel you are complimentary and supporting branding, what you are looking for, how much they charge).
3. Personalise each email and send.
4. Respond within 12 hours to any responses and discuss how you can move the relationship further.

Top Tip: Influencers are very busy people and do not have time to read very long emails.  They are also inundated with offers and emails, so spend time to make your email unique and pleasant otherwise the delete button will be easily clicked!