How can online influencers help make your small brand grow?

Online Influencers marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing tools. It takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. The main differentiator in this approach is that the results of the campaign are a collaboration between the brand and the influencer.

Years ago, the influencer marketing arena was only limited to celebrities and a few dedicated bloggers. Today, influencers arise and saturate the market. This type of marketing does not only involve celebrities but also revolves around influencers. They are individuals who would never consider themselves famous in an offline setting.

There are many well-known networks with their respective demographics than can be used as a strategy for influencer marketing. Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Tiktok are just a few among those networks where influencers can be mostly found. Each influencer has its own set of followers and reputation on which your brand can partner with.

Many of us have a false belief that influence marketing is only for big brands. Since top influencers’ posts are considerably costly for each story that they share on their account. Compared to big brand, small businesses have a low budget and most likely not able to afford top influencers.  But at the end of the day, social media has been continuously occupying the marketing sector and has become increasingly influential for most brand names in the market. It would be a significant move for businesses to work with influencers as organic social media becomes more difficult for most businesses.

Here are some tips that will help small players to level up their game by leveraging online influencers on a limited budget:

Establish your marketing goals

Defining your business goals will help you in building your successful influencer marketing strategy. Knowledge about your brand’s intent has a considerable impact on your marketing efforts.

Understand your target audience

Knowledge about your market will keep you away from having a hard time creating material for your influencer campaign. Extensive customer research data and detailed user on-site tracker will help you more about the people interested in your industry.

Consider supply and demand

When figuring out which social media channel to tap for your influence marketing, consider the market’s supply and demand. The brands’ high demand for social media content is always there, choose the platform that can work really well for a small business like yours. Work with influencers that have a large number of followers and consider places where you will be noticeable and allows more content.

Supply and demand have a higher possibility for engagement and it helps regulate the cost of engagement.

Aim for collaboration

There are three types of social media influencers: the public servant, the moneymaker and the negotiator. The public servant considers influence marketing as a form of public service that also enhances their income while the moneymaker who considers influence marketing as a cash cow, they are likely to sell you on buying a social media story and then move on to their next client. While the transactional influencer’s stories have some value. These influencers get to know your brand and show interest in helping your business grow and with this type of influencer, you will get better ROI when you have them as a collaborator.

Start small

Regardless of your ability to spend on your marketing efforts, it would be more cost-efficient to start locally. If you only have a single store, working with a local influencer will also help your business in conserving your budget. You should start with people who would have used your brand or had a remarkable experience in using your product. With the power of word of mouth, recommendations can spread easily as the number of customers would dramatically increase.

Once you learn the local influencer network, you may already start planning about expanding your geographic reach.

Choose those who have high engagement rates

Local influencers tend to have a lower number of followers where engagement rates are much more important. Smaller followings tend to be more interested in what the influences share compared to those who have a bigger number of followers. You should always keep in mind to not give more priority to those influencers who only has a huge number of followings, but to look after their engagement rates.

Research about their industry 

Don’t go after an influencer that has a different industry compared to yours or your marketing budget will be put to waste by working with the wrong influencer. Also, make sure that the produced content should capture the interest of the influencer’s audience or it won’t turn out effective.

Put into consideration the cost per action

The marketing budget would be worthless if it only gets a name recognition rather than sales leads. Cost per action helps you to know who to consider for your influence marketing campaign. Working with an influencer who is worthy of the price that you will pay, can provide your brand with better sales leads.

Make a great pitch

Influence marketing is a mutually beneficial relationship between the influencer and the brand. Sometimes it takes some trial and error to get the right influencer for your business. But if your brand already took a lot of failures convincing influencers to collaborate with you, chances are you’re not reaching influencers with your message or your brand has an image problem. If so, diagnose the problem and address the problem efficiently and effectively.

The price is right

Before approaching influencers, you have to figure out the best payment option for them. It could be in a form of cash, products or experiences. Decide on what you can afford and give away and stick to it.

Most of the time when giving out experiences, it results in better content. It allows the influencer to see every angle than a regular customer gets. While products that need frequent usage need more time for the influencer to get the full sense. While paying in cash is the best option for a possible relationship, but you should proceed with the collaboration

You might also want to read: A Basic Guide for Business-Minded Introverts