Simple guide to influencer marketing for small businesses

As a longtime online marketer with almost 10 years experience, I have had many opportunities to work for businesses that are looking to find their market in the b2b segment. In the sea of marketing tactics and strategies, most small businesses tend to get creative and cheap or free techniques, instead of using the standard advertising techniques like TV, Radio and Print media. In most cases, small business and startups focus on interactive techniques to share their messages to the exact targeted audience, which will bring them more credibility, popularity, trust, and sales.

Among those tactics is the influencer marketing.

But what is Influencer Marketing and how you as a small business owner can use it to gain more customers?

In short and simple influencer marketing can be defined as the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing. Or in other words letting other people (usually someone who has a decent amount of followers on the internet and is a specialist in his or hers field) tell the story of your brand to his or hers audience.

Why Influencer Marketing?

Well, it proved in the past few years that people can easily buy products from other people that are their idols or heroes.

Who is an influencer?

These days in the world of the internet everyone can be an influencer. As long as they have a small or huge audience. Even you reading this can be an influence to some degree as you sharing specific content which will be some kind of influence on your audience and particular individuals following you.

But the ultimate question is should you as a small business use Influencer Marketing?

If you have money – yes, if you don’t have money it will be a challenge, but it’s worth to try. If we compare the cost per action, there is a significant difference between the PPC cost and Price Per Influence, and most of the time, the second one is very very expensive.

So if you are really up for using Influencer Marketing into your business strategy and you have the financial support for that, you can potentially follow these steps:

Find out what is your buyer persona?

Who are they admiring on the internet? Who is their favorite internet person that they follow everyday? You can use tools like mention.com or buzzsumo.com to identify potential influencers that have an influence on your targeted customers.

Gather as much content as possible.

When an influencer starts promoting your brand you need to have a tonne of content to back up his. A tool that can assist you with that is serpwoo.com.

Make a plan to support your influencer marketing campaign with additional campaigns like remarking, email marketing and social media marketing. That way you will reach to customers that just got a glance of your products or services by the like remarking, email marketing and social media marketing. That way you will reach to customers that just got a glance of your products or services by the influencer.

Contact the influencer.

Before you start sending emails, create a list of potential influencers you want to contact. Research them online, see what are they famous for and write it down.

 

Send a nicely written email.

There are few tips when it comes to writing an email to influencer:

1. Write a straightforward subject line. Make it look like a headline, short and to the point. Don’t be vague and informal. Make sure to mention your company and what the opportunity is. Ex. Join the Awesome Bloggers Network
2. For greeting, go with first name only, unless they refer to themselves on their blog as Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc. There’s no need to bring titles when you’re aiming to open a comfortable back and forth line of communication. Introduce yourself in an open manner. Tell them your first name, your title, and the company you work for. Link to your site. Most influencers will not bother to search or type the name of your business to learn more. Make their life easier.Ex.  My name is [First Name]. I’m the [Position] at Awesome.
3. Let them know what is what you are aiming to – your business goal. Get to the point quickly about what you’re looking to do.  Keep it brief using one or two sentences.Ex. We’d like to offer you an exclusive position in that network.
4. Give them a reason to write your email. Shoot the incentive and explain why you would like them to endorse your brand. Here is very important to use the research you have done because each influencer has different incentive key points. Also give them a unique, researched reason why they should be working with you.
5. Influencers are busy people so make sure to explain that they commitment will not be time-consuming for them.Ex. We’re not looking for a heavy commitment. All we would ask of you for a monthly post on a topic of your choosing
6. Share an interesting fact about your brand – service or product. Ex. Awesome currently 3500 active users, 5000 likes on Facebook, 2600 followers on Twitter and strong will to grow our audience even more.
7. Set up a deadline and end the email short and sweet. Ex. The deadline for accepting our offer is July 31st, please let me know if you need more information for our side. I look forward hearing from you.
8. Write interesting specific content for your niche and mention them in it. That way when you share it on social media they will most likely share it.

BONUS:

Here is a list of the most popular influencers online today – among them are: Logan Paul, Cassey Ho, Emily Henderson, and much more.

 

influencer, influencers, marketing, small business