How to Make Influencer Marketing Work for Your Business

Influencer marketing can be a great addition to your digital marketing strategy. However, getting good results isn’t a guarantee unless you know what you’re doing. Influencer marketing can not only increase brand awareness, but it can promote conversions and sales.

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If you’re a small business with limited resources, you might not be able to hire a person to handle your influencer marketing in-house. However, there are ways to use influencer marketing without breaking the bank. Here are the tips you can use to have a successful influencer campaign.

How to Make Influencer Marketing Work for Your Business

Set a Budget

Influencer marketing costs money, so you must have a budget in mind. This budget will also help you find and vet influencers who are willing to work with your budget. According to GRIN’s article “How Much Do Influencers Charge In 2021,” there are several factors that impact rates, including engaged followers, quality of the brand-influencer relationship, type of campaign, and more.

Know Your Audience

Do you know what your target audience is? If you’ve done different types of marketing, you may have created buyer personas. These will come in handy for your influencer marketing strategy, so make sure you remind yourself of your customer personas before you begin your campaign.

Remember, just because someone is your ideal customer doesn’t mean those are the people who buy your products. Use data and analytics to learn more about your current customers so you can get an idea of the content they’d like to see from influencers.

You’ll also need to know your influencer’s audience to make sure it lines up with yours. While the influencer may be of a certain demographic, that doesn’t mean their followers are the same.

Find Influencers Easily

You can find influencers directly on social media platforms. However, this takes time when it doesn’t have to. Instead, you can use a tool that helps you find influencers with a few clicks of a button. Using an influencer marketing platform can help you keep every partnership organized in one place.

Target Micro-influencers

Micro-influencers are influencers that have less than 10,000 followers. If you’ve just started influencer marketing, you might want to start with micro-influencers because they’re cheaper and usually more responsive to brands with smaller budgets. Micro-influencers are well worth the money because they typically have a highly engaged audience centered around a niche.

Not only that, but micro-influencers also charge less than influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. You may be able to find someone willing to work for a free product.

Try Bloggers

Bloggers are influencers, too. While getting a mention on social is great brand awareness, it may not result in many sales. Blogs are where people go for more information about products, services, or anything else. While there’s no guarantee that you’ll get sales from a blog, you can at least get a backlink to improve your SEO and help your rank on Google.

In other words, bloggers can help you get a social media mention and a backlink. These individuals use social media to link back to their blogs and other offerings, and many of them have large social media followings.

Vet Influencers

When you’re new to influencer marketing, it can be tempting to work with an influencer because they’re cheap. However, you should always vet them to make sure they won’t do anything that can harm your brand.

You should treat everyone who has a relationship with your brand like you would your employees. An influencer can destroy your reputation with just one post, so be extra careful about who you work with.

When vetting influencers, you can use this pre-employment screeners infographic from Shareable for Hires to come up with characteristics you are looking for your influencers to attain.

Follow the Rules

When you hire an influencer, it’s important to use contracts and follow them. Following through on these contracts will help you avoid influencers who might be bad for business. Your contract should include the posts and elements you agreed on and ensure they are FTC compliant. You should also try to respect the influencer’s creative process and allow them to create content they know will work with their audience.

Get to Know Your Partners

Influencer marketing is all about relationships. You need to build trust and credibility with the influencer to build trust and credibility with their followers. Influencers who feel as though your business has cared for and helped them grow will be more open to future collaborations.

Use Your Customers

You never know who has a social media following until you do your research. Your current customers can be some of the best influencers you work with. You can build features into your website that allow customers to share their purchases or connect with you on social media.

You can also reach out to customers and ask them to apply to be influencers. Those with brand loyalty will be willing to help your business grow while they get some additional perks and/or compensation.

Have a Diverse Team

While you may need to work with influencers in one niche, you should still make sure that your team of influencers is diverse. For example, you may be in the health and wellness industry working with fitness influencers.

While your niche is very specific, the type of people you work with doesn’t have to be. Include a healthy range of influencers from those who are more well-known to micro-influencers or industry experts.
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Always Track Results

How will you know if your influencer marketing campaign is a success without data? Make sure you develop a protocol for tracking results. If you’re using an influencer marketing platform, you can track your results easily. However, if you aren’t using any tools, you’ll need to be able to determine which metrics are important to you and how you’ll track them.

Matt Casadona

Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys San Diego life, traveling, and music.