Influencers are all over social media. From your favorite female fitness influencers and esports to yoga and Amazon, you will always find a popular, credible figure. But what exactly is an influencer? How can you even work with influencers?
An influencer is someone in your niche or industry who wields influence. Influencers have specialized knowledge, authority, or insight into a specific subject. An influencer’s audience makes a decision to follow them.
Influencers are:
- Different for every brand and every brand’s campaign
- Credible
- People with loyal followers who trust them
- Aligned contextually with your brand
- Individuals who have a quality audience before quantity
- Authentic in their recommendations
An influencer also helps companies with their influencer marketing efforts.
The benefits of working with influencers
Working with an influencer:
- Powers up your affiliate marketing efforts.
- Connects you to other credible influencers and micro-influencers. (Speaking of micro-influencers, here’s why and how your brand should work with them.)
- Can encourage your most loyal customers become influencers in their own right.
- Enriches your content strategy and fills in the gaps of your own content schedule.
- Effectively reaches your target audience and provides amazing value to them.
- Builds winning partnerships and may result in possible joint-ventures, live events, and other opportunities.
How to work with an influencer
Not all influencer marketing campaigns are successful. Some influencers are not really who they say they are, others will charge too much and not deliver a reputable ROI, and a select few are just plain weird. But you can make them successful if you know how to work with an influencer to improve your influencer marketing ROI.
You can successfully utilize influencer marketing to grow your business. Here are some easy tips to help you get started:
- Invest in the best influencer relationship management tools. Tools like Upfluence and Post for Rent can help you with your everyday influencer relationship management needs. Tools like these can help you store essential information to ensure that everything goes smoothly with your influencer management.
- Choose the best influencer marketing platform that aligns with your business goals and objectives to help you meet your needs. Ask yourself questions like, “Am I always recruiting new influencers?” and “Once I have decided on the platform, which data do I care about the most?” Then determine what needs you want the platform to tend to.
- Don’t be afraid to influence the influencer. Make your influencer outreach efforts as personal as possible. Use hyper-personalization, cold email, and remarketing to get attention.
- Get in the mind of an influencer. The best way to successfully work with an influencer is to get in their head. How do you actually become one? This is a great way to practice your communication efforts with the influencers you decide to work with.
- Review an influencer’s metrics before collaborating. What do we mean by that? When we say examine metrics, we mean, “Get proof.” You want your marketing campaigns and efforts to succeed. You need to make sure your influencer is who they say they are. Look at metrics like their engagement, post frequency, comments/likes ratio, follow growth, branded posts, and more.
