The Secret Sauce of Influencer Marketing for Your Small Business or Startup Company
If you want to master the art of small business influencer marketing, then stop here, take a deep breath, and restart. Because here in this blog post, we have framed all the possible things you will ever need to know about influencer marketing for your small biz.
It’s never been easy to set up a small business and taste success. However, the satisfaction alone makes it all worth it. It is the dream and joy that drives every entrepreneur forward and inspires them to put their blood, sweat, and tears.
But without the right strategies and support, tasting success will be nothing but a far-fetched dream. That’s why, as an entrepreneur, you need to use all the right resources to promote your brand and business on global platforms.
Now, when it comes to global platforms, putting your brand in the digital realm is a necessity. This will not just increase the brand’s visibility but will also help it to reach more and more audiences and customers. Just because your business is small, that doesn’t mean that you cannot pursue a big dream.
Setting up a perfect marketing campaign is pretty effective, but it is quite a time-consuming process as well. It requires a decent budget since you may need to hire several competent service providers to take care of your marketing campaigns.
Having a shoestring marketing budget can cause some problems in this case. While your marketing options are quite limited, you can surely use the internet to get things going for you.
This is where an effective digital marketing method, like influencer marketing, comes into the picture. It is one of the sure-fire ways, which is indispensable when it comes to promoting businesses of a relatively smaller scale.
But how can you go about with the influencer marketing for your small business? If you have a limited amount of ideas, then this blog post is going to give you a comprehensive walk-through of the entire small business influencer marketing process.
Here, I will be listing some facts that will help you understand more about influencer marketing and also the strategies and resources that you can use to make it successful for your small business.
So, let’s get started with any further ado.
Influencer Marketing: What Is It Exactly?
To put it simply, the influencer in “influencer marketing” is someone who is an expert or a personality (or celebrity) who possesses a substantial amount of social followings and clout.
This is where the influence part comes into the picture. Thanks to these industry bigwigs, you can channelize their fame and influence to promote your brand in a very subtle way, much like a PR campaign.
But the influencer marketing process is not as simple as it seems from outside. You cannot just contact a particular influencer, strike a deal with him in a jiffy, and get your business name mentioned in every post he shares on his social media handles. The process goes much beyond that.
Just like any other marketing campaign or strategy, this method also has a few aspects to ponder upon. Hence, you need to have all the influencer marketing tricks up your sleeve so that at the right time, you can play them well.
Wondering how to do it in the right way? Well, in the next part of this blog post, we will be reviewing all the nitty-gritties of conducting influencer marketing to promote your business to the next level.
Influencer Marketing: The Benefits It Offers to a Startup
Visibility and reach are perhaps the most critical aspects of a startup or small business, which they crave. But at the same time, achieving this is the biggest challenge as well. Without spending a considerable amount of money, it’s almost impossible to attain high visibility for your new brand.
Since your brand is not yet established, so there will be almost zero recall of your products and services. After all, if you don’t get people talking about your brand, how can it reach a greater number of audiences?
In this case, the sole option you have for marketing from the ground up requires a lot of money, time, and effort. That’s why you need a marketing method that can cover all these lacks and provide you the targeted results quickly.
- Influencer marketing does exactly the same. After all, there is no doubt that the consumers will surely trust the recommendations of the influencers whom they admire and follow. That’s the power of reverence, and that’s where the “influence” part comes in. This will immediately position your brand in front of a larger audience.
- Just by connecting your brand with a few niche influencers and personalities can create a link between their followers and your business. It’s nothing less than a bridge in the gap.
- Also, this group of followers and large audiences will immediately become your potential prospects. It will spare you the trouble of building your reputation from scratch.
- Thanks to the recommendations of the influencers, the audience will anyway stay under the impression that you will be providing commendable services. Thereby, by default, your brand’s visibility will be echoed and amplified from the very beginning.
But I guess you still have some doubts about its worth. Isn’t it?
Well, I bet you have.
Hence, let’s delve a little bit deeper into the effectiveness and impacts of influencer marketing on your small business.
Influencer Marketing: Is It Really Worth Trying? A Few Key Influencer Marketing Stats
If you analyze the incredible results that you can achieve doing influencer marketing, then you will realize that it’s actually worth every penny and minute you spend on it.
- This will allow you to save quite a deal of money and still eventually manage to attain great visibility for your business, along with an increased sales percentage. 89 percent of marketers said that they received similar or sometimes better ROI from influencer marketing than other forms of internet marketing.
- There are a number of ways you can repay the influencers. Like for example, you can send them goodies, pay them money, offer some free services, or even use cross-promotion.
- The key is to get connected with the right influencers, and this will sky-rocket the reach of your brand in no time. It will give you a loyal customer-base that can pay unhesitantly for the right services.
- Most of the mid-level but popular micro-influencers will have followers in the range of a few thousand or sometimes way more than that. If you can reach even a fraction of it in the beginning, imagine where it can propel your brand. You can do the math yourself.
- According to a 2018 report from Influencer Marketing Hub, with every dollar you spend on influencer marketing, you can make an average of $18 in return.
- Around 80 percent of consumers have purchased something after seeing it recommended by an influencer they follow and trust online.
- It is expected that brands worldwide will spend nearly $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022.
- While Instagram (almost 89 percent) is the most popular influencer marketing channel, YouTube (70 percent), Facebook (45 percent), blogs (44 percent), Twitter (33 percent), LinkedIn (19 percent), and Pinterest (15 percent) are the major platforms, brands focus as well.
- Snapchat is the least popular channel for influencer marketing, with only around 3 percent of brands use it for the same.
How to Get Started With Influencer Marketing?
This is perhaps the most crucial question that has been wondering you. Well, to do influencer marketing successfully, you need to keep a few things clear in your mind.
Below, I am going to give you a simplified and step by step influencer marketing guide that will help you get started with it quickly without much hassle. Besides, this will boost your brand without giving you too much trouble in setting up the influencer marketing campaigns for your small business.
Now, these steps might vary from business to business. However, this is the fundamental approach that you need to follow in order to make your influencer marketing campaigns resounding success.
Have A Compiled List of Influencers of Your Industry
While doing influencer marketing, this is the first and foremost step you need to follow. With a list of experts and key personalities related to your field of business, you can choose which influencers you want to go with. This can also be an organization, but in that case, the number of followers matters more. After all, that is what you need for the campaign to be successful.
List as many influencers as you want. However, think about the influence level they might have on your target audience.
Choose The Influencers Who Align With Your Brand
Once you have the list in place, now you can just begin shortlisting the influencers who prove to be the most relevant to your business.
You have to identify the ones who stand connected or parallel with your goals, besides, if they can cater to the exact same type of audience that you target and serve to.
This will help you increase the chances of making successful sales. Because from the very beginning, you have already streamlined your market and audience with the influencers; now, you just have to work according to that.
Stay Connected With the Influencers
After you have a comprehensive list of potential influencers to collaborate with for your startup or small business, the next thing you need to do is to build connections with them.
You need to start following the influencers on social media in order to reach out to them. Subscribe to their blogs or website, start liking their pages and posts, and also mention (along with a link) them on any platform you see fit and meaningful. Later on, you can email them directly and express your intent to collaborate with them.
After the formal introduction, you must present your brand and explain why you seek to collab with them. This pitch is very crucial. This will further determine the nature of the partnership and also the future success of your influencer marketing campaigns.
Take Part in Creating The Content Along With Influencers
Once you finalize the influencer and close the deal, you can then start collaborating and participating with him in creating engaging content targeting your customers. This will allow the influencer to promote your brand much better.
This part depends entirely on the contract as you might be the one, who promotes the content, or the influencer will just endorse it, or you both can co-promote it.
It may happen that if they get particular about the kind of content you have on your pages, they might offer to create them for you. This can then work as a kind of sponsored advertisement.
The content can also vary depending on the understanding you two will have. They can range from videos, infographics, or just the usual social media posts, reviews and testimonials about your various offerings, etc.
The Top Three Influencer Marketing Tools That Can Help Your Small Biz
Just like any other form of internet marketing, in this case also, you can use a few powerful influencer marketing tools that will let you set up and track the campaigns, and determine future adjustments.
These tools will help you analyze and understand whether you are hitting the target or not. Also, they will allow you to gain an overall understanding of whether the posts are reaching the right audience or not, and the future direction of your campaigns.
Now, let’s see some of the effective influencer marketing tools that you can use for your small business:
1. Upfluence
Upfluence is a comprehensive platform to manage your overall influencer marketing requirements. From helping you find relevant influencers to managing your campaign performance, this tool does it all. Upfluence is a self-serving solution, which lets you customize pricing according to your business size and needs. Companies like Microsoft and PayPal also utilize their services.
Upfluence has a huge database with 500 million contents spread across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and hundreds and thousands of blogs. You can search through their database and find influencers who precisely match your business criteria. Once you find influencers who fit your needs, you can contact them on a large scale.
The tool allows you to find key influencers through its advanced search using keywords and other filters like social media metrics, demographics, geo-location, language, etc. It also provides real-time analysis of several vital data, including their latest posts, monthly traffic, and engagement rates to their contents and social media posts. Using the tool, you can obtain influencers’ contact details and also see who opened your email and are ready to engage.
2. GroupHigh
GroupHigh is another handy influencer marketing tool, which you can use both for researching relevant influencers as well as outreaching them. This all-in-one tool offers a massive 15 million bloggers’ database to its users. You can quickly find relevant influencers based on their content reach, social media following, blog posts, location, etc.
GroupHigh allows you to integrate your existing influencers’ list to the tool so that you can access them all from one place and manage effortlessly. Besides, the tool lets you assess the marketing strategies used by influencers such as social media giveaways, blog referral links, sponsored video content, etc.
Once your final list of influencers is ready for use, you can create custom email templates to pitch your proposals to the influencers. After outreaching potential influencers, you are all set to monitor and track your conversations with the interested ones.
3. BuzzStream
If you need a tool that allows you to do extensive influencer research and outreach them, then BuzzStream is indeed one of the best options we have in the market. Using the tool, you can perform keyword searches to shortlist relevant influencers, and further apply filters like country, language, social media content, etc. to refine the results.
To profitably run an influencer marketing campaign, we need a number of metrics related to influencers’ social media channels and website. BuzzStream is one of those few tools, which gives you complete access to their influencers’ database so that you can analyze them appropriately and streamline your campaigns without much hassle. Besides, the tool offers extended outreach features, including designing custom and personalized emails to pitch influencers, setting up auto-follow-ups, and managing reminders.
Collaborating with influencers is not the only thing BuzzStream offers, but it has an intuitive interface that allows you to manage all your influencer marketing needs while working as a team with your colleagues. The tool also has a powerful data analysis section that lets you track your outreach campaigns, monitor the conversations, and analyze the team performance.
To Conclude
If you have made it this far, I hope that now you have a fair idea about the perks and other benefits of influencer marketing for your small business.
The secret sauce behind the success of these campaigns is all about how well you conduct the influencer research and the amount of effort you put into creating the best content for your brand.
Also, you need to identify the right influencers deftly who suit your business needs and resonate with your audience deeply. And with that, your brand’s reach will be multiplied by manifolds, and you will achieve an all-time high ROI.
With the list of relevant influencers coupled with compelling content and strategic promotion, you can easily highlight the unique selling points of your brand and thus attract more and more potential buyers.
If you follow these small biz influencer marketing tips and keep all the aspects in mind, I believe your startup brand can take a long flight and increase its reach to the moon and back.
Also, if you have already tried out influencer marketing for your small business, please tell us about your experience in the comments below. Besides, if you want to add anything to this small biz influencer marketing guide, then feel free to do so, as it will help us and every single reader of this blog post.
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Mentored by Mr. Soumya Roy, the Founder, CEO of PromozSEO Web Marketing Academy.
Being an entrepreneur and digital marketer, he loves to share his knowledge and experience in topics related to internet marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, branding, entrepreneurship, and many more.
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