How to Approach Influencers to Work With Your Brand
Learning how to approach influencers to work with your brand is challenging. But with a little time, research, knowledge and the right tools, you can successfully pitch an influencer like a pro! Here's a few tips to start you on your way.
How to find influencers to promote your brand
Digital marketers are dubbing 2018 the year of influencer marketing, and brands are using influencers more than ever to raise brand awareness, drive new visitors to your site, and create user-generated content. According to AdWeek, the influencer market was estimated to be worth $2 billion last year, but will reach $10 billion by 2020.
In other words: You’ll want to jump on this train now. But before you can begin your epic influencer campaign, you need to find and select the influencers you want to work with. Here’s how to get started.
Monitor Social Media
Look at your social media mentions. See who’s commenting on your blog posts and who’s sharing your content — do any of them have an engaged following?
Your mentions will help you see which of your brand advocates are the loudest and proudest. You’ll find people who already know your brand and use your products; two things that make finding and approaching the right influencers easier.
You should also monitor relatable hashtags. Hashtags take you to social conversations regarding your niche and ultimately lead you to the active talkers and bloggers in your niche.
Google Alerts allows you to set alerts for brand-related keywords so you’ll be notified whenever someone uses these words online. Then, you can check out the blog post’s author or people actively talking about relatable topics online and see if they’d be a good fit for your brand.
Do a Detailed Google Search
Another free way to find influencers is simply doing a Google search. If you’re a local business, see if there are any local bloggers in your city you could reach out to. Do you sell water bottles and workout gear? Search “health, fitness bloggers in (enter your city)”.
Use Tools to Help Automate the Search Process
If you've got the budget then you should consider using influencer marketing tools. Upfluence is a do-it-all influencer marketing software. It finds relevant social media influencers, as well as lets you set up and monitor your influencer marketing campaign. Deep Social dives deep into Instagram influencers and their audiences, providing you with detailed analytics about each. Buzzsumo is another tool that finds influencers via keywords and hashtags and also lets you discover popular content on desired topics and who’s sharing said content.
How to know if an influencer is the right fit for your brand
There are millions of social influencers out there — literally. Though it’s impossible to track the exact number of influencers on the internet (it all depends on what you consider “influence”), there may not be millions of influencers in your niche, but I’d safely bet there are thousands. Trying to find an influencer that’s right for your brand, that’s going to be worth your time and money, can seem impossible— but it isn’t. You just have to know the determining factors: Relevance, engagement, common ground, cost, and if they meet your needs and goals.
Relevance
In an influencer marketing survey, 67.6% of marketers said their biggest challenge is finding relevant influencers. While it may be hard, it’s important that the influencers you choose talk and post about topics relevant to your brand. They need to be relevant to you and your buyer persona. Some relevance questions you can ask include:
- Is this influencer articulate in the topic area we’re in/looking for?
- Does the influencer match our demographics? Does their audience?
- Are they considered an expert in our industry?
Take a look at the brand NAOT Footwear. As a retailer of hiking sandals, they sent their products to influencers relevant to their niche, who they were certain would have followers within their target demographic, who would also be interested in hiking sandal products.
They reached out to influencer @JessLikesToHike, who posted a photo of herself wearing the sandals and tagged them in the post.
Jess also posted a review of the sandals to her blog, including more high-quality photos that spoke to the adventure-related interests of her followers.
Brands should think creatively about ways to make their products relevant to different niches. While hiking sandals and hiking bloggers are a clear fit, less obvious brand/influencer pairings can still be worthwhile. For example, RXBar was able to connect relevantly to Jess’s readers by having her paint their whole-food protein bars as a good choice of snack while hiking.
Audience Reach and Engagement
You may think the number of followers or subscribers they have is all that matters—it’s not. Audience size is important, but it’s only one line on a list of worthwhile aspects and metrics that help you determine an influencer’s worth to your brand and shape your influencer marketing strategy.