In 2018, digital marketing mixed with the help of influencers – popular leaders of social places in the network like YouTube or Twitter – is a too attractive channel of promotion to pass up.

The concept of this approach to promotion is elementary: the brand finds a leader of opinions – influencer – that fits the objectives of the campaign. Further, it negotiates the product placement and receives results – the growth of sales or subscribers, increasing the loyalty of the audience or strengthening the brand.

According to the eMarketer study, in 2018, 84% of international brands will conduct at least one marketing campaign using leaders in social networks and blogs. Google Trends statistics shows the growth of investing in the influencer marketing for the last 12 months:

The secret weapon of influencer marketing lies in the fact that it does not look like advertising.

The audience perceives influencers as “family guys” which are always entertaining. That is why people are maximally loyal to them. How to interact with influential people of your segment and what mistakes to avoid when working with bloggers and streamers, read on our guide:

Step 1. Marketing campaign development

Decide your main tasks

First of all, you must determine the objectives of the campaign and how you will evaluate its effectiveness.

Your choice of influencers directly depends on the tasks you set for the company. And evaluation of their work effectiveness will help see the feasibility of such promotion.

Ask yourself, why do we use the authority of the influencer: to strengthen the brand, to create a name or to increase sales? One advertising post in a star account can raise brand awareness, but will it increase sales?

So, the choice of the site, the message and the influencer itself – all it depends on the purposes of the advertising campaign.

Using MozBar and SimilarWeb, you can check how selected bloggers are related to the KPI campaign. If you need to raise SEO, look at the domain authority; if you wanna bring traffic to the site – check monthly unique users and overall blog engagement.

And do not forget that the number of subscribers is important only when there is your target audience among them (for a hotel or car company it`s more important to work with a travel blogger, then with a star food blogger and his 100,000 unique subscribers).

Select an appropriate social media

Next, you need to select the platform to start the campaign. Understand that different social media have their own special style and audience and, accordingly, are suitable for different tasks.

Here are some nuances that you should think about:

• People. Use those social media that are most actively used by representatives of your target audience.
• Select image, video or text content. For example, if you need to publish a photo, then such a leader of opinions should be looked for in Instagram. For video content, the optimal platform will be YouTube or Facebook. Text materials are not so much in demand, but if you promote a specific product, you can use LinkedIn.
• External links. If one of the goals of the campaign is to attract traffic from social media to the website, then it is worth considering the characteristics of different social networks. For example, due to certain limitations, it is much more difficult to redirect an Instagram or Snapchat user to a web page.

Also, you can assess the prospects for promotion in smaller and less popular social networks, where, nevertheless, there is a specific audience that may well be targeted for your brand or product. It’s about social media like Anchor or Tumblr.

Step 2. A search of influential people inside the selected network

The search for micro-influencers is a key stage for launching an influence marketing campaign. It is noteworthy that no matter what product you promote (even the most unusual and niche one), you can surely find suitable influencers.

To find an influencer, you need to understand your buyer. Who is he? Do not limit yourself to standard indicators, draw a more detailed sketch of key segments of your audience. What are their values, interests, financial capabilities, scope of activities? This will help to imagine who will be the perfect match for your advertising campaign.

Three ways to find the authorities of your niche

• The first way is to select an influencer manually.

The simplest and most obvious way to find the right leader is to search for users of a particular platform manually. When you search, it’s best to use words that are directly related to your campaign. For example, “travelling” or “fitness”, and also apply filters to make the results more accurate.

The main feature of influencer search on Facebook: the names of the pages of leaders, as a rule, contain a keyword. You can also use the “Confirmed” check-box to clarify the results.

When searching for leaders on Twitter, you can use the option “Near you” if you are interested in finding micro-influencers in a location close to you. Also, you can search for them among those users on which you are subscribed.

As for Instagram (by the way, one of the most popular social media for promoting through the niche authorities), then you can search for the blogger you need through the tabs “People”, “Tags” and “Places”.

The perfect way to find the right type of content on YouTube is to search for keywords through Google. Adding to your request “youtube“, you get a list of channels that are directly related to your query:

Next, you must review the results of a search engine (or social network) and select the relevant profiles. It’s not as difficult and long as it might seem. Especially when many influencers add a keyword (related to the sphere of their activities) to their nickname or profile name.

• The second way – analyze the list of your subscribers.

In some cases, influencers you are looking for may already be among your subscribers. You can check this either independently or by using services like Social Rank.

By connecting your Facebook or Twitter account to Social Rank, you can search for the right people among your subscribers by the words that are contained in their profile description:

You can also search for hooks in user profiles, learning nicknames, the contents of the account description or their publication – all this will help to determine how much a user is suitable for the role of your influencer.

In addition, the search for an authority among your own subscribers speeds up the search process. Pleasant bonus – is that an influencer may already be a fan of your brand or product. Working with such a user will be much easier and more enjoyable.

• The third way to find your influencer is to use a professional agency.

One of the advantages of this approach is that agencies often have links to influencers and bloggers from different industries and spheres. So, the selection of a suitable leader will be more accurate, and the result of cooperation is more predictable. We collected the most popular influencer agencies for you, just keep reading 🙂

Step 3. Choice of influencers

When you find people that, at first glance, are suitable for your marketing campaign, you should choose the best one among them.

Five things to consider when choosing an influencer:

1. Blogger`s content and its conformity to the spirit and image of your brand. Learn his or her profile and publications. Make sure that they do not post content that could spoil your reputation. What is your policy for obscenities, is blogger associated with sports or budget travelling?

Our advice: do not work with bloggers who somehow discuss political or religious issues, as well as those who are inclined to various provocations.

2. The number of subscribers. The principle “the more the better” does not work here. Markerly recommends interacting with infusers, whose audience totals from 10 to 100 thousand subscribers.

Bloggers with this amount of subscribers, as a rule, are in closer contact with their audience, and their publications collect more comments and likes than publications of larger bloggers.

Audience involvement is more important than the number of subscribers.

3. How weighty is the opinion of the blogger in the niche in which you promote the brand or product?

You can answer this question after a short study of the pages of bloggers-candidates. How often do they publish about your segment? Is their content popular with the audience? How do their subscribers relate to the recommendations?

4. The regularity of publications.

For an influence marketing campaign, only those bloggers who regularly post fresh content and communicate with the audience are suitable.

5. Does the blogger have a similar experience of cooperation with other companies?

Although such an experience is not necessary, but it is easier to work with those influencers that have this skills. Such bloggers, as a rule, create better content.

Step 4. Communication with the selected influencers

Once you have selected best influencers for your campaign, you should contact them. There are three main ways to establish contact.

Email

The most usual way to establish contact with the person in cooperation with whom you are interested. The e-mail address of the influencer can be found in one of its social media profiles.

When creating such a letter, it is necessary to consider the following:

• Honesty. If you’ve just stumbled upon a blogger, there is no need to tell him about how long you’ve been interested in what he does, if you actually don`t.
• In a brief form, inform your influencer about the essence of the offer – this is necessary for an approximate estimate of value.
• Of course, some influencers will agree to participate in the campaign, taking as a reward your product. However, you should demonstrate that you are ready to pay for the services.
• Ability to refuse. When writing a letter, be sure to leave the opportunity to deny your offer you without feeling uncomfortable. From a practical point of view, this is also important, because in the future the blogger can change the attitude towards your brand.

Private messages

Apparently, users often look for private messages in various social media, rather than check mail. So this is a great way to contact the user you are interested in.

For example, on Facebook, many of the pages allow you to immediately contact the administrator:

Comments

This method may not seem very effective, but with the help of comments, it is quite easy to start a conversation with an influencer. For example, you can post a comment like:

“This burger looks amazing, Katherine! Perhaps it will be interesting for you to work with us? ”

If an influencer is interested in your comment, you can continue to communicate in private messages or via e-mail.

What’s next?

After you learned a bit about influencer outreach, the following is worth to do:

• start communicating with the most relevant to your product YouTube vloggers, Twitter influencers (and others) and build relationships with them;
• think about creating your own affiliate network of content creators who are friendly to you (think over a system of rewards and incentives for them);
• experiment with content, kinds of influencers, creative ways of its presentation;
• develop an effective system for creating, editing and approving content that will be published by your influencer;
• collect insider statistics on the influencer marketing and establish systematic analytical work, putting forward hypotheses and checking them on new campaigns.

Bonus: a list of services for quick search and comparison of influencers.

There are always tons of platforms that can help automate the search of the best influencer: Buzzoole with a global 200-thousand base of bloggers; Speakr and HYPR – platforms with good cases and tools, exchanges and catalogs, as well as analytical services that will help to identify trend communities, themes and personalities for each niche. To find potential partners among YouTube bloggers and Twitter stars, the following services are usually used:

• Socialblade, OpenSlate are analytical platforms, which conveniently display YouTube public ratings. The ranking is based on the number of subscribers, the dynamics of the growth of the channel and the mass of other factors;
• BoostInsider – offerwall that sells YouTube vloggers. Here you can leave your offer with a detailed description of the requirements, and the “exchange” this offer to the bloggers registered on the platform
• Tubular Labs – paid service that provides all possible analytics for any video posted on the Internet
• FameBit is another popular platform for finding influencers. Allows you to sort them by the type of content, country, social network and so on.

 

We hope this detailed influencer outreach instruction will give you the strength and desire to start (or continue) your experiments on popular social platforms; there is a lot of new experience, mistakes and research ahead of you, and definitely – a lot of marketing feedback.