Influencer marketing can propel your brand towards success. With these steps, you can increase your chances of working with the influencers your audience loves, and your brand aligns with.
If you’re looking for ways to diversify your content, reach new people and create meaningful connections with your audience, it’s hard to look past influencer marketing.
Not only does influencer marketing provide value for your brand, it’s also proven to boost engagement, drive a higher ROAS and reduce cost per acquisition.
Leveraging UGC and influencer content across 9 accounts, our friends at DataSauce saw an average lift of 192% in CTR, a 68% change in ROAS and a decrease of 31% on CPC. Check out the results for yourself.
So, if you want to pique consumers’ interests and boost your bottom line, your best bet is influencer marketing. But first, you need to know who to go for, and how to get them on board.
How do you do that? Well, you get in touch with the sticki team and let us do it all for you.
But if you’re interested in learning more about the process and best practice, keep reading.
In a nutshell, influencer outreach is all about connecting with the online personalities that are the right fit for your brand. Choosing the right influencer can 1. help expand your reach and 2. boost your brand image – all thanks to the power of social proof.
Whether you’re trying to reach out to Instagram creators, YouTubers or TikTok stars, the influencer outreach process involves spending time trawling for the right personalities, then emailing or messaging them to ask if they’ll feature your brand. Usually, you agree to give them a flat fee, contra products, a commission on sales, or a combination of the three, in exchange for promoting your brand.
When done well, influencer outreach can open up a host of opportunities for your business, like:
So you know a bit about the objective and the benefits, now it’s time to go into the process.
The influencers you work with are a reflection of your brand. You don’t want to form partnerships that don’t seem organic, otherwise you’ll risk damaging the impact of your campaigns.
Your brand and the influencer you choose need to align to craft relatable, believable marketing messages. If you’re looking at your product or service offering and scratching your head trying to think of a content creator to suit it, you may need to call in the big guns (us). Sticki has a reputable database of 130 million verified influencers and creators, and we’ll vet them for you to ensure they’re the right fit for your brand.
With that being said, if you’re happy to go it alone, here are 3 factors to help you assess if your prospective influencer is a good fit:
Choose an influencer who is knowledgeable in the field of your brand and operates with the same values.
Let’s say your brand is a subscription-based newsletter that aims to help people make secure and ethical investments to help them reach financial freedom. In that case, an Instagram personality like Victoria Devine from She’s On the Money would be your best choice since her audience is already actively searching for similar topics and services online.
Apart from aligned knowledge and values, you have to consider their reach. At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game, and the wider your influencer’s audience, the more eyes you can potentially get your message in front of. But that’s not to say you can’t go with an influencer who has just a few thousand followers – there’s actually a lot of benefits of working with micro vs macro influencers.
For example, you don’t want to go for someone with a massive audience that’s not relevant to your brand, or that doesn’t have brand loyalty to the influencer themselves. That’s why the third factor on our list is so important…
More than their number of followers, you also have to check out their engagement rate. You want to look for at least a 2-3% engagement rate, but you should also be assessing:
If you can confidently answer yes to all these questions, your influencer of choice probably has great engagement that will (hopefully) see their audience flock to your brand.
Don’t have the time or the means to find this data yourself? We do! Here’s a snippet of an engagement report we generate to vet the right influencers for some of the brands we work with:
Right from the get-go, be clear on what you can expect and hope to accomplish with each other. By starting with clarity, you can avoid any misunderstandings that can lead to unfavourable consequences that may hurt your brand. Another way to see prospective influencers is to see them as business partners—you’re working together.
To set them up for success, you should put together an influencer pack that contains:
In addition, make sure you have a system in place for analysing and auditing your influencers’ performance before you reach out.
When emailing influencers, use a subject line that makes them want to open the email. You need to hook them in and make them care enough to read the rest of what you have to say.
Keep your email’s body up to 100 words or less to be considerate of the recipient’s time and to keep them captivated. To pique an influencer’s interest, start your message by telling them what’s in it for them. Chances are they know their services are sought after. If you want to win them over, start by letting them know they have something to gain by partnering with you.
You should also personalise the message and provide context as to why you think working together is a good idea. Give them reasons for why you chose them, and why they should choose to work with you. Your tone should also be human and sincere, not robotic. Be professional, but not stiff.
As a rule of thumb, when sending emails to influencers and content creators, our sticki outreach campaigns have open rates between 60-85%.
Tip: Look through influencer outreach templates and tweak them. You’ll have more luck with a personalised message than a standard one-size-fits-all template.
Once you’ve got a list of influencers to reach out to and your messaging squared away, it’s time to start sending them out. The average response rate for an influencer outreach campaign is between 5-10%. So don’t be discouraged if you don’t hear back from everyone you reach out to. Just keep trying and eventually, you’ll find the perfect influencer for your brand!
Ready to get started with your own influencer outreach campaign? Get in touch with us today to find the right content creators that will provide maximum value for your business.
Need help with influencer outreach for your brand? Click below to contact us for a quote.
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