Influencers

What are influencers? Influencers are people (or businesses) who will promote your products on their social media accounts for a specified fee. This product promotion could be in the form of a post on the influencer’s Instagram page, a mention of your business and/or product on their YouTube channel, or a shoutout to you from one of their stories on TikTok. These are only a few examples of how an influencer would be able to promote your products. The opportunities are endless when it comes to influencers, so feel free to get creative.

Depending on the influencer and your product’s niche, an influencer can help you get a lot of attention to your products in a short amount of time. However, this isn’t always the case. Unfortunately, there are a ton of influencers out there who have exaggerated social media followings. What we mean by this is that if you hire an influencer on Instagram who shows that he/she has 100,000 followers, it’s possible that this influencer might only have 20,000 or so legitimate followers. The rest of the followers just might be fake accounts, fake followers, fake likes, bots, and/or click farms. We aren’t saying that this is mostly the case, but we are saying that it happens more than the average user might assume, so it’s imperative to research every influencer extensively before you hire them. There are several ways to spot the exaggerated influencer which we will write about in another article sometime in the near future. For now, let’s put the exaggerated influencer to the side, and let’s talk about the real deal influencers who can actually help you get more attention and sales for your products.

Step 1 – Crafting an influencer campaign strategy.

Before you start searching for influencers to hire, you first need to craft your influencer campaign strategy.

To help you start with the mental part of this process, here is a short checklist of questions you need to answer:

  1. Which product or product(s) are you wanting to promote?
  2. Which niche do your products belong to?
  3. Who is your target audience? Be very specific (ie. Women in the USA aged 30 to 55)
  4. How many followers should your influencer have at a minimum?
  5. What should their engagement rate be?
  6. How do you want your influencer to engage with your target audience?
  7. What is the call to action that you want to occur when your influencer engages with your audience?
Step 2 – Crunch your numbers and come up with a budget.

Now that you have thought about a few ideas about your campaign strategy, it’s time to start thinking about a budget.

To help you come up with a budget here is another short checklist of questions you need to answer:

  1. What is an ideal budget that you would feel comfortable spending per month for the next 3 months on an influencer campaign?
  2. What is the average retail price of the products that you will be promoting?
  3. What is the average cost of the products that you will be promoting?
  4. How many units does your influencer need to sell for you to make the influencer campaign a success?
Creating a budget for your influencer campaign is very important. You need to create units of measurement using your budget so that you can determine if an influencer campaign is a good marketing strategy for your niche and your products.
Step 3 – Search for influencers.

This is the hardest part of the influencer marketing campaign because you’re looking for an influencer that fits the many variables that you need in order to give your business and products the best chance of success.

To help you search for influencers on Instagram for example, here are a few tips:

  1. Write down at least 20 keywords that you think that your target customers would search for when searching for your products.
  2. After that, go to Instagram and start searching for those keywords using a hashtag before those keywords and do this one hashtag at a time.
  3. Start making a list of all of the influencers that fit the criteria that you already outlined in step 1 above who are associated with your targeted hashtags.
  4. After you have a list of influencers, start vetting them. You will want to look and make sure that their follower, likes, comments, etc., are legitimate. Let’s Talk if you need help with this.
  5. Once you weed out the exaggerators and fakes, it’s time to do some deep research to see if they fit your product’s niche AND your target audience.
  6. Once you have your list of potential influencers, direct message them and start building a relationship that will hopefully lead to them becoming one of your influencers.

This is just one of many ways to hire an influencer naturally and organically.

If you want to learn more about other ways to hire an influencer using other methods, Let’s Talk!

Drew Restivo

Drew Restivo
Founder at HiredMarketing.com

We would LOVE the opportunity to help you find, hire, and manage your next influencer! This is one of the many reasons why we created HiredMarketing.com because we want to be your product marketing hired hand when you need help. We work on demand, so we can do as little or as much as you need us to. We work on a monthly retainer model so you get to determine how many hours we work on your product marketing projects each month, so you never have to worry about going over your marketing budget. The days of having to hire and train in-house employees for individual marketing tasks are gone. You hire us and we will use our own proven product marketing specialists to carry out your product marketing tasks efficiently, effectively, and within budget.

If you have questions or if you’re interested in learning more, let’s talk.

If you’re the type of person that needs more data before you want to talk to us, then let us conduct a FREE (for those that qualify) Product Marketing Game Plan (PMGP) on your business and products to show you which product marketing strategies you should be implementing to increase your product sales. For your free Product Market Game Plan (PMGP), click here.

If you want to know our transparent pricing options or if you are ready to hire a hand to help you market your products and increase your product sales, then go ahead and click here.