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Influencer Marketing: How and when to use it to get the most bang for your buck
**About**
I’m creating a full documentation of digital marketing growth hacks that include many topics such as, social media growth (instagram, twitter, youtube), SEO, content creation, and pretty much all things digital marketing. It’s completely free. If this is something you are interested in then follow along.
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There is no secret when it comes to influencer marketing and is actually pretty straightforward. Or is it? I’ve implemented enough influencer marketing strategies to know which ones will work well and which ones just simply won’t. Learn from my mistakes and my success and apply them to your own marketing methodologies.
The most important thing when it comes to this type of marketing is that your influencer should not only be ULTRA-FOCUSED to your niche, but they should also be able to sell. Take a look at other products or pages/influencers they’ve promoted and check the results on those posts.
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**How to find influencers and what to pay them**
This is the hardest part, but doing your OWN research will be 10x better than using a platform that “finds” influencers for you. Search your keywords, see related posts of the influencers that pop-up, their followers, etc. Learn about them and who they follow. Each time you branch into a new search you’ll have a whole new list of influencers to look at, then another, then another.
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**Here’s a few pieces of advice I figured out on my own:**
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**A)** An influencer with 1 million followers in a less-relevant niche will actually have less influence than an influencer in an ultra-focus niche with only 30k followers. It’s actually that big of a difference. I’ve had huge accounts (300k-400k followers) tag me in story-posts that ended up driving minimal traffic (less than 50 clicks lol), and way smaller accounts (25k-75k) that were able to drive a good percentage of traffic.
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**B)** Using an influencer correctly will drive enough traffic that has a higher ROI than using Facebook or Google ads (google ads are shit *most* of the time). This is important to know. A Facebook/Google ad will most likely have a better conversion on your site than someone coming across your page from an influencer, BUT that comes with a cost. A advertisement will cost you anywhere from $0.80-$3.00 per CLICK. It comes down to this. If $100 on ads will net you 100 clicks you have to ask can this influencer give me more than 100 clicks for the same $100 investment. With the right influencer the answer will be yes. With doing it right I would say a $100 investment on an influencer shout-out can bring in 300-500 page views or clicks (this is just an estimate from my experience since there are SO many variables to consider).
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**C)** Nobody know’s the true value of an influencer post. Whether it’s a story tag, or a dedicated post, nobody FKn knows what to value it at. Always low-ball your offer to the highest extent and then bragain with them.
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**Process:**
Here’s the full process on how to find the right influencers to use as well as some blackhat tactics (these are actually not blackhat at all) that will help you build relationships with these influencers all to your benefit.
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**Step 1 – Purpose**
What’s your end goal with these influencers. Are you building a themed instagram account? Selling a product? Driving traffic to a website? Figure out exactly how or why you are using an influencer in the first place. Then ask yourself, is this tactic worthwhile? Can the influencer:
-Sell your product?
-Drive traffic to your webpage?
-Perhaps it’s better to drive the traffic to YOUR social media page first and obtain followers in that way rather than driving traffic to a sales page. Cross-platform will have less conversions (insta to insta profile vs insta to web-page), so do your research to see if it’s better just to build your brand on the same platform and then convert the user down the road, drive traffic to a lead magnet site (landing page with email collection), or drive traffic directly to your product.
-Are you trying to convert right now? Or build a following or mailing list that you can consistently market to?
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From my personal experience I’ve created free sites that provided value with the simple intention of collecting emails. Instead of receiving a monetary benefit from selling a product I was collecting emails and able to use that email list not just for business A, but also for B & C. What do I mean by this? I create lead magnets that collect emails by offering them an enticing product. Instead of collecting $$ from sales I am collecting emails that I can then use on the same business A, as well as business B, and C (only if they are similar in genre).
Why not just sell a product and collect emails at the same time you ask? Because a user is much more likely to sign up for a free product by submitting their email instead of only collecting an email from an actual paying customer. The email collecting would probably be 100x more on a free platform than only collecting an email with each purchase.
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**Step 2 – Research**
This is where we put in our time and do our research to find a list of influencers we can use. Whether it’s TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, it doesn’t matter. Find influencers hyper-relevant to your niche and keep every single one in an excel file. You should have a list of about 50-100 because we are going to be comparing prices between each and every one of them. This list will always be of value to you down the road as you continue to build it out.
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**Step 3 – Crafting your offer**
Now we need to decide on WHAT we can offer our influencer in return for some promo. If you have a product you can offer, then offer them free products. If you don’t have a product then manage your budget and figure out what you can afford with these promos. The key here will be to lowball the FK out of them. DM them something along the lines of this:
“Hi so and so, I really love your page and we, at X business, think you would be a great fit to collaborate with on our product. We provide Y product/We are growing Y page/We are selling Y, and have some great traction in this industry. We would like to know if you are available to do a promo for us in return for Y product or other compensation. Let us know if we can work it out!”
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I GUARAN-FKN-TEE that when the conversation gets started and you ask for their “price” that 99% of the time the response will be something along the lines of “What’s your offer?” Or “what is it worth to you”. Why is that? Because influencers are a dime a dozen these days and most of them have NEVER received an offer to do a promo. So they have no idea what it’s worth. For someone with 50,000 followers you could even offer them $30 and see what they say. Remember the list of influencers you built up? This is exactly why we made it, we are going to send the same message to each influencer on your list and then compare prices. Chances are that out of 100 influencers with 50k followers you can land at least one for $20-30. Not only that, but more likely than not you can make a deal for a double feature (getting posted/tagged twice), for only slightly more than a single. Paying $50 for your influencer? No prob, suggest you do a double for $75 so that it “builds the relationship and looks more legit to your followers”. This is a win win for both parties.
Every industry is different. You will see different results with different products, different niches, and different influencers. However, comparing to the traffic or leads you might get, the $30 influencer marketing can potentially go 10x further than $30 worth of paid ads.
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**BlackHat Tactics**
If you are selling a product this tactic is a little more difficult to implement. If you are growing a brand or persona page then this tactic takes a lot of work, but will have big growth and success. I go through this process in a bit more detail on my Instagram Growth Masterclass which I just posted recently. With the same list of influencers that we had from earlier on we are going FOLLOW them. If the platform allows post notifications turn that on. You will be receiving notifications each time that user posts. What we are going to be doing is replying to every single one of their posts with an encouraging comment. Something like “you rock girl”, or “this is dope, you are awesome”. PUMP them up as much as you can while coming across as genuine.
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Do this daily and become FRIENDS with them. It takes incredible amounts of time and patience, but in the end it will be worth it. Once you are several months in on becoming friends, sending nice DMs, replying to stories, etc, you can then say something along the lines of “Hey girl why don’t we promote each other on our pages. Our brand would love to feature you”.. Just like that you have consistently free promotion set for life. These relationships will last much longer than just a single monetary payment.
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All new posts need a flair going forward
byu/JonODonovan insocialmedia -
*whom* they follow
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I’ve been looking for a way to be notified by the influencers. That was the biggest piece I got from this. Follow a hyper focused influencer and get notifications of their first posts.
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TLDR; pay real people who have real followers, that comment and like their posts, to engage with your brand
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