Are you launching a product or a business? No longer do you need to hire PR agencies if you don’t have the funds. You can reach new customers and get the word out by harnessing influencers’ power and their audience to reach even more potential customers. Influencer marketing has become the new “word of mouth”! Any new business that is not taking advantage of it is missing out BIG! The influencer marketing world has grown to be worth over 10 billion dollars. It is predicted to grow to 15 billion by the end of next year! It is a way to expose your services and products through content created by users who have tried the product and want to share it. Creating, planning, and posting content for your business can be inspiring but also an overwhelming task for a new entrepreneur that’s why I love scheduling posts and batch creating content – it makes the entire process stress-free and smooth. Sites like Planoly *, make it easy to create and schedule weeks of content in advance leaving your social media growing and you focused on your business.
Here are my top ways to use influencer marketing to your advantage and see an increased ROI:
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an easy way to draw in influencers and customers who want to promote your business while earning a percentage of the sales made through their custom code or link. Manually setting up an affiliate program can be done if you have a website coding team for your business, but if you’re like most small businesses and don’t have one, you can turn to services like ShareASale or Commission Junction to set up the program. Affiliate programs are great because they expose your brand to new audiences through user-generated content (free exposure for you!!) and create passive revenue for both influencers and businesses (so it is a win-win). Influencers are motivated to get creative and shoot content with your products because it means they make money on it as well. The typical percent of sales given to influencers is between 5% and 15%, depending on the item or your brand.
Paid Instagram and TikTok Campaigns
Another great way to work with influencers is to create a campaign for your launch that features relevant creators on platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok using the product. These campaigns can run anywhere from a week to multiple months, depending on your budget and the launch goals. Creating a custom hashtag and custom brand kit for influencers to use and get familiar with your brand aesthetic is essential in this type of campaign. Paid campaigns can have a great return on investment. Still, they are not for everyone since they require a marketing budget and the ability to pay all the influencers you are working with and create paid posts on the social media platforms to further their reach. Paid influencer postings can be very expensive, and it does not guarantee sales.
Gifting Campaigns
An easy campaign you can run to promote a product is gifting influencers with a contract to post X type of content by X date you can pair with a product launch or sale you would be running. These gifting campaigns are fun and easy to get influencers on board since they are a lower risk on your budget. It gives the influencers more wiggle room to get creative and post content that matches their feed. You can create a custom code or link which each influencer can promote with or without a discount on their platforms, as this allows you to track the ROI each creator brings to your brand. This tracking can then aid in your next campaigns and deciding which influencers to work with again.
Online Platforms To Pitch To Influencers
The paid and gifting social media campaigns are great ways to work with influencers and create buzz for your business; however, they are both entirely hands-on and require manual labor in creating and running them. Suppose you are looking for a more passive approach to building out a campaign. In that case, you can sign your company up to an influencer marketing platform that will do almost all the work for you. Companies like Grin, AspireIQ, and Upfluence can get your brand in front of various influencers and create the traction you need. You can use the platform to set the requirements and details for the campaign you want to run, and then it will showcase it to all relevant influencers. These platform campaigns are an easy way to build out an influencer database and gain some experience working with creatives to promote your products/services.
Social media and influencer marketing have been the wave for the past few years, and if you haven’t jumped on it yet, hopefully, I have convinced you to do so! If you are interested in using a planning tool to schedule, analyze, and optimize your posts head over to Planoly *- it is my number 1 recommendation.
*This is an affiliate link and I do earn a small commission from it that is used to create more podcast and blog content for you! Thank you!
