How To Find and Approach Influencers as a Brand

Are you ready to find and work with influencers to help you market your brand? Then you are in the right place!

Working with influencers is a lot easier than you might think. Many influencers, especially those just starting out, are happy to get your email and are excited to work with brands in their niche. However, you want to make sure to pick influencers who are worthwhile. Below I am breaking down everything you need to know about finding the right influencers to market your products.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a popular way to get your products in front of a targeted audience. Influencers have taken the time to build up an audience in their niche of people who trust them. When you work with these influencers, you tap into their audience in order to increase your brand awareness and grow your company.

How To Find the Right Influencers

Start With Smaller Influencers

If you are new to influencer marketing, bear with me for a second. As a new brand, you may want to reach out to the top influencers in your niche to work together, and by all means reach out if it is someone you admire! However accounts with over 100,000 followers typically have a base rate of $1,000 for a post. This only increases the more followers you have. If this is in your budget, great! But if not, then I recommend starting with smaller influencers.

Believe it or not, smaller influencers, or micro influencers, can have a massive impact on your brand. There are many that take their accounts seriously and have a highly engaged audience. Plus, consider the scale of your current business. I know everyone is at a different place, but depending on how quickly you can produce your product right now, how many new customers can you handle? A mdicroinfluencer could have anywhere from 10-100+ followers interested in purchasing your product today. While a bigger influencer could have even more of an impact, you want to make sure that your company is prepared to scale.

For more information on how to find the right micro influencers for you, keep reading.

Find Influencers in Your Niche

When you are looking for influencers to work with, start with finding influencers in your niche or in your area. A quick way to find people is through hashtags. Smart influencers will occasionally use hashtags such as #(location)blogger or #BeautyInfluencer or #TravelBlogger. Try a quick search of these and related hashtags on Instagram until you come across an account that you like.

Check the Influencer’s Engagement

When you are working with an influencer of any size, make sure you check their engagement before you reach out. Why? Believe it or not, it is still possible to fake your engagement in 2020. There are stories of influencers with over 2 million followers unable to sell even 36 t-shirts. On the flip side, there are accounts with under 10,000 followers who are able to sell out products. It all depends on what kind of value you give to your audience.

So before you reach out to any influencer, you want to check for 3 things.

Check the number of likes. Most of us can still see the number of likes a person gets on their photo. When checking out an influencer’s account, you want to make sure that they are getting a number of likes that makes sense. While Instagram only shows a post to a fraction of a person’s followers, someone with over 100,000 followers should be getting at least 1,000 likes per photo. If they are getting less than that, it means that their followers are either fake or unengaged. Either way, it is most likely not an influencer you want to work with.
Check to make sure that the influencer’s likes are real. Like I said, we still live in a world where people can buy likes on social media. However, there is a quick and easy way to check whether the influencer you want to work with has faked their engagement. Simply click on the number of likes listed beneath one of their photos and a list of the accounts who have liked this photo should pop up. Take the time to scroll through and check as to whether or not the accounts that have liked the post look real. While there are exceptions, accounts that do not have a profile photo, have posted less than 5 photos, or have a spammy username are most likely fake. Having a few fake accounts like a photo may be out of the influencer’s control, however if it looks as though all or most of the accounts are fake, you may want to pass on working with that particular influencer.
Check the comments. Influencers with an engaged audience will have multiple comments on their photos. For reference, I have over 100,000 followers and I receive upwards of 100 unique comments on a post. While this varies for each influencer and whether or not they give their followers a reason to engage, it is an important element to check. You also want to make sure that the comments being left are genuine and not spam/ a bot. Spam comment examples are 1 word comments or comments with just emojis.

Ask the Influencer for Their Media Kit

You never want to go into a collaboration blindly. Many professional influencers and bloggers will have a media kit prepared to share with your statistics of their audience demographics and examples of past work. You want to make sure that their audience lines up with what you are promoting. For example, if you are a restaurant, it is more beneficial to work with someone who may have a smaller audience located near you vs a bigger account with followers around the world. A quick glance through their media kit will tell you everything you need to know!

How to Approach an Influencer

Approaching an influencer is easier than you think! Many have their professional email addresses listed in their bios. Once you have the proper contact, draft a quick email to let them know who you are, what you like about their account, and ask them if they would be interested in working together.

If they respond, you can ask them for their media kit and what their rates are for a collaboration. If you don’t hear back after a few days, feel free to send 1-2 follow up emails. Sometimes people simply miss an email and if it is someone you want to work with, don’t be afraid to follow up. If they still have not responded after 3 emails, I suggest moving on. It is their loss for missing out on a potential paid opportunity!

Ways You Can Work With Influencers

Gifting

One of the easiest ways to work with an influencer is through gifting them one of your products. This could be a piece of clothing for a fashion influencer or a free hotel stay for a travel blogger.

It is important to keep in mind that depending on the value of your “gift”, you may find that many bloggers cannot guarantee coverage of your product. There is a lot of work that goes into the behind the scenes of a photo. From planning out a photo, setting up the shot, hiring a photographer to help them take the photo, editing, and finally posting, there are many influencers who will not take on this work unless it is a product they really want or unless they are getting paid. That is fine! There are many out there who will shoot your product for you, so feel free to continue sending emails until you find someone who will.

Personally, for gifted products that I love, I will often at least share them in my stories.

If you want to learn more about how much effort goes into influencers creating a valuable and engaged audience, feel free to check this post out.

Paid Promotion

This is the best way to ensure that an influencer will promote your product. Once you have determined which influencers you would like to work with, reach out to them and ask them what their budget would be for a paid promotion. This could be a series of IG stories, an IG post, a Tiktok post, YouTube video, blog post, or really any other form of social media you think would be beneficial to your brand.

Before you reach out to an influencer, know what your budget is and how much you have to spend per collaboration. Once you know the influencer’s rates you will be able to figure out which types of collaborations will work best for you.

Affiliate Marketing

If you don’t have a budget for a paid sponsorship, another option is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you give each influencer a code that they can use to promote to their followers. This way you can track how many sales each influencer makes and give them a % of the profits.

Giveaways

Recruiting a couple of influencers to run a giveaway is an easy way to not only promote your product but grow your own following. In a giveaway, people are incentivized to follow you and everyone participating in the hopes of winning a prize. This could be an item from your store, a gift basket, or even a gift card. You can even band together with other brands to offer products from each of your shops. This way you know that anyone who chooses to follow you is interested in whatever product you are selling.

Final Tips For Influencer Collaborations

One way to amplify the reach of the influencer’s post is to pay Instagram or Facebook to promote it. Through paid promotions, can reach your target audience by specifying the are range and location of your target audience.

If you choose to go this route, you can also hire an influencer for content creation and simply promote your product on your on social media channels. Content creation is when an influencer or photographer takes professional photos of your product for you to use on your own social media.

If you found this post helpful, feel free to check out our other social media and influencer tips here. Or save this post to Pinterest so that you can refer back to it later.

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