A Complete Guide on How to Reach Out to Influencers
Not sure how to reach out to influencers for a collaboration request? Read on to get a step-by-step guide for influencer outreach. Get two free email templates too!
Influencer marketing is hot.
The market size of the global influencer marketing platforms is expected to increase from $5.5 billion in 2019 to $22.3 billion in the next four years. That means the market size is poised to grow at a CAGR of 32.4%.
That’s crazy, right?
Clearly, influencer marketing is going to gain more traction. It is an important strategy to grow your business. But if your small business hasn’t dabbled with influencer marketing before, you’re likely to have many questions.
Is influencer marketing relevant for small businesses?
How can a small business reach out to influencers?
Which channels should small businesses use to reach out to influencers?
And most importantly, how can small businesses stand out?
These are common dilemmas that small business owners may face.
If you are wondering how to reach out to influencers and get them to collaborate with your brand, here is a guide for you.
How to Reach Out to Influencers: A 7-Step Guide
Let’s be honest:
You can’t send an email to an influencer with instructions and expect them to post about your brand or products. If you don’t have a proper influencer outreach program in place, chances are you may never receive a response from them.
Remember:
Influencers are popular social media personas. They likely receive hundreds of emails every day. Even micro-influencers receive a lot of emails and collaboration requests.
If you want to make sure that your email isn’t lost in their inbox, you need to work on building a relationship with the influencer first.
So, how should you reach out to influencers?
What if you don’t have a big budget as a small business owner?
Not sure where to begin?
Here is a 7-step guide for small business owners on how to reach out to influencers. It will help you get started:
Step 1: Invest Time in Research
Before you reach out to an influencer, it’s important to know their background.
For this, you’ll need to work on your online research skills. Check out their social media profiles on multiple platforms and get to know their aesthetic, content style, and values.
Scan their feed to find sponsored posts that they’ve published in the past. This kind of research will help you gauge whether their values and content are suitable for your brand.
You may be tempted to reach out to influencers who have huge follower counts. But many social media influencers are notorious for buying fake followers. So, you should prioritize authenticity and trust in order to run successful influencer marketing campaigns.
Ideally, your brand’s values should align with those of the influencer that you partner with. In addition to this, you should also see if their posts resonate with your target audience.
The number of comments, likes, and shares on each post should give you a good idea about their reach and engagement rate. These points can help you evaluate if they are the right influencer for your brand.
What else?
If they have a website, check out how much traffic they get.
Finding the best social media influencers for your business is a tedious task. If you want to make the process easier, you can leverage our influencer marketing platform, Fourstarzz Media.
Using our tool, you can get access to a large database of the top influencer profiles from multiple social media platforms.
You can search for influencers based on which hashtags they use, keywords in their contents or their bio description, brand affinity, and more.
What’s more, you can filter your results based on various criteria, including audience gender split, audience age groups, location, number of followers, engagement, estimated post value, and other parameters.
You can leverage the unlimited access to our detailed influencer reports to understand where their audience is based, what content resonates the most, and to see their fake follower score as well.
And the best part is that you can get access to their contact information as well. This way, you can find the ideal influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns.
Step 2: Compare Levels of Influence
What do you do when you’re buying a new phone? You list the features that you’re looking for, your budget, and then move on to market research, right?
When it comes to reaching out to influencers, small businesses need to follow the same route. Once you’re satisfied with your influencer research, shortlist the ones you’re interested in.
Make sure you’ve done a thorough background check and have noted the important metrics from their profiles such as:
- # of followers
- # of total engagements
- Engagement rate
- Cadence of posts
- Quality of comments (relevant comments vs. not relevant comments)
Compare their metrics and shortlist the influencers who are likely to give you a high campaign ROI. Ideally, the right influencer will be low risk for you.
Here again, Fourstarzz Media’s influencer marketing platform makes it easy to compare levels of influence.
On our platform, you can create a list of potential influencers for your campaign. Our dashboard shows the reach and engagement rate for each shortlisted influencer. You can also compare their projected fees and CPM before you decide on which influencer(s) you want to partner with.
Step 3: Engage With Shortlisted Influencers
Once you shortlist influencers, don’t be in a hurry to begin your influencer outreach email marketing campaign.
Before you reach out to an influencer, it’s a good idea to make them familiar with your brand.
To build a relationship with them, start small.
How?
Like the posts that you appreciate, comment on them, and share them. Try to engage with them on different social channels to get their attention.
These are great ways to get on their radar and tell them that you appreciate their work.
However, do not discuss a collaboration publicly in the comments section. You risk coming across as unprofessional.
Instead, just praise their work to break the ice. But don’t post a canned response like “awesome” or “wow.” If you want to get noticed, add a genuine compliment on their latest posts on Instagram and other social channels.
Still not sure how to reach out to influencers on their social media channels?
Take a look at the screenshot below. In the post, you can see how Chef’n Corporation, a Seattle-based company, admired food influencer, Ida Frosk’s, profile.
Step 4: Find Out What Motivates Your Target Influencers
Small business owners, here’s some good news:
Money isn’t everything for influencer marketing.
Different influencers have different motivations.
Before you reach out to an influencer, you should figure out what motivates them. Based on that, you can come up with an influencer outreach plan with fair compensation.
Some common motivators for influencers include:
- Strong desire to make a difference in the world
- Willingness to inspire others or entertain
- Achieving a higher social status
- Fame
- Monetary gain
- Building a community of like-minded people
- Creative freedom
- Free products
- Flexible hours
Most influencers are likely to be motivated by a combination of these factors.
To figure out an influencer’s motivation, you need to closely follow their content. Try to find out why they’re investing so much time into building an audience and why they may want to partner with you for your influencer marketing campaign.
Are they passionate about a specific social cause?
Is their social media feed aspirational?
These are some of the questions you should ask.
Once you understand their motivation, it’s easier to reach out to an influencer with a campaign proposal they can’t refuse. You can even design your influencer marketing campaign around what motivates them.
While money is a major motivator for many influencers, it’s not always the priority.
For instance, Blair Imani is an Instagram influencer who identifies as a bisexual, black Muslim. She strongly believes in advocating the rights of the LGBTQ community.
In an interview, she said:
“I could not be content with my conscience if I worked with a company that, for example, didn’t even hire LGBTQ+ people or didn’t donate money back to the community they claimed to care about. I hold myself to a high standard and I want to see other influencers follow suit.”
It’s evident that advocacy for social causes is important to Blair.
While designing their campaign, Toms took note of this. According to Blair, the brand had their LGBTQ+ staff help with the creation and marketing processes.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the brand even pledged to donate a part of their sales to important social causes.
Step 5: Decide on Fair Compensation
When you’re planning your influencer marketing strategy, you need to decide on the compensation for the influencers as well. Influencers invest a lot of time and energy into growing a brand. So, it’s obvious that they expect brands to recognize their worth.
While reaching out to social media influencers or bloggers, the burden is on brands to decide on fair compensation…
Read the full post at Fourstarzz.com
