How Free Influencers Took My Brand To Global Success
My name is Moshe Hurwitz and I started an e-commerce private label art supplies brand in 2015 with $12K without knowing anything at all about e-commerce.
In 2018 I sold that brand and walked away with just under $1,000,000 between the price of the sale and the revenues retained (And before taxes too hahaha).
A big part of the reason my brand grew like it did and sold for the price it did was because of influencer marketing and how it affected my company’s sales, number of followers and brand awareness.
I think by now influencer marketing’s power is obvious to some but I feel like it’s still misunderstood by many so I thought I’ll write a comprehensive, step by step guide on how influencer marketing really works and how you can do it for yourself if you wanted to.
1. Find the platforms: Where are your relevant influencers? Are they on YouTube? Instagram? Twitter? Facebook? A blog? Choose the few most relevant platforms to your product or audience and work there.
2. Find the influencers: Start finding the influencers and cataloging them. You can do it manually, use a scraper or use a service like Buzzsumo or HyprBrands. Either way, I make a list of about 300–500 high-quality influencers. I want to see a minimum of 15,000 followers, high engagement rate, and quality posts. I don’t care about likes. Comments and shares are what matter to me. I want to partner with influencers that have conversations with their audience because that means they really have their attention. Engagement rates vary by platform so make sure their engagement rate is average or higher.
3. Approach the influencers: After you’ve found and cataloged your influencers it’s time to approach. Start slowly with messaging just a few initially and not the ones you want most yet. When starting a conversation, be human. Say hello. Tell them what you like about them, introduce yourself, and request a conversation about potentially setting up a collaborative relationship. Make sure the influencers know from the start that if things go well there will be a lot more coming. This motivates them, in my experience.
4. Start the conversation: I start by talking about the influencers’ followers. That’s my target audience and that’s something we have in common. I’ll ask questions about what the followers are saying to help me learn more about my target audience (the followers). After that, I’ll describe my products and why they’re great. I’ll talk about why I think the followers would like them and I’ll offer the products to the influencer to sample.
5. Talk about the post: Once you ask the influencers to try your products they typically ask what you expect in return. I tell them I just want them to try the products. If they don’t like it they can put it aside and give me their honest feedback and if they do like it they can do whatever they feel is best. I do this because I like to let them play to their strengths and since I chose them, I already know their posts are good. Often times I’ll also ask them if they want to do an interactive post, an activity, a competition or anything else out of the ordinary that’ll make a splash. I’m always happy to give them a few extra products as incentives for their followers for that.
6. The price: This is the fork in the road. Some influencers will ask for money and some won’t. Choose what fits your strategy best. I personally didn’t pay influencers for the first year of this journey and I did very well (I got about 50 influencers with followers between 15K — 750K) but nowadays I work as a consultant to larger companies and work with bigger influencers so at those levels paying is nearly unavoidable.
7. The content: Some influencers will post once, some will post several times and some will post a lot, especially if your products are awesome and you’ve developed a good rapport with the influencers. I had about 10 talented influencers with about 100,000 followers each that posted for my products every week for a year. All I gave them was my products and I built a good rapport with them. No money.
8. The results: If you did everything right, your followers, sales and brand name will start growing right from the first influencer’s first post. Some posts will generate dozens of followers and a few sales. Others will give you thousands of followers and thousands in sales or more. The key here is to use many influencers and to do it non-stop to the point that’s it’s a constant flow of new posts, more followers, and more sales.
9. The bonuses:
A. Content — If you manage your relationships with your influencers well you can get permission to use all of the amazing content that they will create with/for your products. It’s been my experience that their content is as good or better than what any design studio can do and it’s free of charge for you to use if they give you permission which they always did for me.
B. Brand recognition — If you do it like me and get many influencers talking about you at the same time and non-stop for months and months this will do more than educate your target audience about you, it’ll create a strong perception of your brand in their minds, AKA real brand equity. This is super valuable but takes an article on its own.
C. Customer insight — Using my approach properly should get you 20K — 200K followers in the first year and once you have that you can start surveying your customers on what they want, need, hate etc and you can design your products with them and for them and let me tell you, that’ll do more for your business than most tricks I know.
D. The paid content — Some of the free influencers will produce such amazing content with the products that after a while I will approach them and ask them if they want to do some bigger projects with me, and that it’ll be paid work. Since they already have my products, know them well and have demonstrated the ability to produce high-quality content, all that’s left is to have a conversation about what kind of activities / videos / content they can create, agree on a budget and pull the trigger. I’ve done plenty of these kinds of paid projects over the years and when done right they are very powerful
So what were my personal results? In the first 18 months of influencer marketing I got about 45,000 engaged and active followers, the influencers have made my brand name famous to my target audience and my sales spiked both in the US as well as in most major countries around the world.
And remember, all of this was from the unpaid influencers. You should see what I do nowadays for companies with budgets
There’s a lot more to social media management and even to content and influencer marketing but these first steps should put you well on your way towards building a known business.
If you have any questions, if you can teach me something or if you need help with anything feel free to reach out to me. I like staying connected
