How Small Businesses Should do Influencer Marketing

When you hear the term influencer marketing, you likely think of creators with millions of followers posting a photo with your product or including it in a video. Along with that, you might think that it costs thousands of dollars for that type of promotion. In short, as a small business owner, you might think influencer marketing is not feasible for your business.

However, it is actually extremely realistic for small businesses to take part in influencer marketing. As a small business owner, you can run highly targeted, affordable and cost effective campaigns by partnering with local, micro influencers.

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

There’s a perception when it comes to influencer marketing that bigger is always better. The more followers someone has, the better they are to partner with for influencer marketing. Do not buy into this.

While large scale creators can work wonders for a campaign, especially for awareness, smaller creators can be just as, if not more effective for small businesses.

While micro-influencers may not have a massive reach similar to traditional influencers, they often have a better relationship with their followers. Micro influencers are able to communicate on a 1 to 1 basis with a larger portion of their fans, creating genuine, authentic relationships. With such a strong connection between creator and follower, when the influencer makes a recommendation — their followers trust them and are more likely to try the product or service. Micro-influencers have better engagement rates on average, are normally cheaper to work with and might actually use your product already!

Micro-Influencers Provide a More Targeted Approach

When you partner with bigger creators, their audience is often so large you aren’t able to create proper targeting. As a small business, this type of mass reach likely isn’t what you are looking for.

Smaller creators often have more niche followings, allowing you to be more specific about the type of audience your product is being shown to. Instead of having your product promoted to a mass audience, have it promoted to a smaller audience of people who are interested in your product’s category and would be more interested in buying. This same principle can also be applied geographically. There are plenty of influencers in your city that you can partner with that will promote your business to people within your community. They may not have as big a reach as other influencers but a majority of their following will be in your community as opposed to other cities and countries.

For example, say you have a small business in Toronto with an influencer marketing budget of $1000. For $1000 you can partner with a big creator with 500,000 followers but only 5% (25,000) of their fans live in Toronto or for $100 you can partner with a Toronto based creator with 10,000 followers and 90% (9,000) of their fans are located in the city. Which influencer would you choose to work with?

Most people will pick the micro-influencer for $100. They may have a much smaller fan base overall and in Toronto but if you partner with them, then you have $900 of your budget left over. This enables you to partner with nine other local creators for your campaign, allowing you to be more targeted in your approach and maximizing your budget.

If you’re wondering how to find out where someone’s following is located, just ask! Most influencers will provide you with the statistics you are looking for. If they aren’t willing to provide stats and avoid sending you important information, we don’t recommend partnering with them.

$100 for a micro influencer, is that all it costs?

There is no set pricing for influencer marketing. You should look at each independent creator as a business. They price themselves what they think they’re worth and it’s up to you to decide if you think partnering with them is worth the price.

All influencers will price themselves differently. Some will charge you per post, others will post about your business for free product — it really depends. Make sure when you’re reaching out to ask for their rate card — it will save you and them time.

How do I get in contact with influencers?

The best way to get in touch with creators of any size is through their email.

You can normally find their email on their Instagram account, you can also use our platform SocialRank to keyword search for @gmail in someone’s bio to find it as well.

Once you’ve found their email, reach out with your offer! Click here for multiple sample emails if you aren’t sure how to craft the perfect message.

How many followers should the creator I reach out to have?

Honestly, there isn’t a magic number. The trick is to find someone who is able to influence their community. If someone has 100 followers and they post your product and convince 68 of their followers to buy from you — that’s valuable.

Focus on partnering with creators who you think actually have influence over their followers and are able to help move the needle. Instead of focusing on numbers, look for people who have aligned values to you and your company. After all, these people will be representing you and your business, you’ll want to make sure they do it in an authentic way.

Someone who genuinely cares about your business and product will create better results than someone who is promoting it just to get paid.

Keep that in mind when finding influencers to work with.

How do I find these influencers?

There are plenty of ways that you can find influencers.

You can go search up various keywords related to your product on different social media platforms. On Instagram this will bring up people who have used that word in their bio, on Twitter this will bring up people that have tweeted about it and on YouTube people that have made videos about it.

If you’re looking for local influencers you can go onto Instagram and click on your city’s locations and Instagram will bring up photos of popular accounts in your location.

You can also look through the people you follow, that follow your business and follow your competitors.

All of the above ways work but they can take a lot of time. How we recommend finding influencers is through our platform SocialRank. With SocialRank you can sort and organize your followers by most followed, highest engaged, most valuable, verified and more. You can also do the same for your competitors accounts.

Once you run a report on your competitors, you can then find people that follow them that have a sizable following and are highly engaged. These people make great potential influencers to partner with because you already know they have interest in the product category because they follow your competitors and with our data you’ll know if they have an engaged audience or not.

Start Small

For a lot of people, influencer marketing may seem daunting which is completely understandable!

Our best advice if you’re just starting is to start small. You don’t need to be reaching out to tons of different influencers in the beginning. You just need one to start. So look around, find one smaller creator and send them an email. Start by just offering a free product in exchange for a post and go from there.

Influencer marketing is a powerful marketing tool that small businesses can take advantage of. You don’t need to partner with the biggest creators for it to be effective either. You can find lots of success by collaborating with the rising creators in your community.