How to use influencers for your small business
As I’m typing this it is the eve of 2022. I’m up early while my family sleeps in. I’m up early because my brain started thinking about a conversation I had yesterday via Instagram direct messages with a client who is struggling to get her head around what to do differently in 2022. You see - she wants to have a better year than the last two. She actually needs to have a better year and we are now deep into building a strategy to use influencers to promote her services.
Her first reaction to my suggestion to use influencers was that she was “too small” and “couldn’t afford that” but she couldn’t be more wrong. It got me wondering if this opinion was shared by others. A quick Stories poll revealed that quite a few of my small biz followers shared this view and hadn’t even considered using influencers for their business.
So I thought I would give you all some insight into the conversations we have been having around the use of influencers; who these social media influencers might be, what an influencer might be able to achieve for your small business and, how you might be able to afford them to help market your products and services.
Why influencer marketing remains important in 2022
Still tipped to be incredibly important in 2022, influencer marketing provides you with a personal and direct line to your customers. Not only that, influencers offer the often elusive ‘social proof’ needed to make sales, and can allow you to bypass the long process of developing ‘like, know, trust’ with your customers. Influencers have already built trust with their followers, so when they say a product is good, their followers are way more likely to purchase.
In 2022, paid advertising through social media is going to become even less targeted as we increasingly opt out of data tracking and cookies start to disappear. Social media channels are only going to become more and more cluttered and, in the case of a channel like Instagram, your potential audience is fragmented into feed, stories, reels and more. One way to combat this may be to use the unique targeting option presented by influencers. But it’s not going to be for everyone…
The cost challenges of using social media influencers
The cost of working with some influencers can definitely be prohibitive. Good influencers, powerful influencers come with a price tag that is out of reach for many small businesses.
They may also favour working with larger brands or you just don’t have the capacity to deal with the traffic generated by a successful larger influencer but you do have options - like using smaller or ‘micro influencers’.
What are micro influencers?
Professional and big-time influencers might be out of our reach right now so enter the micro influencers - who are a more affordable and often equally powerful marketing tool for a small business. We are surrounded by micro influencers, (you may even be one yourself) and their influence is not just limited to the social media space.
Tribe Group defines micro as having 3,000 or more followers, usually in a specific niche, while Forbes puts the number between 10,000-50,000. There is a LOT of discussion on this topic. For a small business, the truth is that anyone in your niche who has a truly engaged and trusting following of people who might want or need your product can influence sales and growth for you.
In today’s word-of-mouth economy, just 10 happy customers can snowball your business to success.
Where can you start with influencer marketing for your small business?
If you’re low on budget then you’ll have to do your own research. Spend time in channels where you believe your customers are, like Instagram or Tik Tok or, if you’re a professional service, even LinkedIn. You’re looking for people/profiles who share your values, who talk about the kinds of problems that your products solve, who aren’t already doing a stack of paid promotion. Follow them, get to know them, get to know their audience and how engaged they are. Look at the type of content they create and imagine how your products would fit. It’s unlikely that, if you did strike a deal, that you would have much control over the creative output so you need to feel comfortable.
Big word to remember here is ‘respect’.
Anyone who is growing an authentic community doesn’t view them as a commodity, so don’t just assume you can buy or trade them. Be honest and upfront about your intentions and your interest and be willing to accept the influencer’s terms and their creative ideas. There is a misconception that brands and businesses have all the power in these relationships but they don’t. Don’t ever just offer to give someone free product in return for a post - those types of negotiations aren’t a good opening line.
Authentic relationships will create authentic partnerships.
Be prepared to work with influencers
If you’re approaching someone who isn’t using an agency or who hasn’t had much experience in paid content, then you can put them at ease by being prepared with things like a scope of work or a contract. You can get these things created for you by a lawyer like Social Law Co or my local Pathfinder Law
It doesn’t have to be over the top and full of scary lawyer-jargon though. I recommend paying for your contracts to be custom made if you can, rather than copying and pasting from the internet - it’s a good investment if you’re intending to use influencers for your small business marketing into the future.
What does marketing success look like?
This is incredibly hard to measure or to attribute to your influencer campaign. Sometimes it just does not work, but that does not mean it will always be that way. Again, be honest about your expectations of what success looks like for you and let the influencer decide if that’s realistic or not. You should have some form of measurement in place that can track the success of the campaign and differentiate general sales from those generated by the influencer’s activity.
Support your influencer
Campaigns like this often fall down because of the business or brand not having the right supports in place. Here are some ways you can muck-up an influencer campaign for yourself:
Not having enough product
A slow or glitchy website
Not having a way to capture all the new leads
Trying to control the creative
Asking / expecting too much
Not valuing results other than direct sales
Here’s a scenario: You ask an influencer to promote a product and send people to your website home page. You see a spike in traffic but limited sales. A few days later all you have is the stats of your web traffic and the reach, click throughs, comments and so on from your influencer.
What if instead: You gave your influencer a discount code and sent customers to just the product itself and then added a pop up or check box where they could sign up to your database for an extra discount or free shipping? Discounted sales are a great way to introduce new customers to a product that they will hopefully buy again - especially if you can email them special offers in the future. Now you have something to show for your campaign.
There is a LOT of evidence to suggest that people are more likely to try something new if they aren’t paying full price for it - then if they like the product they will happily buy it again.
How do you know if an influencer has a fake audience?
As I wind up this blog post, I want to get you thinking about what you’re buying. There’s fake and then there’s ‘fake’. One is super obvious; their followers and commenters will have random sounding handles, are often following thousands of accounts but haven’t posted yet themselves; don’t have many followers, are often private or, if they aren’t private they will have posted a series of photos that all look very similar and have no caption, just a chunk of hashtags. Scroll back through your influencer’s list of followers and if you see a lot of these types of accounts, (often back at the beginning of their growth), then you know the number is a little inflated. That’s an easy one.
Fake engagement is a little harder to spot but you’ll see the same accounts posting comments on every post and then if you go to their accounts, you’ll see the same accounts commenting there too and so on. This would indicate they have an ‘engagement pod’ a group of people who band together to bump up each others’ engagement percentages - it looks good in their stats but won’t deliver you the results you want.
Once you have agreed to work together you can and should ask to see their account insights. I recommend doing that in person or over something like Zoom as it’s pretty easy to fake insights. Buuut hopefully you’ve done your own research and you’re working with someone that you trust.
Ok that’s probably enough to get you thinking. If this is something you’d like to explore in 2022, please book in a free discovery call with me here or send me an email and I can help you develop a strategy and plan to use micro influencers to market your small business. I’ve got stacks of low cost marketing ideas and tips to do #bettersocial
Now off I go to ring in the new year. I hope it’s everything you are hoping for! Thanks everyone who has been reading my blog this year and please feel free to comment or share, I’d love to hear your thoughts or experiences.
✌🏻Erika
