Third-party influencers tend to have the strong reputation your brand needs and can help you with a variety of marketing activities. Including increasing your brand awareness, boosting impressions, engaging with your target audience, and building your social media following. Let’s think big picture: Influencers can help get in front of new customers, shorten your typical sales cycle, increase revenue and make deals on a larger scale.

Identify Your Influencer

These days you can’t go anywhere without hearing, seeing or nearly smelling the powers of Influencer marketing. Fans of Influencers trust that their endorsement of a product or service comes from a reliable source – not something as basic as a contract signed between parties.

Contrary to what you believe, influence isn’t a popularity contest. You want to find voices in your industry who have true and authentic communities.

Find Prospective Influencers

Rather than focusing on the most popular crowd, identify people who are influential with your buyer personas and consumers. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers yourself! See who they look to for advice or to keep them on the trends.

Start by making a list of thought leaders, industry experts, keynote speakers, bloggers – whomever it is that your audience is following. Do your social research. Start by choosing the platform where your audience is and type relevant hashtags to your product or business into the search bar.

While you’re doing your research, take note:

• Do they publish consistently?
• Is their content focused?
• What other businesses are they connected to?

Now that you’ve gathered your information, narrow down your list. Remember this important tip – don’t let an influencer’s popularity affect your decision, their followers could be paid for.

Reach Out To Your Prospects

If you’re ready to use Influencer Marketing to drive business, you’ll need to start reaching out to the top influencers on your list. Focus on being genuine while building honest and meaningful relationships with them. You are trying to build a strategic content partnership.

Dive in! Begin sending outreach emails.

If you’re feeling shy, proceed by getting on their radar. Share their content, writing comments where you can and so on. Show them you are interested in their content. Take the necessary steps to gain their trust.

Once you find an Influencer you want to work with, you need to discuss your compensation terms. In most cases, Influencers will work in trade (i.e. exchange your products, services, merchandise for them mentioning your business) and others will want monetary payment. Do note, there will need to be some negotiating. Although the number of followers an Influencer has will impact how you need to pay, don’t fall prey to influencer fraud.

Promote Influencer Content

To truly build an effective campaign to drive business you need to promote your Influencer content in their audience. Keep in mind, after all your research, this should be where your audience is as well.

If you’re a restaurant and want to highlight a new seasonal menu, consider sharing the news through your newly chosen Influencer. If you’re a swimwear company send some samples of your new suits to your Influencer. Don’t be afraid to give your Influencer a customized code if you’re having a flash sale. Give them clear and concise instructions on how you want your brand represented.

Set realistic goals and define campaign timelines. Identify what you’re trying to achieve so you and your Influencer are on the same page. Are you trying to boost sales? Write down benchmarks and analyze KPIs at the start of your campaign so you know how well your Influencer campaign is actually going.

People love to say it is hard to measure how successful Influencer Marketing is, but if you start off on the right foot you’ll be just fine. Get creative, yet all above things, enjoy your partnership.