How to Use Influencer Marketing to Grow Your Brand
A step-by-step process sharing everything you need to know from finding influencers and maintaining relationships to promoting your brand.
Photo Source: © Malchev / Adobe Stock via Health Relations
Whether you’re a new business owner or a marketing professional, influencer marketing has boomed with the expansion of the creator economy, and businesses that have added this tactic to their advertising campaigns have seen massive success. In fact, according to NoGood, the influencer marketing market size has more than doubled since 2019.
Companies like CashApp, which interviews celebrities with awkward money questions, and Gymshark, a popular athletic apparel brand promoted by fitness influencers, are just two examples of ways that companies’ advertising teams have used influencer marketing to their advantage. Especially in the case of Gymshark, which has an influencer marketing campaign that presents their brand as practical and comfortable. This garners trust from potential customers who follow the fitness influencers vouching for the brand. With that being said, I’ve compiled a quick six step plan for anyone looking to get involved in the influencer marketing realm.
I’ve said it before, and I'll say it again: Finding your niche is critical in the creator economy!
Are you an artist? A musician? A brand that sells activewear? Or a brand that sells business casual attire? Are you trying to promote your new book?
Get clear about your intentions and what you are looking to market.
Who is your audience? Who are you trying to reach?
As we all know, marketing toward Gen Z is going to look a lot different than marketing toward the Boomer generation. Decide who your target audience is, whether that is an age group, geographic location, or group of people interested in a specific activity or lifestyle.
Find the top influencers within your niche, or the ones who have access to your target community. These can be well-known mega influencers, or micro influencers with high engagement.
Once you curate a list of creators and influencers that meet your criteria, start engaging with their content so they become familiar with your account. Like their posts, re-share their content and drop a few comments before reaching out to them.
Connect with the influencers of your choice through either their professional contact information, or if you have the budget, an influencer marketing agency.
Reaching out to an influencer through their business management email, which is often placed strategically in their bio, with a personalized message is a great way to make a connection with someone you want to work with.
Another method of getting in touch with influencers is through tools such as the TikTok Creator Marketplace, which helps to connect brands with influencers that match their niche.
If you are selling a product, sending a free product to influencers is a third great way to start a connection.
With regard to an influencer marketing agency, they are generally full service and help you work through the entire marketing process, however they come with a hefty price tag; the price of working with an agency can range from $15,000 to $50,000. If you’re up to it, though, Influencer Marketing Agency recommends The Influencer Marketing Factory, Viral Nation, Moburst Ltd. and Ubiquitous.
Negotiate a contract that works for both you and the influencer.
Tiers of influencers, types of content, payment models and return on investment are all things to consider when searching for, negotiating and evaluating a contract. Search Engine Journal goes into more detail on all of those areas here.
Maintain your connection with influencers and try to connect with members of their communities.
If your relationship with an influencer doesn’t work out, try to maintain a professional relationship with them that can lead to more collaboration in the future! Also, in order to expand your reach, make an effort to reach out to and connect with their circle of fellow influencers.
To give you an example of these steps in action, I'll run through this process as if I were an artist looking to grow my brand without funds to hire an influencer marketing agency.
The first thing I would do is identify my niche as an artist and match that specific type of art to the audience I want to reach. If I specialize in graffiti style art, I might want to look in one direction, while a classical painter might want to look in another.
For the purpose of this example, let's say I am a graffiti style artist (one of my favorite forms of art) who regularly works on a specific wall space within my city. In this case, I might determine that my audience is people who live in my city. Conversely, if I work out of my garage and primarily commission individual pieces, my audience might be people who enjoy graffiti artwork, or more specifically, those who buy commissioned pieces.
From there, I would look into the top graffiti style artists, as well as the top artist influencers, in my area. The graffiti tutorials account @machinestudio on TikTok has 254.8K followers and 4 million likes, making them a mid-tier influencer according to this Shopify resource. When I click on the account’s Linktree from their bio, I see that they are based in Las Vegas and a contact phone number is listed. If I am based on the West Coast, or I ship commissioned pieces, I might interact with their account for a few days, then reach out to connect and offer a business deal. If I am based in, say, New York, then I might want to continue my search until I find an influencer closer by, who has access to the geographical audience I am trying to reach.
Once I find and connect with an influencer who matches my criteria, and who is interested in partnering with my brand, I would then negotiate a contract and work from there.
Whether you’re just starting out, or have years of marketing experience, influencer marketing is currently experiencing exponential growth and is a great avenue to take with your business. I hope that this quick overview gave you an idea of how to get involved and take advantage of all that the creator economy has to offer!
Best,
Nina for the Don’t Count Us Out Yet Team