Social media holds great potential to help any business grow. Each major platform boasts a diverse user base, meaning that they can provide you a market for practically anything. There certainly is no problem as to whether or not one can find an audience on social media, but the trick is how they can reach out to these potential clients. There are several approaches to this, and one of the most effective ways to get the attention of your audience is to leverage the power of social media influencers.
Finding the Right Influencers to Promote Your Brand
Knowing the influencers that can help endorse your brand should not be a difficult task. Here are some best practices that you need to follow:
- Know your goals and formulate a campaign that aligns best with your business’ needs. In doing so, you will be able to identify what sort of influencer you should be working with.
- Determine the campaign that you wish to run. Given a clear set of goals, you should now be able to figure out the best marketing approach. This should also help you narrow down the category of influencers that you will want to promote your business.
- Determine the influencers that satisfy at least one of the following requirements:
- Influencers who are relevant to your industry and the related niches. You should start looking for influencers that are relevant to your business in your industry. These influencers can best help you grow your audience, especially if they share the same audience as you, which brings us to the next point.
- Influencers that you share an audience with. It is not necessary for an influencer to be directly associated with your niche so long as their audience or part thereof is the same as what your business caters to.
- Influencers who promote your competitors. These influencers have a high likelihood of talking about your brand as well, and have an audience that are willing to listen to their promotions.
- Gauge the influencer’s authority. This will help you find the influencer with the reach and relevance that suits your campaign.
How to Reach Out to Influencers
Now that you have identified the influencers that can provide maximum value to your campaign, the next step is to reach out to them. There are two primary ways to get their attention, namely:
Via social media
Various social media platforms offer plenty of features that can help you engage other users including influencers or you can use multichannel outreach strategy connecting with influencers both on LinkedIn and via email using tools like Reply.io. A great way to engage influencers — and, in effect, reach out to them — is via a quick, meaningful mention. You can do this by commenting on their posts, tagging them in your own content, and sharing their content that resonates well with your brand. Many influencers have grown to their current size thanks to the many connections that they have made with their followers, so don’t be surprised if they are still more than willing to strike a conversation with you in spite of their overwhelming popularity.
Via email
The email is a more direct approach to influencer outreach. It can serve as a catalyst for a wide range of collaborations that can put your brand under the influencer’s spotlight. Such collaborations include the following:
- Guest blogging. Influencers tend to share blogs that they have written on other sites. As such, one of your best options to get a mention from your target influencer is to invite them to write a guest post for your blog. Let them know of a recent post that you happened to like and how their message or objectives align with your own.
- Interviews. Now not all influencers are keen to writing content for you, so another collaborative option that you should take note of is inviting them to an interview. Here, you will end up doing the heavy lifting for the influencer, as all they have to do is talk and answer your questions.
- Podcast guesting. The right influencer can impress your podcast audience and boost your podcast’s authority as they can provide insights that would have been beyond your current knowledge.
- Product promotion. Influencers can become advertisers for the right price. That does not mean that you really need to shell out a lot of money to get them to talk about your brand, though. You can always send them a high-quality sample of your offers and email them about it.
Now influencers tend to get a ton of emails asking for collaboration so you will need to be very creative with your approach. Here are some steps that you should take to ensure that you not only get your target influencer’s attention but also their nod to your proposal:
- Do your homework. Basically, you will have to stalk your target influencer. First off, you will want to know the best email address that you want to contact them with, and this is where email search tools like ContactOut come into play. You should also know what makes them tick, their preferences, and their views on certain topics. The information that you have gathered can help you craft a compelling pitch and connect with these influencers.
- Write a subject line that will catch the influencer’s attention. The subject line is the first thing that the influencer sees after receiving your email, so you will need to craft a rather intriguing one if your message is to stand out in their busy inbox. It should be direct and relevant to the influencer that you are targeting, telling them exactly what you want from them yet intriguing enough to make them want to open your email.
- Make your pitch really compelling. A cold email does not need to sound cold. Make it warm and personal, and include some interesting bits that will help you connect with and engage your target influencer. Talk about your shared interests and how their work aligns with your goals, for instance. Make it unique for every influencer that you want to contact. Also, be brief and straight to the point. Tell them who you are, what you want, what value can they get from working with you.
- End your pitch with a clear call-to-action. Write what your target influencer should do if they wish to move forward. Avoid being vague with your CTA as it is the best way to confuse your recipient or simply be ignored.
- Follow up on your request. Influencers may end up not having much time on their hands on the day they received your email, so you should make sure to email them again within four to seven days to see if they have received your original message. Should they not respond to your follow up, you can hit them up with another email or message them in social media. Now you don’t need to be very persistent here. Should none of your efforts to reach out to the influencer work, simply move on before they found you too annoying.
Influencers are really popular people with a powerful sway over their followers, but you should not let that fact intimidate you into reaching out to them. Many influencers are kind souls that are willing to work with smaller brands, and while not all of them will agree to give you that much-needed publicity, connecting with them is still worth a shot.
About the Author
Christian an email outreach specialist from ContactOut with years of experience in writing compelling email pitches and engaging content. He loves cats, dogs, and a hot cup of coffee. He will surely be happy to connect with you on LinkedIn.
