Have you heard about influencer marketing a lot these days? Are you eager to equip your small business with this marketing method? If your answers are Yes, keep reading.

According to a report by Statista, influencer marketing is growing from 6.5 billion in 2019 to 13.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2021 globally.

As you see, influencer marketing approach has become a highly popular form of digital marketing in the past few years. 

In this post, we are going to talk about this effective digital marketing tactic and share the important information and also influencer marketing strategies to help you promote your brand and meet your revenue goals more quickly with influencer marketing.

What is influencer marketing?

Basically influencer marketing is marketing your brand, service or products, through social media influencers who are followed and accepted by an audience base, therefore have the power to influence their opinions.

Influencer marketing is one of the trendiest and most powerful figures of digital marketing worldwide.

Influencer marketing is all about relationships, the relationship that you’re leveraging between an influencer and their audience as well as the relationship you’re building between your brand and your influencers.

In this method, you can promote your business without having numerous social media followers and get more customers by the hands of a person who has enough followers and has the power to influence them. Moreover, this person can motivate their audiences to reach out to your brand and ease the process of AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, and action) the best-known model of marketing, for your business.

49% of social media followers make their decisions to buy a product or a service, based on influencer recommendations.

So don’t ever doubt influencer marketing’s effect.

What are the types of social media influencers?

Influencers who are active on social media can be categorized into different groups based on the number of their followers:

Nano-influencers

This category entails influencers with the least followers, less than 10K, but they have the greatest number of interactions with their audience.

Brands like to work with Nano influencers because their audience is super dedicated and they highly trust them.

The negative side here can be the lack of time or experience because Nano influencers don’t usually work with social media for a living and it might bring you some troubles.

Micro-influencers

Generally, these types of influencers have between 10k-100k followers. They also have great rates of engagement with their audience.

The only issue that these people will likely want, is to be receiving financial compensation. We do have to respect that because that could be the way that these people are earning their living. This could be their full-time job.

Macro-influencers

Macro influencers are well-known individuals who have between 100K-1M followers.

They can immediately impact your business positively because of their reach and their content

But keep in mind, as influencers grow, they do tend to lose connection to their audience and their niche might start to dilute.

Mega-influencers

The most popular influencers have more than 1M followers on their social media channels.

Mega brands who can afford these famous influencers’ prices can benefit their brand with a mega influencer.

But keep in mind that they have various followers, so if your product is very niche, they might not be a good marketing method for promoting your business through influencer marketing.

Is influencer marketing a growing trend?

Influencers are becoming increasingly important as consumers trust brands less, actively block out direct advertising more and have gained shorter and shorter attention spans.

According to the report by Statista, the influencer marketing platform market will pass 370 million dollars in 2027 worldwide. Influencer marketing also has grown by 1500% in the past 4 years.

So, you can count it as a rising trend and consider it as an effective tool to enhance your marketing.

If you are asking yourself whether you should invest in influencer marketing or not, We recommend you get to know more about the benefits and drawbacks.

Advantages of influencer marketing for your brand

We have provided the most important pros and cons of influencer marketing to help you decide more wisely:

1. Giving you a chance to reach your target audience
2. Giving you a booster for your sales
3. Giving you the help of well-known and popular influencers to grow your business
4. Giving you the power to make others believe and trust your brand

Disadvantages of influencer marketing for your brand

1. High expenses 
2. Getting a lot of time from you to find a right influencer
3. Getting damage from influencer’s mistakes if chosen improperly

How to design your influencer marketing strategy?

How to build an impressive influencer marketing strategy? We at DAAVIN have provided an incredible guide for helping small business owners with big plans.

Follow the steps.

Step 1: Set up your campaign goal

Ask yourself:

• What is your purpose of influencer marketing? 
• Why do you want an influencer to collaborate with you?

Now, obviously gaining more money is a major goal for all businesses, but there are other options that you might not have thought about.

Some common marketing goals are:

• Build brand awareness and strengthen brand image
• level up social media engagement and interactions
• Improve conversions (sales, newsletter subscribers, free trial sign-ups, email list building)

Step 2: Set up your budget

You will need to set aside a budget. If you’re an independent business owner, it might be really tempting to skip this step, but keeping track of your expenses is going to help you understand whether your campaign left you in the red or in the green.

If you want to pay your influencers in the product, it is really easy.

 Just calculate your campaign by figuring out your cost per influencer.

The important part here is staying on top of your numbers to ensure that you’re getting your return on your investment.

Step 3: Finding the right influencers

You should decide whether you want to use Micro or Nano influencers, Macro influencers, or Mega influencers.

There are pros and cons to each.

Nano influencers

Pros: Genuine, Dedicated followers.

Cons: Lack of experience

Micro influencers

Pros: Higher return on investment

Cons: Looking for financial compensation

Macro influencers

Pros: High Reach, immediately impact business

Cons: Less connection, Diluted audience

Mega influencers

Pros: Unbelievably high reach and massive impact on business

Cons: High cost, not suitable for very most small businesses 

As we talked about these categories in the former part in detail, you need to choose the influencer which fits your goals and budget.

To make sure that it’s the right fit, you can ask for screenshots of their analytics so that you can look at the demographics of their audience.

Influencers get asked for these states all the time, so you don’t need to be shy about asking.

You can also check out their posts and their followers’ interactions with the post. You can gain a lot of insight by this, including their followers’ type, the influencers’ professional behavior and …

There are also free tools that help you calculate influencers’ engagement rate, which basically tells you how invested and interested every influencers’ followers are.

How can you actually find influencers?

So, you’ll want to use these tools to find the right influencers.

Obviously, you can just go on Instagram and type in some hashtags and search through the top and section.

 But the results could be pretty limited.

You can use a tool called Dovetale. It’s a pretty robust platform to help you find Instagrammers and Youtubers, and also you can search based on specific keywords, locations, niches and audiences.

You are able to send influencers a message straight from Dovetale, too. 

Dovetale has a 14-day free trial.

Unfortunately, you can’t search for TikTok influencers on Dovetale yet. So, for that, you can also check out Hypetrace. 

Step 4: Validate your influencers

You’re also going to want to validate that this content creator can create the type of content that you’re looking for.

So, to do this, make sure to check their past work.

Step 5: Reaching out to influencers

We are going to draft up a message to see if your intended influencer will be down for a collaboration.

Here is the part where a lot of people get tripped up because they get nervous.

They don’t know what to say. They feel intimidated by the fact that these people have a lot of followers.

Here’s a little piece of advice:

The hype is always less than what you think it is!

If someone has 50K followers and you’re imagining that they’re getting a hundred direct messages a day, they are probably getting only 5 DM’s a day.

Be a fearless business owner. Don’t let something like a follower count discourage you.

For example, imagine you are an interior designer and want to send a message to your target influencer who has a community for your industry. Start like this:

Hi (the name of your intended influencer)

My name is (your name), I am the brand manager for (your company’s name). I came across your YouTube account after watching your (name a video related to your company niche). I really love how in-depth you described the way of house designs.

After watching, I wanted to reach out to see if you’d be interested in trying our new collection. If you’re accepting collaborations at this time, I would love to send you the full line for you to review in a dedicated video.

Feel free to check us at (your company’s website address)

If you’re interested, let me know, and I’ll be happy to share more details.

So, let’s dissect this a little.

First: introduce yourself

Second: establish a connection (let them know that you know who they are, and this also helps them in making it feel less like a mass email.)

Third: Give them a genuine compliment. This helps open up the relationship and it also sets the expectation of what kind of content you’d like them to create for you.

Now, we want to cut straight to the chase.

Fourth: tell them exactly why you’re reaching out

Fifth: explain your expectations softly

So, the purpose of this email is to gauge interest and gently propose a relationship.

Let them know where they can find you. You also want to make sure that you are including your social media handles in your signature as well, and that’s going to help increase your credibility since maybe this influencer hasn’t heard of your brand before.

The email should be about them, focus on their work and that’s going to help warm up the conversation.

Once you find out that they’re interested, the next step is to get more detailed about the expectations and the type of content that they’ll create.

Step 6: Deciding on how you will create content with an influencer

So next step, you are going to want to negotiate the terms of the relationship. This could happen in an exchange of friendly emails, back and forth.

It does not have to be anything serious like a contract, but as long as you are having a paper trail, that’s enough if you’re just starting out.

Talk about the type of content that you want them to create, such as:

• Blog posts
• Instagram posts/stories
• Facebook posts
• Sponsored Facebook Live
• LinkedIn posts/videos
• YouTube videos

We also recommend you to consider these factors to negotiate. Such as:

• Specific requests

If the relationship is fair in the sense that the trade-off is equal, you can have a list of requests for the influencer to fulfill.

But if the relationship is skewed in the sense that the influencer is more so doing you a favor to help promote your brand then you will have to forego some of that creative control. At that point, you might have to tone down some of your requests.

Either way, we recommend that you give them creative freedom. You chose them because you like their work in the first place. So, try to trust them to do a really good job for you. Because a script usually comes across as ingenuine and stiff so just keep that in mind, as you are working with an influencer.

• Where the content will be published

You will also want to discuss where these things are going to be published

• Do you want a feed post?
• Do you want a story post?
• Maybe you want some blog content?!

It’s really up to you and what makes sense for your business and the influencer you’re working with.

• Timeline

Next, you will want to discuss a timeline.

If you want to see a first draft, just set the date for when that would be done, but generally speaking, it’s usually enough just to have a date of when that thing would be going live.

• Mentions

Come to agreement as to how they will mention you.

Do you want your name to show up on screen? Maybe you want to be tagged in the photo, or maybe you want them to include a link to your website in the description box.

• Call to action

In the best case scenario, the influencer will have a very clear call to action, like:

 “Make sure you’re checking out (your website) to see their new collection”

And you also can ask your influencer to leave a link to shop with you, to see a higher return on investment.

• Compensation

You’ll also want to agree on compensation. If you have a budget to pay for their time, then you can just simply ask

• What are your rates?
• Can you send me your rate card?

But if you don’t have a budget, there are always around this. You can give them something of value.

That’s not just a simple money exchange, but just keep in mind if the roles were reversed, and if you were the influencer, would you be happy with the deal that you’re about to offer them?

• Product

You could exchange products for content. This is a very popular way to carry out influencer relationships.

• Professional opportunity

You could exchange professional opportunity for content

You might want to invite your intended influencers to design a custom line in exchange for talking about it on their social media.

So, this could be a win-win, because for your influencer, it adds to their experience as an influencer and for you, you get to add a new collection with a face behind the line.

• AD spend

You could exchange ad spend for content.

So, what you would do is you would send the influencer your product. Get them to take a photo or a video with it and post it to their social media as usual.

The reason that this works is because you’re getting exposure from the content that they’ve shared and they’re getting exposure from your ad.

So, if there’s respect, you’re both happy with the end product, then you’re going to want to continue on this relationship.

And if you’re able to establish a genuine connection and you both have an emotional tie, then both of you are going to want to be more accommodating towards one another, and you’re going to want to help uplift each other.

Step 7: Stay organized & track results

The next step is managing your relationship and tracking the results to see if your influencer marketing campaign worked.

You want to start small at the beginning to see if influencer marketing is even going to work for your business.

If you’re maintaining relationships with many influencers at a time, you can use a free tool called HubSpot.

You can make notes of people’s social media handles, shipping addresses, and when shipments were sent.

You can write down the results that the influencers brought to you as well.

You also can input contacts that you’ve reached out to, so that you’re not accidentally reaching out to someone more than once.

So now, how do you know if your influencers actually brought you return on investment?

So, to track results, you are going to ask your influencer to use your link, for instance, in their YouTube description box.

That way you can see how many people click the link to go buy your product.

This link is called a UTM code, a UTM code tracks the performance of campaigns, and you can easily make it, here.

UTM code tracker is a snippet of simple code that you can add to the end of a URL to track the performance of campaigns and content.

Step 8: Review your results

And eventually, you can track how many customers your influencer brought in.

Once your campaign is over, measure your results against your initial goal.

At this point, you can see if you want to work with these influencers again, and to keep those relationships going. And if not, try different influencers and different types of content.

Some industries will be better suited for influencer marketing and some will be suited for other digital marketing methods.

So, if you find that influencer marketing isn’t really working for you, then just make sure that you are keeping up-to-date with your digital marketing education to find those winning strategies.

Some Frequently Asked Questions on influencer marketing

In this part, we are going to answer the questions that are mostly asked about influencer marketing by business owners.

How much does influencer marketing cost?

The price depends on the influencer’s types. For example, Instagram posts in 2021 was like this:

Nano influencers: $10-100

Micro influencers: $100-500

Macro influencers: $5-$10k

Mega influencers: $10k+

Is influencer marketing only limited to Instagram influencer marketing?

You can also find influencers in other platforms like:

• YouTube
• Facebook
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Twitter

All these platforms can be used to benefit your brand by influencer marketing. It all depends on your target audience and your marketing goals.

What are some influencer marketing tools?

There are many useful influencer marketing tools that you can use to measure the important factors for your business. We recommend you these three :

•  Dovetale
• buzzsumo
• Fourstarzz Media

How should I choose the best people for influencer marketing?

If you set up your goals before looking for influencers, you will have a better choice. Take it seriously. We have told you this item in detail, just get back, and read it in influencer marketing strategy.

We suggest you consider these influencers:

• The influencer who has relevant follower for you brand
• The influencer who gets more likes, comments, story visits, and so on
• The influencer who has a good fit profile for your brand
• The influencer who is authentic
• The influencer who values the same things as you
• The influencer who is the most creative content creator for your brand
• The influencer who frequently publishes the content
• The influencer who is reliable

Make sure that they don’t have fake followers and don’t do illegal moves against the platform’s law.

Conclusion

In this article, we tried to show you a clear picture of influencer marketing definition and tell you the differences of Nano, Micro, Macro, and Mega influencers. We also guided you step by step to set a significant strategy for your brand. Moreover, we covered the questions which were asked by a huge number of business owners.

Hope this article could help you to build your influencer marketing campaign and if you find it complex, don’t hesitate to contact us at DAAVIN. We have amazing offers for you in the influencer marketing world.

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