The best way to promote your business, product or service is to reach out to potential customers directly. social media is where all the buzz is, and with influencers amassing hundreds, thousands and even millions of loyal followers in all types of niches the options are truly endless.
While it's easy to hire a marketing agency to do all the back-end work for you, it's more affordable to contact promoters directly. The following tips will show you how to find high-quality social media influencer in minutes.
Identify your audience
Before contacting any influencers it's vital to know the niche your business falls into. Is it fitness, real estate, make-up or something entirely different?
The influencer you contact should be able to influence the audience that is most likely to buy your product. Now, that doesn't mean that he/she MUST be in the exact same industry.
For example, an influencer that has a large self-development Youtube channel followed by young man can be a good candidate for promoting a fitness course, since young man who is into self-development is also likely to be interested in getting in shape. So there are certain over-lapping niches, which can help broaden your search for the right influencer.
Marketing limitations
All businesses have certain limitations, primarily:
Enter relevant Facebook groups
Facebook groups are a goldmine of potential customers and like-minded individuals that are ACTUALLY engaged in sharing information and opinions. Best of all, they share their names and can be contacted easily.
Enter FB groups of social media influencers as well as those containing people from your industry. In the former, you will find influencers advertising their services, and in the latter, you can contact people from your industry and ask for advice on finding and hiring influencers.
While FB groups are highly effective, also consider contacting relevant people on LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube and other social media platforms. The more networking you do, the more information you'll have and the easier it will be to find the best influencer for your specific requirements.
Word of mouth
Contact friends and others in your industry and ask them if they can recommend any influencers. It's best to ask business owners who've worked with influencers directly in the past rather than those who rely on the experience of others. This will help avoid those influencers that aren't worth the money.
If you have trouble contacting a business owner, because they only share a business email on their website (to which they personally rarely respond), services like Nuwber can be helpful.
This service will provide information on any individual based on some piece of information like name, phone, home address etc. This can also help you weed out any trouble-makers that you wouldn't want to conduct business with.
Find multiple business owners and reach out to them directly for a goldmine of information on influencers and who knows, strike a mutually beneficial deal in the future?
Find their website
Serious professionals always have a Google presence. In other words, they have a personal website with contact info and other important information such as the type of services they provide and their pricing. Influencers are no different.
If you're having trouble contacting them through their main social media account, Google search their real name or profile name to find their website. Often times you will find a special email or phone number for business inquiries.
Message would-be influencers
There are thousands of social media users with a large following who aren't selling any services. Not because they have an aversion to it, but because they lack the know-how on finding clients to promote. Contact these regular users and see if they'd be willing to promote you.
Instead of paying a large sum to a premium influencer, find many would-be influencers with a relatively large reach but little experience in the business. They are often more than happy to promote your services to kickstart their influencer career for a small sum or even completely free if you can act as an influencer for them by sharing your experience with your business friends.
Utilize influencer marketing tools
There are free and premium marketing tools available that can help with finding the right influencer.
Upfluence is one of the most popular tools. It has a massive database of over 3 million influencer profiles and they get updated in real-time. The algorithm analyzes each piece of content for reach and engagement so it's easy to figure out the potential that each influencer can have when promoting your product.
More importantly, it's easy to find relevant influencers by using as many keywords as necessary and placing more weight on one keyword or the other. You can narrow down further with the location, social platform, number of followers and more.
Freelance platforms
Freelancing platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr are useful not only for finding writers, translators and programmers but also for people with a large social media followings or email lists. You can find freelancers to contact and offer a job or create an ad and have the interested parties contact you in no time.
The advantage of using freelance platforms is that the influencer is obviously looking for clients, so negotiating a deal is an easier process and the platform will take care that the payments are processed and the service delivered in time, otherwise you'll be able to cancel and get a refund without too much fuss.
The Bottom Line
To find the right influencer first identify your audience. Secondly, take into consideration the limitations such as location, age and your budget and your desired time frame.
With those preliminaries out of the way, utilize your social network, influencer marketing tools and other before-mentioned methods to contact the potential influencers by sending an email, DM, making a phone call or all three.
While it sounds like a lot of work, with some practice it shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to get this entire process well on the way. Hope this helps!
