For many businesses looking to dabble into social influencer marketing, one of the most difficult challenges is locating influencers with considerable reach, engagement and returns.
We have eliminated this bottleneck and are about to show you how you can do so without necessarily doing what everyone else is doing.
Use Social Influencer Platforms
For us, this is the easiest way to reach thousands of vetted and proven social influencers. You see, it’s not just enough to engage social influencer with tons of followers. You need influencers who are relevant to your niche, have an active audience, have massive reach and incredible engagement.
There’s no point in doing business with someone who claims to have 3 million followers, but tweets a post and has less than 100 people engaging with him. That’s a waste of your time and resources. Instead, we would choose someone with just 70,000 followers who, whenever he posts a Facebook update, gets 2,000-10,000 comments, likes and shares.
That is engagement and will more likely generate more bang for your buck in return. This is why it is best to go with social influencer platforms like NeoReach where all the influencers are proven to be capable of producing excellent engagement and returns on investment.
Create Epic Content and Seek Out Influencers
Sometimes, small businesses just don’t have the budget for social influencer marketing –any wonder it’s being used by mostly medium to big sized brands.
So, what do you do if you’re in this situation? Simple: Create epic, knock-other-content-out-of-the-park content, and offer them to top social influencers in your niche.
Here’s something you might not know: most social influencers aren’t as open to blatant commercial ventures as you might think. This is because most of them understand that consistent commercialization will most likely result in the alienation of a significant part of their audience.
So, they would rather work with a business that creates awesome value and epic content –with their pitches inserted of course- as against those looking for wanton promotion. So, if you’re the underdog here and do not have a lot of money for social influencer campaigns, this will put you way ahead of the pack.
Most of these social influencers are used to providing value to their audience anyway. If your content stands out, you can be sure that they will tweet, vlog, share, or post about your content.
Piggyback on Big Brands’ Campaigns
Big brands are always launching social influencer campaigns. So, start by looking for big brands in your niche or in related industries. Look for a retweet, mentions, and so on. After doing this for some time, a trend will start to appear.
People will often talk about where they first heard of an ad or a piece of content. Reverse engineer this and you will often be able to trace the content back to its very origins –in this case, the social influencer’s account.
Clone Social Influencer’s Strategies
Let’s assume you’ve found a few social influencers, yet for some reason, you can’t seem to get them to spread the word about your products and services.
What do you do? Adopt the closest form of flattery: copying their strategies.
If for instance, they created a video on 5 DIY plumbing tricks, you can create a video plus a pdf on 8 Easy to Do Plumbing Fixes and tweet it at their audiences. This will take time, but if you do this for just 30 days, chances are that word will get around about you to the social influencer, resulting in them being open to discussing your proposal.
Finally, you could also try social popularity tools and apps like Buzzsumo, build a relationship with the influencer by consistently being active on their blogs, and social media account, reach out to social influencer marketing authorities and ask them to point you in the right direction, and use hashtags on Instagram and twitter to find them.
About the author:
Oscar King, a freelance writer and social media enthusiast, enjoys sharing tips and insights into social media marketing. To learn more about Oscar, you can check out his Google+ profile.
