How can you use influencers to gain a larger audience?

Influencers are no longer a new phenomenon, they have been changing the marketing scene for years now. 

Starting back in the early twenty teens, influencers hit the social media marketing industry without really meaning to. 

From bloggers to instagramers, they’ve taken the industry by storm and changed the face of digital advertising forever. 

So, how and why you should influencers to your social media strategy?

In this blog post we will cover:

  • – What are influencers?
  • – How to engage with influencers
  • – Using influencers for audience gain
  • – Using influencers for giveaways 
  • – How can influencers be used for a blog post?

What are influencers?

Firstly, if you don’t know what influencers are, have you been living under a rock?

They properly came on to the scene back in early 2010, where bloggers and hobby photographers suddenly started appearing in brand campaigns and on the front row of fashion week. 

People soon realised the power these people had on the internet. They only had to mention a product on their blogs and it would sell out in days. 

As they started moving on to youtube and ‘vlogging’ their daily lives, the influence they had increased exponentially. 

Today, instagram has become their best form of advertising products for brands as well as the old fashioned yet still relevant blogging format. 

They quickly became some of the richest people in the country, earning thousands of pounds to advertise products and test them out online for the world to see. 

This new form of advertising wasn’t necessarily ground breaking, celebrities used to be the go to for brand deals in the past. But these were seemingly normal people, pushing their way up through the ranks to reach the top through their social media marketing skills. 

People trusted their reviews because they weren’t an A-lister. They were in their bedroom telling you you needed this product. It was a more humble way to promote products and seemed to connect with people in a way that hadn’t been tapped in to before. 

How to engage with influencers

Firstly, it’s important to start engaging with influencers that are in your industry. For example, if you own an gin brand, there are many ‘ginfluencers’ that would be happy to work with you. 

Of course, there are influencers for most things, such as fashion, foodies, fitness etc. So work out where you fit in and find the influencers that would work well for your brand. 

How to engage influencers?

Start making relationships with them at first, following them, liking their content and commenting on their posts. Once you establish a connection you can message or email them about upcoming events you might want them to collaborate on.

It’s a good idea to get a few influencers on board to work with you across multiple campaigns. Some brands make influencer group chats to keep them all engaged with the brand and any updates. 

It’s also a good idea to use an ‘ego bait’ strategy. So what is ‘ego bait content?’ Ego bait content is a content type in which you intentionally mention, and link to influencers in your industry. This is often to put them in a good light and to ‘stroke their ego.’ This means sharing influencers posts or content on your stories and tagging them in it, so they see you’ve shared like their content. They may then go on to reshare the story to their audience, mention your products in the future or ask to work with you. 

How much do influencers charge?

When you reach out to work with them, be ready to receive media kits with their prices included. Most bloggers do this as a full time career and therefore do charge to collaborate. But this will usually still be a very good way to get your products out there. 

Start with influencers that are slightly smaller if you are a new business. These micro-influencers tend to do collaborations for a smaller charge or for free. This is a great place to start and to create a great relationship with a small influencer. As your brand grows you can move on to bigger influencers. 

Using influencers for giveaways

A fantastic way to use influencers when you are having a giveaway. There are two ways in which this could work for your brand. 

1 – Supporting the campaign: 

Influencers can help promote any campaigns you are running. For this, you will have to have a good relationship with the influencers already as they aren’t technically collaborating with you on these campaigns, they are just helping promote it. 

For example, if you want to run a giveaway on your instagram, the influencers can share the giveaway on their socials and send their followers to your profile. This will help you gain more entries for the giveaway. 

In this example, let’s say you are a gin brand. You are running the giveaway of one bottle of gin solely on your instagram. However, to gain a larger reach, your chosen influencers can share the giveaway post on their instagram stories, directly their audience to the giveaway. 

2 – Collaborating on the campaign:

Let’s use the example of a gin brand again. This time however instead of running the giveaway on your instagram, you want the influencer to run the giveaway from theirs.

You can gift a bottle of gin to the influencer to run the giveaway with. They can create their own content and photos. 

Then, they can run the giveaway of the bottle on their instagram, promoting your brand to their followers. Many of their followers will enter the giveaway plus will be directed to your profile too.

You could even say that you want entrants to follow your instagram to be entered into the giveaway. This way you both gain from it. 

How can influencers be used for a blog post?

Using influencers to write a blog post on your brand or products is a great way to direct readers to your site and improve your SEO. 

Lots of influencers still have their own blogs and can write in depth reviews of your brand or product. This can be done by sending them a sample of your product so they can write about it and create content surrounding it across their social media platforms.

If you find a great influencer that would work well with your brand but they don’t have their own blog, you can commission them to write an article about your brand to submit to a magazine. 

You could also commission them to write a blog post to go on your own website. 

Alternatively, you can commission them to create instagram content, like a post or story set to promote your brand to their audience. 

There really are so many ways to use influencer marketing to your advantage! 

For more information on social media strategies and much more, why not contact us