5 things you need to know before you spend anything on influencer marketing

5 things you need to know before you spend anything on influencer marketing

We've all been around in 2017 trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. If you've been trying to market your website, you've definitely heard of influencer marketing. If you haven't heard of it, then you've likely been living under a rock. If you haven't hear of it, don't worry, uncle Razzy is here to help!

I've been using influencers for a while now and know what to do and also what not to do when it comes to paying someone to push a promotion of mine. When you pair up the right influencer with the right promo, your returns can be pretty lucrative. When you don't do the research prior to hiring an influencer, you might as well just burn your money.

Here are the 5 main things you need to know before diving into influencer marketing

1. Authentic Relationships
People will look through dozens of pages and they may only follow one or two of them. They follow these influencers because of common interests, which is amazing when you're targeting specific people. The followers know what the influencer is all about and knows what they commonly post. If your promo looks way too spammy, it will likely get turned down by a good influencer because they don't want any sort of back lash from their following.

No influencer wants to jeopardize their hundreds or thousands of hours of work it took to build up their following with your overly spammy looking promo. Most of the great influencers will only work with you if your brand or product is closely related to what they are already pushing or posting about. If they don't think their audience will be interested in your brand or product, they likely won't accept your payment.


2. Influencer marketing is for the long game
If you're desperate for money and you think "I'll just pay this guy on Instagram $75 to post to his 500,000 followers so I can make a quick $750!" you're in the wrong market. This is because influencer marketing is a long game, not an instant game. Sure, you can make a sale or two from one influencer posting about you or your product, but it takes time to get your brand out there in front of people who want to see it. The more they see your brand from top influencers, the more likely they'll see you as trusted and they will then purchase. Posting just one time won't get much of a yield because you haven't built up your brand enough yet.

Building trust comes over time when it comes to this type of marketing. You have to build trust with the people as well as the influencer themselves. If your influencer doesn't trust you, you won't get good posting times and they might slack on the content or links being published for you. If their following doesn't trust you, you won't get any conversions right away.


3. Spend money to make money
Like I mentioned above, you'll need to pay influencers a few times to get the ball rolling. You won't see an instant return on just one promo being pushed by an influencer, it takes a few. It will take a good amount of split testing and figuring out what works before you will see your promos gaining any traction. You'll need to figure out what images to use, what call to actions to have in place, what are the best times to post and especially what influencers to hire to push your promos. By doing all of this a few times you will get an idea of what works and what doesn't.

A good way to track results is to give each influencer a unique URL to promote. I'm not talking about a specific page on your website, I'm talking about adding UTM code to your links so you can see which influencers group of followers are clicking through the most.

I would suggest waiting until you have around $750 for a test campaign, before you do start anything. This will give you enough money to test multiple high end influencers within your niche and figure out which ones work and which should be essentially fired from your roster.


4. Let the influencer has some creative freedom
When it comes to pushing PPC ads or something related, you have all the creative control. When it comes to influencer marketing you'll need to let them have creative control so they can post what they feel their followers would like to see. Some influencers only post with specific filters or borders, which you might not send them, so let them do what they do best and that's social media posts lol

Influencers know how to post something in a way that it won't look like a blatant advertisement. You want sales, so you might get something together that looks great, but might come off as spammy to others and then the influencer will reject it.

Think of it this way, if an influencer posted a picture of your websites product page and said you were the best, do you think you'd get much traction? Probably not, but that's what you'll likely ask them to do. On the other hand, if the influencer had something in their hands in real life and took a selfie with it, then posted the link to where they bought it (your link), don't you think it would get more traction?

Giving the influencer creative control would allow them to produce a promo that would have the biggest impact for the money you're spending. They've been doing this for a while and their followers want to see specific content coming from them, so let the influencer do his job.


5. The amount of followers doesn't matter if it's not related
It's easy to get enticed by an influencer who has 1,000,000 followers and they want to publish your promotion to the masses. If the following isn't related to your product or website, it's pointless since there won't be many conversions. Sure you could get a few sales, but spending a ridiculous amount of money on 1mil followers and getting a few sales isn't as good as paying 1/10th of that on an influencer with 100,000 followers who is super niche specific.

I've purchased promos on Instagram from people who have 1mil, 2mil and even 3mil followers that weren't specific to my industry or niche and it turned out to be a waste. I was young and dumb, and I wasted a lot of money doing influencer marketing this way. Luckily I learned from my early mistakes and I hope you will too lol.

I learned that getting very specific with my niche is key to making sales over time. Even when you're specific, you will still need to do a few promos before you start to gain any ground on the influencers followers trusting you. But getting niche specific and targeted will save you a lot more money down the road



In Conclusion:
You'll need to work with the influencer in order to have the best results. If you're not building a relationship with the influencer AND their followers, you're losing the battle already. You'll need to have a few promos going at the same time in order to get enough data in to see what's working and what isn't, but you'll also have to give the influencers creative control because they know what works and what won't with their followers.



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Thanks!

Razzy