28% of marketers report that influencer marketing is the fastest growing customer acquisition method. We’ll get into why in a bit…
But does it work for solopreneurs and small business?
Yes!
And it can be done for free, or by using low-cost tools.
This article focuses on businesses that don’t have big budgets for marketing but are prepared to put in the work to find real influencers who will believe in their products and services and get excited about a potential partnership to help your business grow.
Word of mouth marketing has always been the most powerful form of marketing, from the minute people started selling stuff way back when, and it still stands true today.
In online marketing, influencer marketing is based on the fact that consumers trust other consumers more than they trust brands.
It makes sense because the average online user is exposed to about 3000 brand messages every day. It’s too much.
And online, where you can’t actually see the face on the other side of the computer, trust is key.
Building trust online is essential to making sales, and influencer marketing builds trust and credibility in a way no other marketing method can because influencers are people who have:
In addition, they share these personality traits:
Influencers are not necessarily celebrities, just people who have authority in a certain niche.
So influencer marketing is using influencers to promote products or services to the followers who believe in them.
But. When an influencer promotes your goods, it has to be done naturally and sincerely because influencers are usually people who have built their credibility by being credible. And that is where the trickiness of this type of marketing comes in, which we’ll get to.
Solopreneurs who use influencer marketing, tap into the power of a person’s influence online.
If you’re wondering how effective it is… more than 67% of marketers are increasing their budgets to accommodate this technique.
Image Source: Influencer Marketing Hub
Having said that, it’s not only big companies who are investing in influencer marketing.
Solopreneurs, without a big budget, or even any budget, can also utilize influencer marketing.
There’s many digital methods of marketing, such as:
And so on.
And yet, a study shows an increase of 325% in Google searches for “influencer marketing” in one year, which confirms the growing popularity of the strategy. That can only mean one thing: influencer marketing works.
Indeed, a report by Linquia found that 92% of marketers say that influencer marketing is effective.
But why?
It’s all about T-R-U-S-T.
Traditionally, people would do business with people they liked and trusted. And because they would go into a physical store where “real” people could be seen working, consumers would go into a shop and believe that if they were to buy something that needed to be returned and refunded, all they’d need to do is simply return to the shop with the item and proof of payment, and Bob’s Your Uncle.
Or before they’d agree to accepting a service, they’d meet with a representative and discuss the deal.
Digital marketing is different because generally speaking, consumers don’t interact with humans, but with clicks. This is why email and social media marketing are still so important – because when done correctly, relationships and trust are built.
Digitally speaking, humans find it hard to trust online brands because they can’t see the humans face-to-face behind the computer.
A whopping 70% of millennial consumers are influenced to purchase by recommendations of their peers.
And this is why influencer marketing is so effective; the influencer has built trust with a large group of people. When they endorse a product or service, their followers consider the influencer a trusted peer, and so the influencer has tremendous persuasive power.
To boot, influencers are so much more interesting than brands. For example, Imforza says that 86% of the most-watched videos on YouTube about beauty were made by influencers, compared to a mere 14% from brands. Brands are boring and focus on the promotional aspects, but influencers treat their audience as buddies. And buddies are far more fun than business meetings.
When he or she recommends your goods, you can be sure that many of their followers will buy into what they say.
Instead of you as a solopreneur needing to build credibility from scratch via various channels like social media and email marketing, a two minute discussion about your goods from the mouth of an influencer can generate more sales than had you spent months of hard work trying to build trust.
Not all influencers will want to partner with you. And that’s OK. But it helps to know what will motivate people to help grow your business.
This is the formula that motivates micro-influencers:
They believe in your products or services
Have an audience that would also be into your goods
You are not direct competitors.
And here’s the proof to back it up:
Image Source: Crowdtap
How do influencers prefer to benefit from joining forces with you? By getting paid to do so:
While they may prefer getting monetary compensation, it’s not the deciding factor and you can still try other compensations; just put on your creative hat by understanding what’s important to them and seeing how to meet their needs first.
Aaron Orendorff, currently the Editor in Chief at Shopify and founder of iConiContent, was unemployed five years ago. Desperate to do something, he started a blog. Today, he has become a social media influencer.
In this video, he speaks about how he used influencer marketing to land huge writing gigs for the world’s top websites like Lifehacker, Entrepreneur and BusinessInsider.
Brian Rudolph, founder of Banza (a chickpea pasta company) started out by emailing influencers to gain traction for a new concept and product that at the time, did not yet have traction and was going through growing pains.
He started out by dropping comments on photos of the people who had big Instagram followings, saying something like, “Hey this looks really good, would you want to try our product?”
When an influencer shared the product, other influencers wanted to try pasta made from chickpeas.
All it required was time.
Here’s another success story. In 2014, at the time a small luxury mattress company, Leesa, who deals directly with consumers, needed a way to reach millennials.
They decided to look for a set of influencers that spoke the language of their target audience, reaching out to them for support, and received positive responses. The campaign set them up for robust growth, drawing more than 100,000 clicks to their website.
The type of influencer you decide to look for must depend on your goals. For example, local influencers who are not on social media may be suitable if your goal is to run workshops. So your goal must drive the type of influencer you target.
When you’re a solopreneur, you’ve got to think of ways to market your business that are free or low cost, and micro-influencers are ideal.
The reason why you want to go for the micro-influencer is that you stand a better chance of them being interested in what you have to offer, unlike a better-known celebrity or expert who gets inundated with requests.
What to look for:
How to find them:
If you have already built up some social media presence, you may have Twitter or Instagram followers who are micro-influencers. The best way to identify them is by the number of followers.
The next step is to find out if the content they post is relevant to your business, but not in direct competition.
Now think up ways to start engaging with them. But you have to remember that the reason why they’re so popular is that they are authentic. They will not respond to any appeal that is not authentic or cheap or fake.
Use the “Search & Explore” feature on Instagram (location hashtag) to find people you don’t yet follow.
The next method of finding micro-influencers are with free or low-cost tools:
Buzzsumo “influencers” search function.
These are really just a few of the most popular tools to find influencers, but there are many more. Do a Google search using a variation of this phrase to find more: “find influencers free tools”.
Here are some ideas to kick off engagement:
It’s not always easy to measure success once a micro-influencer partners with you, but there are ways of finding out how things are going. Check for:
The hardest part of any digital marketing campaign is the patience factor. Results can take so long to see, and it’s no different with influencer marketing.
Tom Fishburne, Founder of Marketoonist said, “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”
And with influencer marketing, this is especially true.
Guest author: Izaak Crook is the Content Marketing Manager at AppInstitute, a SaaS App Builder platform that allows anyone to create their own iOS and Android app without writing a single line of code.
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