How An Influencer or Affiliate Program Can Catapult Your Small Business To Success

You’ve probably heard a million times that word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective and cheapest way to expand your customer base. And we think that’s true. But after you’ve done all you can on that front, another great way to encourage folks to talk about your business is influencer marketing (sometimes also called affiliate marketing).

We all follow some sort of influencers on social media; that can be local foodies, travel bloggers, industry experts, meme and quote pages, newscasters, famous actors and singers, and everything in between. If these folks are talking about your business, you may find new customers in their followers, but also gain credibility with your current customers if they trust the opinions of those influencers. It can also help humanize your brand if you don’t often show your team on social media.

So let’s talk about how to invite them to be a megaphone for your business.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is the art and science of inviting anyone with a following to talk about your business. At its core, it’s relationship building. Some people think it’s magic and just happens on its own. But like all good marketing, if it’s good marketing, you shouldn’t see the work behind the scenes. And there is a lot of it.

Organized influencer marketing programs work best for small businesses with amazing products who haven’t had much exposure elsewhere, since influencers love sharing hidden gems. This also works well for new releases. Perhaps that’s a new hot yoga class series, sour beer keg tapping, or summer coffee shop menu.

What Do These Relationships Look Like?

There are generally two levels of engagement. The first one is fairly low cost, but higher risk. You can offer a free product, service, or exclusive event invitation to the influencer and ask them to share it with their followers if they like it. 

The cost is just your product or service, and the risk is that they may not post about it at all, or they may not post positively. There are no guarantees. However, there are some things you can do to increase your odds. You can let them choose what products or services they accept. For example, if you’re a puzzle or game publisher looking to work with an influencer, and your contact is someone who hates puzzling flowers, letting them choose one of your puzzles with art they do love will increase your odds that they’ll enjoy your product and post positively about it. Only sending them a flower puzzle though, may lead to that sitting on their shelf unsolved for a long time at best, or at worst, them not truly enjoying it and posting negatively about your brand. 

The influencers will often hashtag #gifted in their post for transparency, but most influencers will still say something like this is my honest opinion, though, so they maintain some credibility and authenticity.

The second type of engagement is much more pricey but usually guarantees positive results. Some bigger influencers have rate cards listed in their bios where, in addition to free products and services, you also need to pay them to post about you on their platforms. They usually break out the fees based on content type (reels, posts, stories, etc.), so you can choose a variety of options. We recommend that your agreement with them includes at least one of each post type on Instagram since posts and reels are driven by different algorithms.

You will likely have an opportunity to review the content you pay for in advance, and in addition to being able to provide key points you want them to include, you may also be able to make changes you’d like to see to the drafts you review.

Most social media platforms require this content to be marked as sponsored content or branded posts, which can make it look a little bit like an ad. 

How Do I Find The Best Influencers?

The easiest way to collect a list of relevant influencers for your campaign is to search your keywords in the search bar on social media platforms. Who is already talking about your industry?

We recommend searching for your competitors as well. You won’t want to target someone who just talked about your competitors in a sponsored deal. Some influencer contracts require exclusivity for a period of time. But you may find someone who regularly talks about local dog parks, for example, and that’s perfectly okay for them to talk about you and your doggie day care peers.

Consider who your target audience already follows, even if it’s not directly related to your business. For example, if you are a mocktail brand, you may want to engage pregnancy and baby influencers since pregnant people are likely looking for something fun and interesting to drink sans alcohol.

When you’re investigating these accounts, look through their content and note if they have done product reviews previously, how many followers they have, their general posting frequency and average engagement, and some things you love about their content. 

How Do I Get Started?

First, make goals and figure out your offer and budget. How many potential customers do you want? What is your budget? How many influencers do you initially reach out to so you don’t get way more people wanting free products than you have budget for? This is likely an ongoing, phased tactic. As you get “no thank yous” you can invite more folks.

Then, start engaging with the content of those folks on your list. Follow them, like, comment, and reshare their content. Building a two-way relationship starts with giving and supporting their work. A cold outreach to an influencer you don’t even follow won’t go over well.

Once you’ve started to establish some good karma, you can begin outreach. We recommend including in your message how you found them, how long you have loved their content, what specifically they do that you like, what your offer is, and why you think it’s a good fit for them. Most of this will be in a direct message on Instagram or the preferred social media platform, but some may have a link to email them in their bio, so look to make sure you’re following their preferred approach so you start off on the right foot.

As you get a couple of folks interested, be sure to follow through with what you discussed. Once the content is posted, share it far and wide. You may want to be added as a collaborator if possible, or even consider boosting the posts to expand your reach even further.

Of course, after your specific deal is complete, you should continue to engage with their content so they might want to partner again soon. 

This stuff can be so fun and it’s almost always worth it to shoot your shot. As long as you are kind, respectful and generous, influencer marketing can be a great approach to secondary word-of-mouth marketing.

If this type of thing doesn’t happen to sound as fun to you as it does to us, we’re happy to help. Just email us or DM us on Instagram!