We’ve all heard the horror stories about fake influencers with fake followers, charging huge premiums and never delivering results for the brand they work with.
However, I’d say that fake influencers are in the minority of influencers. It’s hard to become an influencer and build an audience that cares, it takes a lot of daily work. This is why some influencer deals are so expensive. You’re paying them not just for a shoutout, but for the time and work it took them to grow an amazing fan base.
If your budget is tight, never fear! Small influencers can be a great place to start utilizing influencer marketing.
How to Spot a Legit Influencer
Legit influencers needn’t be hard to spot. While we really don’t know whether they bought their followers or not, you can tell how engaged their audience is. Look at how many likes and comments they’re getting on their posts. Since likes can also be bought, look to the comments for the real evidence. If the comments are real, they most likely have real people commenting on their posts. If the comments look like:
“Nice,” “Nice,” “Nice,” “Nice,” all in a row, that’s very suspicious and they are probably buying robot comments.
Another great way to tell if an influencer is legit or not is how long they’ve stuck with a particular brand. Most brands are not going to stick with an influencer long-term if they aren’t producing results. Long-term brand relationships are a sign that both parties are happy with the relationship.
Start Small
You don’t need to dish out thousands of dollars for an influencer deal. Starting with micro-influencers is great not only for your wallet, but it gives you both more flexibility to test different promotion types and find out what works best for your brand.
This will help prevent you from flushing a huge portion of your marketing budget down the toilet. Plus, I’ve found that many times, and influencer with around 11K-15K followers has more reach than some larger influencers. Influencers and theme pages with this amount of followers have usually delivered the best for me in the past.
If your budget is super, super tiny, consider influencers with just 1,000 or so followers. These influencers are just getting started and will sometimes do a promotion in return for just receiving some free products. Of course, you will need to provide free products to any influencer that you work with. Tiny influencers often have a more intimate relationship with their fanbase as well.
What Influencer Marketing Is For
Influencer marketing is primarily for promoting your products. It’s not a very cost-effective way to gain followers unless you are holding a contest and the influencer helps you drive traffic to that contest.
Services are a little harder to promote with influencer marketing, but if you know of a local influencer, having them do a vlog or a post when they visit your dog parlor or horse massage business can be a great boost in publicity for you.
Maintaining Relationships
Like any friendship, romantic relationship, or business relationship, you need to keep in touch with your influencer. This is especially true if they’ve been great and you want to work with them again in the future. You can email them cool information that they could use, or DM them once in a while with a short, personalized note.
Building relationships is at the heart of all marketing. So building and maintaining great relationships with your influencers sets the stage for building relationships with their audience.
Need help getting started with influencer research or learning how to reach out to influencers? Contact me here and we’ll talk about your business goals, and how you can utilize influencer marketing to accomplish them.