Unlocking the Potential of Influencer Marketing for Small Businesses
The open nature and opportunities presented by digital media have opened a variety of marketing strategies for small businesses that seemed impossible even a few short years ago. In 2023, small business influencer marketing is not only a great strategy for building your brand, but also one that is more accessible than ever. Let’s start by taking a look at the potential impact that an influencer marketing campaign could have on your local business.
Understanding What Influencer Marketing Is and How It Works
When most people hear the term influencer marketing, they immediately think about celebrities with a million or more followers on social media platforms such as Instagram. However, like anything in business, not all influencer marketing takes place in the major leagues. Local business influencers with anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 followers are known as nano- and micro-influencers, and they may be just what your brand needs to gain exposure to the types of customers you hope to capture — local ones.
Similar to influencer marketing that occurs at the Kardashian scale, small business influencers are businesspeople who leverage their audience for a price. In many cases, that price is literal, as most- influencers charge a fee per post or ask for a fixed percentage of sales generated from their campaign for your business. Beginning and hyper-local influencers may also trade in products and services from your business, depending on what you sell and what they need.
The Advantages of Working with Influencers for Small Businesses
The number one advantage of working with small business influencers is gaining access to their audience. By definition, influencers have the attention of their many followers. If you do the proper research and match those followers to your target market, it’s clear why businesses make $5 for every $1 invested in influencer marketing, on average — the strategy works.
Furthermore, when you work to develop a positive and reciprocal relationship with your influencer, you increase the authenticity and reputation of your business and your brand. Working with an influencer literally humanizes your business.
Influencer content can also have a positive effect on other aspects of your digital marketing portfolio, specifically search results. When an influencer posts about you on their pages and channels, it creates backlinks that can elevate your search results. Additionally, influencers may encourage their followers to leave reviews for your business, which increases user-generated content, a critical element in increasing your local search rankings.
Finding the Right Influencer for Your Small Business
When looking for small business influencers, it’s important to do plenty of due diligence to make sure the individuals you work with are both legitimate influencers and properly positioned to help your business. Let’s look at both of these aspects a bit closer.
First, make sure that you research any potential influencers before you contact them to make sure that they are as successful as their profiles seem to indicate. Both new and established influencers may use cheats to increase their followers, such as buying followers or using bots to make their numbers seem more impressive and legitimate. However, buying followers can ultimately hurt an influencer’s engagement numbers, canceling out any advantages these increased numbers temporarily bring. Make sure that you scan their follower list to look for the telltale signs of real followers, such as profile photos and usernames that are more than just strings of letters and numbers.
You also want to pay close attention to their engagement rates. How many people like and respond to their posts regularly? To figure this out, look at the number of responses they generate and divide that by the total number of followers on their account. A good rate, especially for local influencers, is 2-3% engagement.
Next, make sure that the people who do engage with potential influencers are actually people you want to patronize your business. To do this, use your marketing personas and match them with followers as well as the influencers themselves. Consider factors such as geographic location, age, language, and other products or services the influencer might already engage with on a frequent basis.
Measuring the Success of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
Like any marketing campaign, local business influencer campaigns need to have an effect on your bottom line to be worth your time and money. Therefore, before you contact any influencer, decide on clear, measurable goals related to that influencer’s posts. Are you trying to make sales? Increase your own engagement or foot traffic? Articulate these goals and design a system and time to measure them throughout your influencer campaigns.
Maximizing the Impact of Influencer Marketing on Your Small Business
Choosing to engage in small business influencer campaigns is a big step in modernizing and successfully accelerating your local digital marketing efforts. However, if you really want to capitalize on all that influencer marketing can provide for your local business, then it is important to keep a few tips for maximizing the impact of influencer marketing in mind.
Building Relationships with Influencers
Influencers’ main currency is relationships, both real and imagined. One of the reasons this marketing method works is because of the relationships that influencers maintain with their followers. As a result, you must also make relationships part of your influencer marketing strategy. Make sure to personally reach out to influencers via email or direct messaging (DM), rather than trying to engage with them through comments. Then, continue to talk with them and share updates throughout your working arrangement with each other.
Authenticity is critical in influencer marketing. You want your influencers to see your business as more than a transaction or paycheck because that attitude will then translate to their followers.
Incorporating Influencer Marketing into Your Overall Marketing Strategy
It’s important to note that influencer marketing is not a one-stop solution for any business’s marketing strategy, but rather it must be part of an overall approach to marketing that includes other factors, such as social media (both organic and paid), search, and traditional marketing. Otherwise, the time, effort, and money you put into influencer marketing campaigns may not have the level of return you hope to achieve.
Staying on Top of Influencer Marketing Trends and Best Practices
Remember that like all marketing, influencer marketing is constantly changing. Therefore, be sure to stay on top of trends in the field by reading marketing blogs (like this one!) and using that information to inform your own influencer marketing efforts. For example, while Instagram is widely considered the number one social platform for influencer marketing, Tik Tok has been gaining share quite effectively in the past couple of years. In fact, the app currently has more than 1 billion active members monthly. Make sure you (and your influencers) are ready to pivot if and when a change in platform is required.
Finding an Influencer for Your Small Business
For many small businesses, it doesn’t take a lot to acknowledge the power and purpose of influencer marketing; however, finding an appropriate influencer for their business is another challenge entirely. In this case, it is important to remember what an “influencer” really is: someone with power within your industry or niche and who your target customers already know and follow. Working with a small business influencer is the modern version of finding a local celebrity for product endorsement, a spokesperson if you will. Once businesses embrace this parallel, finding an influencer for a small business becomes exponentially less intimidating. Let’s take a look at some simple steps you can take to find an influencer for your small business.
Start with Your Own Social Following
The best and most organic influencers you can find are the ones who already use your business, so start there. Search through your followers with an eye for influencer clues, such as locals with a large following and high engagement. By looking through your own followers, you also gain the advantage of knowing that the person you work with as an influencer already knows your business and, hopefully, is a customer. This type of real, organic engagement from the person responsible for promoting your products or services is exactly what makes influencer marketing so effective; the stories influencers tell are real and their audience relates to them.
Research Local Hashtags
Another way to look for voices that matter locally in your field is by searching related hashtags. Influencers know how to leverage hashtags to boost their reach, so their use of hashtags related to your business illustrates that they know your industry and are prepared to promote it.
Start with specific results, keying in local words such as #albanyrestaurant to see what pops up. However, note that many hashtags are not location-specific, so you may need to be more creative in your search. One strategy is to search for more specific hashtags without local references that are still related to your industry or niche, such as #farmtotable. Then, narrow down your results by looking for posts from local users.
Use an Influencer Platform
It’s important to remember that influencers are in business too, and, just like businesses, they advertise. Influencer platforms such as Grin, Creator.co, Bandwith Influencer Marketing Software, and Upfluence offer just such a solution. These platforms support both influencers (as well as their agents) and brands by offering a single source for them to find one another, devoid of all the noise found on other social media sites.
Used properly, influencer platforms can help small businesses target the type of local voices they need to boost their brand and, as a plus, by using an influencer platform to find an influencer for your small business, you know ahead of time that the person you are trying to work with is open for business.
Increasing the Reach and Effectiveness of Your Influencer Marketing Efforts
Choosing the right marketing mix is essential for maximizing your return on investment, and even at the local level, influencer marketing campaigns are becoming more and more effective in this way. However, successful local influencer marketing is about more than finding an influencer and giving them samples of your product. You need a strategy, goals, target market, and clear direction for your influencer campaign along with a clear way to measure its effects.
If you need help putting any or all these marketing pieces together, contact Elevation Ten Thousand today. We can help you understand where influencer marketing should fall in your business’ marketing mix and prepare any or all aspects of your influencer marketing campaign in a way that will maximize your reach and results.
