Influencer marketing can be one of the most cost-effective means to reach your target audience, especially if you’re a small business with a small marketing budget. Here are 7 tips to keep in mind to get the best results with influencer marketing for small businesses!
1. Choose the right influencers for your brand
This is the key to a successful influencer marketing campaign: the better influencers you choose, the more results your campaign will bring. Here are 3 things to check before you agree on a collaboration:
▸ The story and values of the influencer
Influencer marketing is a strong branding channel: every time you do a collaboration with an influencer, a piece of their reputation is attributed to your brand. Therefore, you should ask yourself: do their values match your brand’s? Is that of a person that you want to represent your brand?
▸ Influencer’s price vs social media stats
Instagram influencer pricing might be confusing at times. Do they ask a fair price for their average reach? Keep in mind that the number of followers is not an important metric here – there is no point in paying for thousands of followers if their content doesn’t reach them! Instead, you should check their engagement rate, average likes, and average reach.
▸ Influencer’s audience demographics
This is one of the main criteria when choosing influencers: does their audience match your target group? Checking the influencer’s audience demographics also helps you to detect fake followers.
This is a good reason to use an influencer marketing tool – not only will you see the influencers’ followers distributed by age, location, and gender, but also their interests, brand affinity, followers’ credibility, and much more. Create a free account and try it out yourself!
@mollymae’s account on Promoty’s Influencer Discovery (try it out for free)
2. Prefer micro-influencers over big influencers
Instead of working with one big influencer, do a campaign with many micro-influencers instead: that gives you a higher return on investment with a smaller budget.
Why is it so? Firstly, influencers with a smaller following usually have higher engagement and a more authentic bond with their followers. Secondly, by asking for smaller fees and often being open to working for products only, they are a lot more cost-effective.
Let’s take a look at two campaigns. In one case, the brand does a collab with one big influencer with 50 000 followers. In the second case, they choose 10 micro-influencers for their campaign. Here are the results:
| A campaign with one big influencer | A campaign with many big influencers | |
| Influencers | 1 | 10 |
| Followers on average | 50 000 | 5 000 |
| Campaign budget | 500€ + products | Products only |
| Potential reach | 50 000 | 50 000 |
| Average engagement | 5% | 15% |
| Average likes | 2 500 | 750 |
| Total likes | 2 500 | 7 500 |
3. Set up story-only campaigns for the bigger influencers
However, you might want to also involve some bigger influencers to get a higher reach. In this case, you can create two campaigns: a regular campaign for the small influencers, and a story-only campaign for the bigger influencers. Since influencers usually charge less for a story compared to a post, it’s a good way to get more coverage with a lower budget.
4. Reward influencers with products
Micro-influencers often accept collaborations where they only get products as rewards – especially if they really like the product and use it anyway!
That kinds of campaigns are good for two reasons. Firstly, they are super cost-effective for the brand. Secondly, product campaigns also tend to attract influencers who actually love the product and are willing to sincerely recommend it to their followers. As a result, collaboration posts are more authentic and bring better results.
N. B. Of course, in this case, you need to also consider the value of the product – you can’t expect influencers to work for custom water bottles or a box of protein bars only :’) If you’re marketing a lower-price product, you should also include monetary rewards.
@jnnikas x Dermosil collaboration photos
5. Work with your superfans
For the same reasons, you should always work with influencers who use your product or service and are willing to sincerely recommend it to their followers! That results in authentic collaboration posts that bring the best results.
How to find your superfans? Start with your customer list – are there any potential influencers? Additionally, you can check your social media: who are the people who are already sharing your brand on social media?
If you create a marketer account on Promoty and add your social media handles, you can also see influencers who already follow you or engage with you on social media – try it out for free!
6. Measure and optimize the results
This is the last, most important step. of every influencer marketing campaign: measuring the campaign results to understand which collaborations brought you the best results.
However, the choice of KPI-s you should monitor depends on your goals. If you’re trying to grow your brand awareness, you should measure reach-related KPI-s. If your goal is branding, you can check engagement and the number of new followers on your brand’s account. If you’re trying to boost sales, you can use personal discount codes and tracked URL-s to measure the impact on sales and revenue.
Read more: your guide to measuring influencer marketing 📝
After that, you can optimize your influencer marketing program like you optimize your PPC ads. Usually, 20% of the influencers bring 80% of the results – your goal is to identify this 20% and turn them into brand ambassadors.
7. Focus on long-term collaborations
Long-term influencer partnerships are good for several reasons. First, they appear more trustworthy, create more touchpoints with potential customers, and thus, bring better results for the brand. Secondly, they require less time from the brands. Thirdly, influencers charge less per post when you agree to do multiple posts and stories.
If you need an influencer management tool to manage all your (potential) influencers, negotiations, collaborations, and content in one place, you can try Promoty – the free version allows adding up to 10 influencers which should be enough for small businesses!
Using Promoty’s Influencer Discovery, you can search for influencers worldwide, filtering by their social media metrics or audience data. Additionally, you can see detailed account insights for every influencer – which helps you to find the right TikTok and Instagram influencers for your brand.
Try it out yourself – create a free account to get started!👇🏼
