How to Leverage Influencer Marketing for Your Small Biz

When you think of influencer marketing, you may think about big brands that hire people to speak positively about their companies. That's part of it, but small businesses can gain as much advantage from influencer marketing and turn it into a huge growth asset. Several of the benefits of influencer marketing include:

  • Building brand awareness
  • Reaching new customers
  • Increasing sales
  • Enriching content strategy
  • Building credibility and trust
  • Lower cost of advertising


Establish Long-term Partnerships

The most successful influencer marketing campaigns look for long-term partnerships with influencers. The relationship between you and the influencer must produce mutual benefits. Giving them a steady flow of revenue will keep your brand front and center of your audience. You might reward them with lucrative recurring commissions to guarantee that they continue to work with you. The standard commission rate for influencers will range from 10 percent to 20 percent, but we have seen some companies go as high as 40 percent.

 

Bottom line: Make the commission worth their time, or they may pass on your offer.

 

Don't Discredit Local Influencers.

Do you want to know the disadvantage of hiring a big celebrity influencer like Charli d'Amelio on Instagram? Not only would a small business lack the budget to hire an influencer like this, but big influencers have an abysmal engagement rate.

 

They may have an audience of hundreds of thousands, but they receive less than a 1.1 percent engagement rate on Instagram and only a 0.3 percent engagement rate on Twitter. Contrasted with a small local influencer of around 1,000 followers, they have an engagement rate of 7.2 percent on Instagram and 1.4 percent on Twitter.

 

Small and local influencers have a more sales-oriented message, and they often give the biggest return on investment. These influencers often attend branded events and engage with local customers to collect testimonials from a local audience.

 

Don’t Overlook Influencer's Performance.

To properly leverage your influencer marketing campaign, you must regularly evaluate the return on investment. Look at how much you see in return for what you paid. Not all influencers are created equal, and you must pick one that will align with your target customers. You need to measure their performance to understand if they will yield a return on cost. An estimated 35 percent of marketers didn't measure their performance, according to an IMH study. 

 

Giant corporations may fail to measure performance and do fine, but a small business that fails to measure performance can find itself belly up from financial hemorrhaging. Since you work with a limited budget, you must assess the total cost at every stage. 

 

It would also help look into influencer programs to help streamline and manage your influencers. These programs can help with things such as payouts, gauge influencer value, and help manage relationships with influencers.

 

Never forget the ultimate goal behind an influencer marketing campaign—to drive sales and grow your business.

 

You can measure a campaign with the following values:

 

  • Sales
  • Website traffic
  • Engagement rate (likes, comments, interactions, etc.)
  • Email signups and social growth

 

Small businesses should prioritize engagement since this creates a long-term relationship with customers. Counterintuitively, small businesses should invest less merit in the number of sales in the beginning. That shows you one of the most common mistakes. Around 43.5 percent of companies think of it as the most valuable measurement.

 

Instead, you should set increasing sales as a long-term goal. As brand engagement increases, people will trust your company more and express a greater willingness to buy your products. Sales don't need to appear immediately, but they should increase over time. An average campaign will generate $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. You can usually expect to see measurable results at the end of three months.

 

Conclusion

Consistent influencer marketing efforts will yield the best results through regular brand exposure. You want to place your brand in front of your target audience regularly. Small businesses often make a huge mistake in that they will stop the campaign after they see the initial results. You want to keep the campaign running because business growth will continue to rise over time as audiences continue to get exposed to the brand. The return on investment should increase over time with influencer marketing with business growth and improved sales as the ultimate goals. 

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