How to Boost Your Brand or Product Launch with Influencer Marketing

You’ve built a revolutionary new product or created an imaginative new brand. Congrats! Now, how do you draw the attention of customers who will love your product or service?

There are dozens of effective digital marketing strategies to explore. Depending on your budget, most of them will work to varying degrees. However, professional digital marketers say that influencer-created content outperforms company-created content 51% of the time. Additionally,  92% of consumers worldwide say they trust earned media over all other advertising methods.

It’s easy to see why influencer marketing has become a popular way to launch a new product or increase brand awareness. People trust the people they follow on social media platforms, even with the advertisement disclosure. (I’m sure we can all admit the instances we’ve been #influenced to make a consumer decision).  

So, how can you generate brand awareness through influencer marketing? Let’s dive into what influencers bring to the table, how to hire influencers, and why you should focus on long-term relationships.

What Can Influencers Do for Your Brand?

Even pre-internet days, it was an established principle that word-of-mouth marketing was extremely effective, usually considered second to none. 

Influencer marketing capitalizes on the concept of word-of-mouth marketing. Although the definition of an influencer is often subject to debate, for the sake of this conversation we will consider them anyone with a medium-to-large social media following. Influencers are typically focused on a specific niche, like fitness or travel influencers. People follow influencers because they’re interested in their niche and the content they post about it.  

Brands approach influencers and content creators to promote products or services that are related to the influencer’s niche. For example, a website that helps people find hostels might approach Instagram travel influencers to recommend the site’s services to their target audience through Instagram Stories, posts, and more.  It’s important to note that finding niches that are aligned between the brand and the creator increase the feeling of authenticity, and often positively impact engagement.  

How do influencers help your brand? There are a few notable ways that they leverage their expertise, niche, and following to help your product launch or brand awareness campaign:

• Create relevant and engaging content: Social media influencers built their following by understanding what types of content will engage their target audience. Glean their expertise by involving them in the content creation process. They make content for a living, and often have an authentic way of communicating a message, even if it is a specific sales call to action. The campaign will be more authentic and therefore yield better results. 
• Promote giveaways and contests: People love free stuff, and influencers can put your product in front of countless pairs of eyes. Work with the influencer to create a giveaway contest that will work with their audience. You may be able to run a giveaway on the brand’s social media account. But remember, adding an influencer marketing campaign will boost engagement, help reach a wider audience, and ultimately allow you to achieve your marketing goals.‍
• Bring awareness to your brand or product: Ultimately, the purpose of influencer marketing is to let the world know that your business exists. Regardless of the platform or type of promotion, working with an influencer will put more eyes on your business.

Influencers have so many valuable attributes to offer your product launch or brand awareness initiative. However, you need to make sure you work with the right influencer for your company—one that not only boosts your organic social media marketing, but also shares common goals. It’s time to talk about how to find and how to hire influencers for your business.

How Do You Contact an Influencer to Promote Your Product?

It’s an entirely too common mistake - a business wants to explore influencer marketing and starts spamming partnership requests in comment sections. From the influencer’s perspective, this is often a red flag. Like dating, great relationships go through familiar phases, so how do you find and contact influencers in a productive way? 

We’re going to discuss the typical way to find and contact influencers, but you can also work with an Instagram marketing agency to skip these steps and have expert guidance.

How to Find the Right Influencer

You don’t have to look far to start finding social media accounts with large followings within your niche. Searching keywords is surprisingly effective after a recent update, so search the keywords you already know are related to your business. 

With different types of influencers available, the real difficulty is finding social influencers that are right for your business or product. Use these tips to help find the perfect influencer:

• Don’t work with influencers that will promote anything: There are countless influencers out there that will accept any offer that comes their way, as long as the price is right. Avoid these accounts. Instead, you want influencers that focus on promoting quality brands and services that align with their lifestyle. 
• Look for influencers that would use your product or service: Effective influencer partnerships target accounts that would already be interested in what you have to offer. Someone truly interested in your product will have a content strategy, and will create more effective content than someone just looking to get paid.
• Be realistic about follower counts: Someone with a million followers might not be within your budget. However, you can still effectively promote your business with smaller accounts. Looking for the right micro-influencers might be the right approach for your business.
• Find influencers that align with your target audience: It’s important to work with influencers that get your niche, the products and services you sell, and provide you with access to your target audience.
• Look for creators that already use your products: Finding the right influencer is easy when they already like and use your product. This type of connection makes it easy for great things to happen when it comes to marketing your brand.

You’ve found a few accounts that you’d like to work with. What’s next? You need to reach out in a genuine way.

What’s the Best Way to Contact Influencers?

You need to understand how to ask influencers to promote your product. Look in the comment section of any account with over 10,000 followers and you’ll likely see dozens of companies posting sponsorship requests. Is the influencer even interacting with them?

The majority of influencers with experience almost always will ignore comments about sponsorships.  This is largely due to many of those offers being scams or overall fake. Comment offers do not have a good reputation. 

Instead, read the influencer’s bio and see if they’ve listed a preferred contact method. Many influencers will have an email setup specifically for sponsorship offers. Others will say “DM to work together” or something similar. If the account lists a preferred method of contact, use it.

Direct messages are usually fine if there is no preferred contact method listed. Follow these guidelines to make contact with the influencer:

• Be personal and genuine throughout the entire message
• Start by saying you’d like to work with them, then proceed to introduce yourself and the company
• Directly spell out what you’re offering, such as any free products or payment amounts.
• If possible, move the conversation to email so important communication pieces do not get lost in the DMs

It might take time, but you’ll find the right influencer for your brand and business with consistent effort.

How to Partner with Influencers to Achieve Ongoing Success

You might start by learning how to ask an influencer to promote your product, but ideally, that won’t be where the partnership ends. If you’ve found an influencer that creates high-quality content and you enjoy working with, keep working with them. 

You don’t need to continually skip around to different accounts. Instead, seek to form lasting relationships with effective influencers and keep building awareness of your brand or product launch.

Are you looking for expert guidance with influencer marketing? Working with an influencer marketing agency that has a skilled management team and existing relationships with many reputable influencers could be the solution to find your perfect influencer match. Contact us today to start maximizing your influencer marketing budget.