Make influencer marketing as cost-effective as possible [Infographic]

The right influencer can help you get a lot of exposure for your business, so what do you need to consider when working with influencers?

You’ve got your small business chugging along nicely, but you want more. You’ve decided that it’s time to take things up a notch or two. You’ve got good traction on social media, and are getting decent traffic to your site.

Clearly, your marketing efforts are paying off.  How do you scale them up and extend your reach even further? Have you considered pairing up with an influencer? The right influencer can help you get a lot of exposure for your business.

In this post, we’ll look at how you can make the process as cost-effective as possible.

What do influencers do?

Influencers have a reasonably extensive fanbase and regularly communicate with their followers. This can be done through blog posts, social media posts, and videos, to name a few. Their fans trust them and are more inclined to take the influencers’ recommendations to heart.

Influencers typically give your company a shout out over social media, post links to your website, like and share your social media posts. Research demonstrates that small business owners seem to be aware of social media’s marketing potential, with 48% planning to use these platforms for marketing in 2019.

What are the benefits for a small business?

If you’ve chosen the right influencer, you can expect:

How much do influencers charge?

That depends on the individual influencer and how many followers they have. Generally speaking, the more followers, the more you can expect to pay. Check out the chart below to get an idea of what the rates looked like in 2017.

The costs will also depend on the type of work they’re going to do. Most people in this industry value a longer-term contract. This means that they might be willing to give you a better deal if you provide them with more business down the line.

How to save money on an influencer campaign

Choose someone with a smaller following

Start with an influencer who has between one thousand and ten thousand supporters. As the number of followers increases, the level of engagement decreases.

At some point, an influencer has to start cutting back on reacting or replying to comments. The downside of this is that this could lead to a decrease in comments, driving overall engagement down. The upside for your business is that you don’t have to choose the most expensive influencer to get the best results.

Get to know more about them

This is an essential step. The more you know about an influencer, the better. What are they passionate about? What do they consider interesting? Say, for example, that they love dogs and are passionate about rescuing animals.

That’s something you could use. Why not host a fundraiser for an animal rescue organization and invite them to attend? They might come, and, even if they don’t, they’re bound to let others know about the event.

Another reason cyber-stalk your chosen influencer is to get more insight into what they say and what they post about. You can then learn to create posts that center around topics that interest them. Include a quote from a piece that they’ve written, and let them know about it.

They might decide to share your post if it’s well-written and of value to their followers. After all, the influencer’s business is to keep their followers happy. They’re likely to be posting frequently, which means that they need a lot of content. Provide this content, and your site will get a boost.

Give them freebies to review and offer discounts for their followers

Freebies are a tried and tested method to get some low-cost publicity. The downside is that you don’t know when, and if, they’ll review your product.

Perhaps you could offer free shipping off the first purchase or a discount on all purchases for the influencer’s followers. Make it something that the fans would appreciate, and you’ve got a good chance of getting some great publicity.

Final notes

Influencer marketing does not always have to be expensive. If you choose the right partner and make them the right offer, you might even get away with giving away a few products or throwing a fundraiser.

Find out more about influencer marketing today by taking a look at the 84 stats included in this great infographic from Smallbizgenius: