Influencer marketing is everywhere. Businesses don’t hesitate to spend money on influencers because they know it will work.
And it does work.
Influencer marketing ROI is 11x the ROI of banner ads.
It shouldn’t be surprising because 49% of people say that they rely on recommendations from influencers when making a purchase decision and 40% say that they purchased a product after seeing it used by an influencer.
Instead of spending your marketing budget on different channels, you should invest it in influencer marketing. Instead of targeting your audience, you should target influencers who control your target audience.
What is influencer targeting?
Influencer targeting refers to targeting influencers instead of your target audience. Influencers are your target audience and you try to persuade them to use your product/service and talk about it.
The challenge here is finding the right influencers.
The most appropriate influencer to target is one who influences your target audience. Your target audience should be your target influencer’s follower.
For instance, if you have a meal planning app that you want to sell, Bobby Flay will be a perfect influencer to target because if he tweets about your app, you’re sure to get a lot of business. Your target audience is his follower.
So instead of targeting a massive group of people, you choose a few influencers that will help you reach your entire target market quickly and efficiently.
Makes sense?
Influencer targeting tips
Here are a few tips to help you get started with influencer targeting.
1. Create informative content for influencers
When you’re targeting influencers, you have to create a different type of content as you'll create for your buyers.
Influencers prefer authentic, data-driven, and actionable content that they can refer to and share with their audience. They won’t share anything average.
Yes, it takes a lot of hard work to create an informative content piece that will persuade an influencer to share it, link to it, or create a social post around it.
Once you have created an awesome piece of content, you need to reach out to the influencer and show him the content. You can send an email or a message on Facebook to show your content that is of interest to the influencer.
Influencers are very choosing about the content they share with their followers so you have to make sure you send them something worth sharing.
Here is a piece of content that an influencer will ignore. It is a cluttered infographic with no actual information. It is really hard to tell what this infographic is about and what the key takeaway is.
Now here is a piece of content that is more likely to be shared. It has statistics and data that anyone will like to share with one’s followers.
You don’t have to necessarily create an infographic instead any content type will work as long as it is really great.
2. Use guest posting
You can target an influencer with the help of an awesome guest post on a high authority site.
This is an exceptionally easy way to target an influencer of your choice. The only issue is: Getting published on a leading authority website.
Follow these steps to get started.
Step #1
Understand your influencer.
See where he publishes content, what blogs he contributes to, what are the websites he usually talks about on social media, read a few of his most recent posts and figure out what he is into these days, etc.
You get the idea.
You need to track every activity of your target influencer for at least a week before you plan your guest post.
Step #2
Choose 3 to 5 blogs where your influencer publishes guest posts or actively participates or talks about. You need to get your guest post published on these blogs.
Choose a topic that’s most relevant to your influencer’s interest these days.
Your influencer’s interest might change so it is recommended to carefully scan and analyze his recent interest.
Step #3
Reach out to the blogs and pitch your guest post idea.
Step #4
Once you get a reply, create an awesome article. Take the idea from your influencer’s recent social media posts and see what type of content he has been sharing from this particular blog.
Create an article that’s better than what your influencer has already shared.
Submit your article and sit back.
Step #5
Once your article goes live, wait for a day and see if your influencer shared its link.
If not, you should reach out him with a link to your guest post.
Step #6
Repeat.
3. Use affiliate marketing
Targeting an influencer gets easier if you can show them what’s in it for them.
And there is nothing better than compensating them for their efforts. This is where affiliate marketing gets the job done.
You can pay a commission to affiliates for every sale they generate.
The best influencers for affiliate marketing are the ones who sell online courses. Why?
Because:
- They're already in the knowledge commerce industry and know how to sell an affiliate product.
- They have access to real buyers, not just followers.
Here is the challenging part: Not all influencers sell online courses.
You have to find influencers who are already into this.
You can use knowledge commerce platform like Kajabi where you'll find hundreds of micro as well as macro influencers who sell online courses. Here is an example of what type of people you'll find on Kajabi. It’d be a piece of cake for Michelle to sell your weight loss product/service.
Udemy is another platform where you'll find a lot of micro-influencers who can generate instant sales.
Once you find an appropriate influencer, get in touch, share your affiliate program, and clearly tell what’s in it for her/him.
This technique works best with micro influencers. If you'll reach out to big name influencers, your request will be declined most likely because most influencers don’t like sending their customers to someone else.
This is one reason why platforms like Kajabi and Udemy work best because you'll only find micro influencers on these platforms.
Conclusion
Finding and targeting an influencer is a full-time job. You have to make sure that your team doesn’t take it lightly. It calls for months of hard work to get a positive response from an influencer.
Once your business grows, things will get a bit easier. Until that time, keep pushing.