You must understand that a lot of influencers and industry experts are swamped with senseless offers, advertising, and spam. People ask them for their shares, their expertise and advice without an appropriate remuneration. This is why they tend to ignore most messages without even reading them.
So we suggest that instead of asking them for a favor, why not do a favor for them first. This will help them notice your message among others that are frankly just doing the opposite. And once you are able to start a conversation with an influencer, you can begin to collaborate on some projects that can be a long-lasting relationship. But how can you successfully do this?
1. Conduct an Expert Interview
There are two reasons for this approach. One, people love sharing about what they are passionate about. And two, influencers don’t have a lot of time and you can offer to interview them as an expert in the industry which can be very little work on their part.
It would be best if you pitch a large publication and have a publishing contract or agreement first before asking the expert to contribute.
If you don’t have an agreement yet, you might be unable to find an appropriate platform to publish your interviews. Plus, asking influencers to take part in articles that never go live isn’t something that can help you build strong relationships.
2. Don’t Ask For A Favor, Offer One!
As we’ve said earlier, influencers are swamped with messages from people asking them for their expertise. And if they helped everyone who runs to them, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. So how can you implement this?
Just ask yourself what kind of favors can you do for influencers? Here are some few ideas:
- Comment on their blog post
- Share their blog post
- Review their book
- Endorse their skills on LinkedIn
- Find and report an error on their blog
These ideas a quite easy to do but after doing them some favors. You must find the right words to start the conversation.
You would want to avoid saying it like:
“Hey George, we reviewed your e-book. Now can we have you share our articles in return?”
The better approach would be:
“Hey George. As we were reviewing your e-book on Amazon, we came up with a brilliant idea for a blog post that could really complement your book. Could you please take a look at it and share your opinion?”
If your influencer has the right personality. Finding an error on their blogs/content/website can help you win their trust.
3. Create A Personalized Pitch
You’ll have a better chance getting noticed by the influencer if you present an idea that is good and unique so that it wouldn’t look like spam. Here’s some tips to create a personalized pitch.
A. Call the influencer on their subject line
Research shows that using the email recipient in the subject line can increase your mail’s opening rate by 20%.
Some subject line examples are:
- Congratulations, [FNAME] [LNAME]!
- TEDx2020: Invitation to register for [FNAME] [LNAME]
- Hi [FNAME] [LNAME], please update your email preferences
B. Personal Note
Enhance your emails with a personalized note. It could be anything as long that it shows the influencer that you’ve done some research before contacting them.
In fact, the ideas for personalization are simply endless. However, you might want to cut the fluff and get straight to the point.
4. Mention the Influencer In Your Content
The last approach is mentioning your influencers in your blog posts. After sharing or promoting their blog, personal brand and service, the influencers would be happy to take a look at this post and share some feedback.
- Find influencers who are interested in your topic. You can find them mostly in LinkedIn/Facebook communities and Twitter.
- Email the influencers and ask them to take a look at your posts and share their feedback. If the feedback is good, you and the influencer will have something to talk about while also sharing it with your audience.
- Find a way to mention them in your blog post perhaps by quoting them, linking to their post and research.
How To Measure Influencer Marketing ROI
One of the greatest challenge in any campaigns is determining your return on investment (ROI). As influencer marketing continues to rise in popularity, there are more accepted ideas on how we can measure the success of your campaign.
Although every influencer campaigns can be measures differently depending on your goals set. Hopefully, these general statistics can help you get a closer look at your influencer marketing.
- Reach and engagement with each post made by an influencer
- Additional website visitors received as the result of the influencer marketing campaign
- Any additional sales generated compared to the costs of working with your influencers
- The types of marketing messages that best resonate with your target audience
If you are aiming to increase your awareness, then you should set measurable goals based on the number of impressions you’ve made. Or how many people have seen your message.
To build up your brand, you would want to focus on your engagement rate and compare your past rates with the current improvements from after you’ve done the campaign.
If you are interested in conversions, check and see whether you’ve experienced an increase in sales following the campaign. You can gather all of the necessary statistics from your website using Google Analytics.
Take note that it would be best to begin monitoring your campaigns just as you’ve begun implementing your campaigns as this can make it easier for you to see the changes caused by the work of your influencers.
