68% of small businesses currently use influencer marketing as part of their marketing strategy.
~ Influencer Marketing Hub Survey, 2020
Small businesses have a good reason for doing so.
We saw how important it has become for firms to build authentic content, get user- and employee-generated content, and position their brand well with a human touch.
Influencer marketing is a form that enables brands to achieve all of the above and grow cost-effectively.
Today, we share 4 ways small businesses can get the most out of influencer marketing on limited budgets.
Why Do Small Businesses Need Influencer Marketing?
1. Increased Brand Visibility and Engagement
Influencers can enable your brand to reach and spread your message to a wider and more highly-targeted audience. They can:
- Create content for your brand
- Encourage their audience to engage with you
- Initiate further actions, such as their followers buying from you or sharing about you with others.
2. Content Creation for Brand-Building
Influencer marketing can help your small business build its brand from the early stage. Influencers can understand your brand (its product and personality) to:
- Create content that highlights it
- Bring it in front of your target segment
- Position it in your category
- Form associations in audiences' minds to get strong recall and recognition.
In short, influencers can enable your brand to create differentiation and build upon it through content.
3. Measurable Results
You can easily evaluate an influencer's performance through metrics such as engagement, cost per engagement, clicks, conversion, and ROI. Your brand can use the insights to:
- Set new goals and explore new opportunities for future campaigns
- Decide whether you want to build long-term relationships with influencers
- Create a mix of new ones for various goals.
In short, your brand can use the insights to enhance its overall influencer marketing strategy.
4. Cost-Effectiveness
Influencer marketing can help you get the most out of your costs as:
- You can make performance-based deals with the influencers.
- You can work with micro-influencers to grow your brand in its initial days.
- You can partner with influencers long-term and generate real value for your business.
In short, your small business can use its limited budget to get sales, build a brand, and grow a customer base.
How Small Businesses Can Use Influencer Marketing to Grow
Focus on Micro-Influencers and Niche Influencers
While starting your influencer marketing journey, two types of influencers can establish brand recognition and affinity (micro-influencers) and credibility (niche influencers) on a limited budget.
They will help you attract an audience that shares your interests and build expertise in your category.
You can work with them in these ways:
- Find, reach out to them, share and discuss your expectations, and seal the deal when you're on the same page.
- Start various initiatives for different intents.
For example, you can work on a blog series with a niche influencer to build expertise across channels such as websites and social media (LinkedIn and YouTube). Meanwhile, you can collaborate with a micro-influencer to start a campaign, get engagement, and drive traffic to your shopping page.
Doing so will enable your brand to entertain and educate people and grow your business.
Build long-term partnerships with influencers to build variety and depth of content, launch campaigns and host giveaways, and have a good customer base.
In short, your small business should work with micro- and niche influencers early to set up its brand for consistent growth.
Use Social Media and Influencer-Generated Content
Social media and influencer-generated content are a must in your brand's influencer marketing strategy. You can take these steps to get the most benefit out of this combination for your brand:
- Start an influencer campaign where they build content for you and ask their audience to participate and engage with you.
- Plan incentives and offers to give to the influencer's audience and push them to take the desired action.
- Repurpose their content and share it on various other channels to drive more traffic and actions.
- Prepare the journey map and optimize the touchpoints to deliver a memorable experience to their audience and convert them.
Your brand should focus on how it can tie all of this back to the business goals of ROI, conversion, and cost per engagement.
Offer Delightful Experiences to Influencers
It's one of the crucial elements of your influencer marketing efforts. It helps ensure the influencer stays engaged and invested in the brand's growth. Here are some ideas for unique experiences to consider:
- Make them feel like your best friend by giving them access to your brand channels and new products and initiatives before sharing them with the public.
- Make them feel part of your brand by inviting them to behind-the-scenes tours, meet-and-greet events, and company gatherings.
- Show your interest in the partnership by offering customized gifts.
For example, if you're a food and nutrition brand, you can gift them a food kit of after-workout healthy snacks that they love.
Doing so enables you to build a strong relationship with them and make them show your brand in a positive light.
Leverage Influencer SEO
Influencers have well-built content strategies, target segments, channels to be on, and topics they want to be known for. They have tested and developed their secret sauce to win the SEO game through blogs and social media.
Your brand's influencer marketing strategy can benefit from influencer SEO by:
- Including their content in your strategy and repurposing it in various formats.
- Sharing their content on your website and social media, linking to it from other relevant pages.
- Asking the influencer to share your website links in their content to get high-quality backlinks.
In short, leveraging influencer SEO enables your brand to gain visibility, drive website traffic, improve rankings, and generate leads.
As you can see, your small business's influencer marketing strategy must focus on micro-influencers, social media, influencer SEO, and building relationships with them.
Starbuzz.ai is an Influencer Marketing Platform for businesses of all sizes to boost and begin their influencer marketing journey.
