Influencer marketing has faded a bit, but it's still powerful, so use it!

Influencer marketing has faded a bit, but it's still powerful, so use it!

If you haven't noticed, a lot of the influencer marketing material you find online has faded a bit, but that doesn't mean it's a dead marketing tactic.  In fact, influencer marketing is just as strong as it was before, and you can even get in now to save more money since the initial craze has slowed down.

If you don't know what influencer marketing is, it's a way to pay someone to promote your website or blog in a way that makes it look great.  You give someone a few bucks or a ton of money, and they will publish a post on their social profiles with you in the spotlight.  The amount you pay for the post really depends on how many followers the person has and how much they actually want.  This is the reason you need to shop around, because there is no real industry average to figure out a price for your post, so it's at the sole discretion of the influencer to figure out the price they want to charge per post.

Just 6 months ago you could hire someone to do influencer marketing for you and it would cost $450 a post.  Since the craze has died down a bit, those same influencers aren't getting as many requests, so their prices are more negotiable.  They will still come at you with a high price tag, but they are more winning to negotiate with you if you come back with less than half of what they were asking.


Finding the right influencers to work with takes time
You won't always have to search for the right influencers, but normally you'll have to take a bit of time to sift through the masses to find the perfect people for your business.  I normally check the highest followed influencers and send out a message to them to see what their costs are, which tend to be too high, so I'll always go through the micro-influencers while waiting for the big accounts to respond. 

Micro-influencers are the same as the big influencers, they just have fewer followers, and this means they tend to be cheaper.  I love working with micro-influencers because they don't usually post as often, they treat you better, and they're more willing to cut you deals, unlike the bigger accounts.

After you have a list of influencers you want to work with you just need to contact them.  Don't be shy, they don't bite unless you ask them to lol.  Don't tell them how much you want to pay for a post, let them tell you their price, then counter if you think the price is too high.  Also, don't be afraid to tell them "No thanks, I'll just stick with my current list of influencers who are accepting the price I'm willing to pay" and the influencer will likely stop talking to you... until they need some money   I've noticed a lot of influencers get an itch that can't be scratched unless they accept your bid that is lower than what they are asking.  This benefits you because you're now paying a fair price, and the influencer doesn't really lose any money because it's just a post on social media, so everyone wins!

You won't get rich with just one promotion from a single influencer
Think of influencer marketing just like email marketing, you need to stick with it if you want to be successful.  Did you know the average person takes 6 emails before they decide to purchase from you?  The same goes for influencer marketing and you'll have to continually work with influencers to get the word out about your business.  You could work with 6 different influencers at the same time and actually speed up the process, but it will cost you 6x the amount compared to slow playing it and letting 1 influence post at a time.

The beauty of overlapping your influencer posts is that people tend to follow the same influencers, which means your posts will get seen more on a daily basis by the same people.  This means you will speed up the process a bit and people will begin to see you as a trusted source

Your promotions need to be of high quality
You can't open up MS paint and make an image to post to Instagram, it just doesn't work like that, so be sure you have good images to push around the internet if you do plan on using any sort of influencer marketing.  It's not difficult to do, you can actually use stock photos and a free image editor to add text to it, then send it to your influencer for posting.

It doesn't matter what niche or platform you're targeting, no one wants to see a garbage looking image come across their newsfeed, and most influencers will turn you away because you'll just hurt their appearance.  You can ask the influencer to create your image, which will likely cost a little extra, but there are some people out there that will do this as a courtesy since you're working with them anyway

Think of what YOU would click on, then replicate it
So many people out there are trying to push a service or product and get caught up in the marketing side of it.  Everyone forgets about what they are clicking on themselves and they just push what they think others want to see.  To be successful with influencer marketing you need to think of what you're clicking on when visiting Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform you love.  Replicate the triggers other people are using to get you to click through and you will have a successful campaign every single time


In conclusion
Influencer marketing isn't dead, it's not even slowing down, it's just not talked about as much because they hype had died down a bit.  People are still making plenty of money with influencer marketing, even more so now since the competition has dwindled, so I don't see why this isn't a marketing play in someone's arsenal.  Yes, you have to be strategic when picking your influencers, but that's common practice with anything business related.  One of the best things is that you can now negotiate easier with big influencers than you could 6 months ago due to the hype having died down


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Thanks!

Tommy Carey