Have you ever considered diving into the world of influencer marketing with your business and using it as a way to market your business? If you have, then today’s episode of The Stephanie Kase Podcast is for you. Today, I’m going to give you my thoughts on exactly how to go about influencer marketing and how to make it effective for growing your business. This is all coming from the perspective of someone who owned a business first and is now a content creator who works with other brands. So, let’s dive into how to grow your business with influencer marketing.

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Who Do You Want to Work With?

If you’re really interested in working as an influencer, the first step is to identify who you want work with. It’s important to research and identify influencers that align with your brand values, target audience, and niche industry. One of the things I like to look at is who their audience is and how engaged that audience is with the influencer. You want someone who has an organic engaged audience – not someone who’s paying for their followers.  Their content should also be high quality. Remember though, not all value of a collaboration comes from sharing to an audience. Sometimes there’s something to be said about having more content for you to share on your platforms, too. 

What Are You Offering?

After you figure out who you want to work with, you need to figure out what you’re comfortable offering to influences. Do you want paid collaborations – paying them to write content? Do you want an exchange collaboration – something free for a certain number of posts? Or do you want to do affiliate marketing where they sign up and get commissions? There’s also user generated content – they’re just creating content for you to post. Each of these options has pros and cons, so let’s break them down. 

Exchange Collaboration

If you want to do an exchange collaboration, you’re giving an influencer a product or service in exchange for posting about their experience. Be realistic about who you’re going to work with. If you have a $50 home décor product and the influencer has 100K followers and you want them to post on their stories and feed, you probably won’t get that collaboration. They can charge a lot of money for those options. But, if you have a $3K valued stay at your Airbnb, that might be worth it to them. That single feed post is way more valuable now and they’re getting a better exchange.  If you do have lower paid items, work to find smaller, microinfluencers who you can give the product for free and are wiling to pay. 

Paid Collaborations (or User Generated Content)

There’s a few pros and cons to going the route of paid collaborations. The con is that you have to pay extra for someone to create content and post the content. But, I will say that when I have a paid collaboration, I’m typically more motivated to actually create awesome content for that brand. I want to make sure they’re happy with it! Usually, with paid collaborations, you have the option to buy the rights to the content so then you can use it freely across your platforms. There’s a lot more longevity in that. I also think that paid collaborations can really result in some awesome relationships. Those long-term relationships with more posting over time really tend to do better than just a one-time collaboration. 

Affiliate Marketing

We get requests daily for affiliate marketing opportunities. People are constantly emailing us about being an affiliate for them. Honestly, I don’t read half of those emails. The only time I’m really interested is if the new partnership’s value is similar to the value I would actually charge another brand. Some affiliate programs are so low – for example, 10% of a $50 product. I wind up working really hard to make that $5 and it’s just not really worth it. But then there’s other products where I can make $50+ from an affiliate sale and that’s incentivizing for me. So, just think about that when you’re working on affiliate marketing. Additionally, so many of us are getting lots of these requests so make sure that if you’re going to work with influencers that you and your product really stand out to a larger creator. 

Goals & Objectives for Influencers

Once you know who you want to work with and what kind of collaboration you’re looking for, it’s time to establish your goals and objectives for your brand partnership. You need to clearly define what you want for yourself and what you’re looking for. From there, you can communicate that to the influencers you agree to work with.  There’s generally a few main goals you might have. Obviously, you could increase brand awareness, look to drive sales or increase traffic to your platforms.

No matter what you’re trying to do, setting measurable goals is helpful to determine if influencer marketing is working for you and what you’re getting out of it. You can look at impressions, engagement rate, referral traffic, link clicks – whatever makes sense as far as you’d expect with the collaboration. This might mean asking for information from the influencers before you work with them. I also think it’s important to understand the value of non-measurable goals, too – which really goes back to brand awareness. Some of the best partnerships I’ve had is when they understand that brand awareness and people seeing their name over and over from one influencer with a long-term partnership is still valuable. It helps build trust. 

Build Genuine Relationships

If you’re looking into brand partnerships, I think it’s important to remember that you want to build genuine relationships with them. The best partnerships and best outcomes come from building those real relationships. Not just because they’re going to take care of you, but because you’re going to love that content and they’re going to create something great for you.  That’s what will drive the best results for you. So, when you’re looking for a brand to partner with, make sure to engage with their content and determine if it’s a good fit for you and them. 

I hope this was a great base for you to start with influencer marketing in your business! If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them for you! Honestly, I do have a unique perspective of being a influencer who has worked with brands and as someone who owns a business, too! So I hope seeing this from both sides was beneficial! 

Other Resources

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