For your business, there are never enough ways for you to promote your brand and your company. It is your opportunity to show your local community why they should spend time at your company and why they should trust you over other competitors.
For marketing, there are many routes that you could take to improve your visibility in your industry. You could take on the role yourself, implementing these strategies, but it can be challenging to do that while running your company! Another option is to hire someone else to do this for you.
What is a Social Influencer?
There might be some confusion over this term, but a social influencer is someone who has an audience and can share information about your business with their audience. There are dozens if not hundreds of influencers for you to choose from, but you have to be careful which one you hire and how you see them benefitting your business in the long term.
Choosing the Right Social Influencer
The most important aspect of this process is choosing someone that you feel would positively help your business. For example, if you are a medical office, you have to find someone with experience and a trusted audience in your target demographic for your future patients.
If you are a restaurant, you want to have someone younger potentially who has the right audience to begin finding new customers. You also want to hire someone who has the same values and would be a positive marketing effort for your brand. You don’t want to hire someone who would tarnish your reputation and hurt your brand. If it takes you longer to find someone, that is alright if you find the right person!
Where Do I Find a Social Influencer?
Before you even begin your search to find the right social influencer, you have to be clear about your goals. Outline what you want to accomplish, your marketing objectives, and what your ideal brand spokesperson should be like. This will help you narrow down your choices and even give you a clear idea of what you want your audience to see when they see your business.
Once you do this, you have to research your own. Find people who best align with your values, your goals, and how they present themselves. You might have to spend more time looking, but make sure you create a list of relatively close individuals to your ideal candidate. From there, you can contact them and see if they would be up for the challenge!
Work Closely With Your New Social Influencer
The most important aspect of this process is finding the right person and creating the proper connection to be on the same page with your goals. It can be frustrating to find someone who would best exemplify your business, but they do not understand your goals. However, there’s one solution to this: communicate more!
With more communication, your social influencer will have a clear idea of what you need, and you will have a clear idea of what their plan is by your goals. With open lines of communication, this can blossom into a great business relationship that will help your entire brand with how they communicate with the outside world.
Create an Optimal Agreement and Price
If you hire someone to help you with your marketing, it is only fair to give them a great price and make sure that your agreement benefits everyone involved. For instance, if you have a social influencer helping you promote your restaurant, perhaps you occasionally give them discounts and free meals to promote to your customers. You might even pay them per post.
You might even pay them per post. In most cases, social media influencers can range from $250 to $750 per 1,000 engagements. However, the social media influencers you choose will have their own prices. Generally speaking, the minimum prices depend on the follower count. For those with less than 10,000 followers, you will likely pay $75 to $250 per post. If your influencer has up to 100,000 followers, you could be paying up to $500 minimum per post.
It is essential to treat your social influencers like they are employees of yours because they are! They are technically being contracted, and while they might not be obligated to come into your office every day to report to the boss, they still are working with you to help your company. Your small business is a tight-knit group of people anyways, which is why you should work to find an optimal agreement and make it worth their while to help you and your company.
Audit Your Process and Discover the Perfect Formula
Unfortunately, not every marketing strategy that you employ with your influencers is going to work. Fortunately, you have the potential to change this as needed to make it work for you! While working with your social influencer or even a few of them, you can find out what they notice, what they think would work, and fine-tune your process.
It is essential that you constantly revisit your plan, find out what works, and continue to find the best marketing strategy. Your customers will respond differently over time, even if you use the same ads and marketing tactics. For this reason, your social influencers and your marketing team should always be focused on providing explicit content and updating as needed to continue to excite and reach vital markets.
How Much Does it Cost to Get a Social Influencer?
This depends on the depth you put into their work and how much you expect from them. The most important thing is to work with your company, your marketing team, and your financial division to figure out what you can afford. You should always seek quality over quantity when it comes to influencers and marketing.
Social Influencers Are the Way of the Future
Traditional marketing is slowly dying out, and social influencers are the way to the future. If you want to reach your audience and even grow your consumer base, focus on partnering with individuals who have social influence and could make an agreement with you for the future.
Social influencing is the way of the future, and you could get ahead on this trend to help your small business take off in a way that will ensure your future success!