Influencer marketing is not a possibility, but rather a necessity for modern companies. According to the report, almost half of all consumers depend on influencer recommendations, making it one of the most important tools of digital marketing.
However, another study reveals that two-thirds of businesses pay an average of $250 for sponsored posts on Instagram, while 27% spend up to $1,000 per announcement. This is a major issue for the vast majority of small businesses because they cannot afford to invest that much in influencer marketing.
That is exactly why small business owners need to be clever and find a way to work with influencers without bleeding money. We want to help you deal with this problem, so keep reading to learn eight ways how to hire an influencer without spending too much money.
The Benefits of Influencer Marketing for Small Businesses
If you are still wondering whether influencer marketing is the way to go for your business, we want to remind you of its numerous practical advantages. Some of the biggest benefits include:
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Trust building: Influencers are key opinion leaders and the audience believes their suggestions or recommendations. Therefore, the audience will trust influencers when they recommend your brand, products, or services.
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Relevance: A well-chosen influencer guarantees relevance because he/she targets highly specific audience groups.
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Educational content: Most users don’t trust advertising anymore. They demand quality and educational content, which comes in the form of influencer posts.
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Conversion potential: Influencers’ followers are loyal, so you can expect a lot of them to engage and convert into your customers.
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Traffic booster: Popular niche players will grant you additional exposure, giving your website a new wave of fresh visitors.
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Cost-efficiency: The last benefit on our list is the main idea of our article. Influencer marketing can be more productive and less expensive than other channels if you plan it properly.
Practical Tips to the Successful Influencer Marketing
Custom essay writers say: ”There are so many ways to organize and prepare an influencer marketing campaign, but not all of them will give you the same results budget-wise”. Here are eight proven methods to launch a successful campaign on a shoestring budget.
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Define Goals
You don’t want to launch an influencer campaign without defining business goals. What is it that you want to achieve? Is it to raise brand awareness or drive website traffic? Perhaps you want to earn more leads or generate conversions?
Answers to these questions will give you the basic idea on how to approach the whole project and how to plan the budget. For instance, you can choose to pay a small commission for every product sold through influencer campaign because it guarantees a substantial ROI.
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Analyze the target audience
A small business has to learn everything about its average customer: age, gender, location, education, personal income, and so on. That way, you will be able to search for an influencer who pretty much belongs to the same group and who has the highest odds of turning followers into consumers.
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Think about the style
Another way to maximize the efficiency of your campaign is to find a social influencer who perfectly suits the style of your average consumer. After all, you can’t expect a cheerful 17-year old schoolgirl to trust a highly rational 40-something male influencer. On the contrary, you need to find a person with whom the audience can relate to easily.
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Choose the right channels
Sometimes even the best influencers cannot generate the desired result because they don’t use the targeted channels of communication. Jake Hill, a digital marketer at the assignment help agency, gave us a good example: “An Instagram-focused influencer is worth nothing to B2B clients who target LinkedIn users and vice versa. To maximize cost-efficiency, you need to focus on the right communication channels only.”
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Beware of basic features
An ideal influencer candidate can fulfill each one of the four major requirements: niche, reach, engagement, and reputation. If you want the campaign to be profitable, you have to select an influencer who works in the same niche, reaches a substantial number of consumers, drives user engagement, and has a reputation that perfectly aligns with your brand.
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Micro-influencer marketing
A small business should not try to approach global audiences, but rather focus on a highly specific target group. Micro-influencers are the best way to achieve this goal because they build smaller groups of loyal followers.
A report shows that micro-influencers are able to generate 60% greater engagement than other campaigns. This happens because micro-influencers build a strong relationship with their audiences. At the same time, they are not celebrities, so you don’t need a huge budget to hire a micro-influencer.
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Pay with products or services
Paying with goods or services represents an excellent cost-reduction mechanism. Susan Black, a marketer from essay writing service, claims: ”If you are selling valuable products or services, you can offer it instead of money”. For example, you can offer influencers a lifetime license to use your software for free or organize a nice trip for influencers in the traveling niche. It’s a win-win solution for both parties since you get to save money, while the influencer receives a valuable product.
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Measure results
You can never estimate the productivity and cost-efficiency of your campaigns if you don’t measure results. Make sure to follow the objectives of your marketing strategy: traffic increase, lead generation, higher conversions, etc. Doing so, you will understand which tactics work well and which ones need to be eliminated from your influencer marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing has become one of the most important tools for business promotion in the last few years. However, hiring the right influencer is getting more and more expensive, so you need to figure out how to overcome the obstacle.
This post showed you eight ways a small business can work with influencers without bleeding money. Make sure to remember our tips and use them in your marketing strategy – it will help you reduce investments while taking advantage of this powerful marketing channel.
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