An essential step in any influencer marketing campaign is appropriate and effective outreach. Influencer outreach is essential in running a successful campaign, so avoid the following common mistakes:

1. Reaching out through the wrong platform

It is important to reach out to potential influencer partners on the right channel – the best contact method is often simply through email. Though social media is the popular choice for other types of communication, email is more demanding of response and makes the conversation easier to track and reference later. Social media can be cluttered for this kind of business conversation, but useful for sending a message pre-pitch to ask how best to get in touch about your idea. It is also always safe to go through the business account, not personal accounts.

2. Not having clear campaign objectives

Establishing your campaign objectives is essential in building the foundation for the rest of the project. Depending on what you hope to gain specifically from this campaign, you will need to use the appropriate channel (i.e. social media platform) and at the same time the right influencer.

A social media influencer will have their own personal strengths, which you will need to be aware of and select them according to whether these things will help you in reaching your campaign goals. Communicate these goals with your influencers so everyone is on the same page and the campaign will be more successful.

3. Picking the wrong influencer

Having a clear list of criteria for finding the perfect influencer to head your campaign is vital, as well as knowing how these requirements are prioritized.

It is important to remember that an influencer’s number of followers isn’t everything – audience engagement is another influential factor to consider. Small, niche followings can be just as valuable as larger, mainstream audiences, even more so, if chosen and applied effectively. Daniel Hardison, a business writer at Ukwritings and Academized, says: “These things contribute to creating a presence that will drive sales and promote brand visibility.”

Thorough research and clear goals are both crucial in this stage of the process – you need to ensure your values align and that you have the same or at least overlapping audiences.

4. Writing a generic, long-winded, or just bad pitch

When it comes to writing your pitch, use personal details and specific connections between the brand and the influencer to make it more effective. Never use the same template for multiple pitches, or, even worse, send the same pitch as a mass email.

Also, remember that the pitch is just that – it isn’t your entire plan and doesn’t need to include every detail about your business, it is simply the hook. Be concise and try to get to the point quickly. Communicate the vital information clearly, the basics, and include the next step you would like to take.

Wayne Smith, a communication manager at Boomessays and Bigassignments, says: “Framing is everything: you want to pitch an offer to them, like you are doing something for them, rather than asking them to do something for you. Your pitch needs to sound like a unique opportunity that will benefit them as well as you.”

5. Taking things too personally

When it comes to getting turned down, it is important not to take things personally. The influencer could have any number of reasons for declining your offer, most of which have nothing to do with you, your brand, or even your campaign pitch. If their response is lacking in details or reasons, it may be reasonable to enquire as to why they chose to decline and whether they are giving you a hard no or just a ‘not right now’. Of course, this shouldn’t ever come across as a bitter plea, begging to know why they rejected you – instead, make sure you frame this line of questioning as constructive advice to help you with future pitches.

Finding the right influencer for your marketing campaign can make all the difference when it comes to building your brand image and audience and increasing sales. So, it is extremely important to ensure your outreach is perfect!

In an era of social media, having knowledge about how to find the right influencers who can help you to introduce your products to your ideal audience is the best way for generating sales. It is very rewarding to put your time in building a bond with high-quality influencers and getting their help in building your community. 

If you can’t keep up with this latest trend in digital marketing, you sure are going to lose some shares in the market against your competitors. Therefore, you should be agile to find the best influencer for your brand before your competitors do. There are multiple tips and tools to find the most relevant influencers. Some of them can be very time consuming and ineffective. So, here are some most useful tips and tools for you which you will need for audience building, increase your social following and getting more shares in the market.

Social media

Be aware that there are already some people who talk about your product or products that are complements or substitutes for your product. Posts or social media mentions about those products can lead you to these people.

Thanks to social media monitoring or listening tools, you can easily find who is a fan of your product or similar products. Mention and Google Alerts can be a great example of these tools, where you can easily track mentions of your brand or product. Once you find those influencers, take your time to get more knowledge about their engagement rate, demographics or reach. If they are suitable in every way, then contact them in the most proper way in order to get their attention.

Hashtags

Hashtags are great because they make the content very obtainable. Almost every social media have hashtags to make the content very achievable for everyone. Also, people, really like to use hashtags in their post which make them even more obtainable. 

You can either search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand or you can search for hashtags like #ad #influencer #sponsored in order to see who is already interested in promoting products. If you are going to search for hashtags that are relevant to your brand, try to be specific, so you can get better results and save your time.

Once you liked someone’s content, do not jump into connecting with them. Review particular metrics that are important to you – check if their audience is ideal for you, assess their engagement level, and see if their other post is also relevant to your brand. When everything is okay, then do not forget to add the influencer to your list in order not to forget about them and keep your bound with them. It is very necessary for turning them into brand advocates.

Advanced search tools

Some social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin have advanced search tools. This is very time-saving as you can dive deeper faster. 

Search for the topic that you are interested in. Once the search results come out, you will have the chance to use filters for people. You will have several filters like location, industry, company, business type and so on. Choose the filter that you need and the search will give you the results that are very close to your need. 

The aim is to reduce the number of results and retain only the most relevant and needed ones. The advanced search tools can give you very specific information and also you can easily contact the influencer through used social media.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

If you want to skip all the steps above, you can use influencer marketing platforms that do everything for you. Keepface Influencer Marketing Platform can be an example of such kind of platforms. It introduces you to its database of influencers with their social media profiles, performance data, audience analysis, and special insights. 

You can get to know the location (country, state, city), demographics (gender, age), score and ranking of each influencer. It also provides you with top-performing posts, estimated impressions, posting frequency and followers growth of the influencer. 

With the Audience analysis tool, you can get valuable information like demographics, languages, ethnicity, interests of audiences. You can also benefit from a special insight that tells you about influencer media value, similar influencers by content and audience, as well as, fake followers. It is a very user-friendly and all-in-one platform. 

You can easily register as a brand, create your own projects, find influencers for these projects from a wide range of influencer database and get the creative help of an in-house project team for briefing the influencers. 

It’s the fastest way of finding the most ideal influencers for your brand 

All the tools above can be very helpful and effective if you use them in the right way. You can try them and choose the most appropriate and effective one for yourself. But do not forget that if you want to add influencer marketing to your strategy then you better learn how to use Influencer Marketing Platforms because they are the most time-saving and cost-effective way. 

Also, bear in mind that these influencers are getting various offers from different companies. Therefore, you should come with the best offer in order to get their attention. Once you find the fitting influencers for your project that would be a huge mistake to lose contact with them when the project ends. The more you build closer relations with them, the more they will be willing to promote your product.