How to get Influencers to Promote your Brand or Product

Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash

The power of the influencer is as strong as ever. Influencer marketing has gone from strength to strength over the last decade, with brands and businesses seeing the lucrative results that can come from partnering with authentic creators with engaged audiences.

It’s a ‘human’ approach to marketing and promoting products, giving it a level of realness that marketing straight from a brand’s proverbial mouth can never fully achieve.

The influencer effect

A study in 2018 revealed that influencer marketing was considered effective by 92% of the respondents. 86% of the respondents were also willing to dedicate a specific budget for their influencer marketing campaigns.

That’s a huge chunk of people — and from my own experience on both sides of influencer marketing, I can understand why so many marketers and business owners wish to allocate their budget to content creators.

As a fashion influencer on Instagram with more than 35,000 followers, I regularly work with brands. I feature items of their clothing either on a gifted basis (where I post in exchange for free clothing), or on a paid basis (where they pay me to create content for them to use across their marketing channels, and I post that content on my Instagram account).

As an influencer, I deeply understand my audience and have conversations with them on a daily basis. I know what they resonate with, I can preempt the questions they’ll ask, and I know what information they’ll find useful when it comes to the products I promote (in my case, that’s usually around fit and sizing).

So when it comes to working with brands, I have a wealth of information at my fingertips and I know how I can get best work with that brand so both parties get the results they’re looking for, without sacrificing on quality or value for my audience.

I’ve worked on the other side of influencer marketing too. Over the past 10 years of my career, I’ve worked in content marketing roles for fashion and beauty brands and retailers, and a big part of that has involved working with influencers.

Why you should work with influencers

Here are just a few of the many benefits to working with influencers:

1. They have a ready-made audience and if their engagement is strong, they’re almost guaranteed to get good results when featuring your brand.
2. Not only are they promoting your brand, but the nature of social media means they’re creating content that you could potentially use for your own channels, which helps with the content creation side of things too.
3. A good influencer will give you feedback on your brand or product. I get a lot of DMs and comments from my audience whenever I post. They ask questions or tell me what they like about the look of a product, and that firsthand feedback from your target audience can be invaluable to a brand as they look to grow or improve things for their customers.
4. You can easily track the results of your collaboration, helping you determine whether influencer marketing is the right approach for you (or whether that particular influencer works for your brand). Following your collaboration, you can ask the influencer for a breakdown of results. Ask for screenshots of their insights from that post, so you can see how many likes, comments and saves it received. You can also give them a custom URL with a trackable link — if they share this in their Instagram Stories, you can see exactly how many visits you got from them to your website. (If you want this level of insights, you’ll probably have to make your collaboration a paid one, as it requires more work for the influencer).

Choosing influencers to work with

So, you’ve decided you want to give influencer marketing a try. Now what? Firstly, identify who you’d like to work with. Spend time on your social media platform of choice (Instagram, TikTok etc.) and see which creators are popping up on your feed or explore page, who’s tagging you already (which means they’re already a fan), and who your competitors are working with (or who’s tagging similar brands to yours).

Follower count is important to a degree but it’s not the be all and end all. Making sure that the influencer is authentic and a natural brand fit is more important — as is their engagement rate.

You can use platforms such as Phlanx to see what an influencer’s average engagement rate is. Ideally, you want this to be between 1% and 5% but the higher the following, the harder it is to achieve this rate, so bear that in mind.

Use your common sense when reviewing an influencer’s account. If they have 70,000 followers but they’re averaging 200 likes and a handful of comments, chances are their following isn’t engaged and your brand account won’t see much of an uplift, or your website won’t get much traffic. If another account has 30,000 followers and they’re averaging 2,000 likes and around 30 comments, that’s a good indication that their audience is engaged and will become genuinely invested in your brand.

You’ll also want to check that their values are aligned with yours as a brand. If sustainability is important to you, for example, then make sure it is to them too — and that they’re not promoting throwaway, low quality clothing.

Next, consider your budget. Generally, the accounts with high followings will only accept paid collaborations so if you want to test gifting only (i.e. giving the influencer free product in exhange for a post), you may need to work with micro influencers (around 10,000–20,000 followers). That’s no bad thing, as these kinds of accounts tend to have a very engaged following.

If you do wish to work with accounts that have bigger audiences, you’ll need to set some budget aside. There’s no real standardisation when it comes to influencer rates so this can be a bit of a grey area. A recent (2023) report by SevenSix Agency has a good breakdown of what you should expect to pay depending on an account’s following. You can download that report for free here.

How to build relationships with influencers

So you’ve got your list of ideal influencers you’d like to work with, now you need to establish a relationship so they’d like to work with you. If an influencer has a large following and an active account, chances are they’re getting messages and email from various brands on a daily basis asking to work with them.

If that influencer is authentic, they’ll probably only be accepting a handful of those offers. Building a good relationship is so important in this respect.

As an influencer, I’ve had brands reach out to me who don’t follow me and have never engaged in my content, and send me copy and paste emails that shows me they haven’t really thought about who they’re working with — and they just want someone to say yes.

When you email an influencer about a collaboration, make that email personal. Why do you want to work with them? What is it about their account that you like and how do your brand values align with theirs? How exactly do you want to work with them? Be timely in your responses too. I’ve had instances when a brand has reached out and I’ve replied, only to have them leaving me waiting for weeks for them to confirm. This can often leave the impression that you’re unorganised, or that this collaboration isn’t that important to you.

Test and learn

Not every collaboration you do with an influencer will meet expectations. Some collaborations will flop, some will exceed. That’s all part of the process. Test a few things out, see what works for you and the people you partner with. Keep reports of the activity you’ve done and the results you’ve seen and continuously review your influencer marketing strategy to refine it and get the most out of the work you’re putting in.

Parts of this article are taken from my book, ‘Making Content Work: Tips, tools and templates for your brand or business’. Available now on Amazon, in paperback or Kindle.