Tips To Effectively Reach Out To Influencers

After identifying the relevant influencers for your project the next thing is to reach out to them, but how you are going to do that? Brands can reach out to creators through DM or by sending them e-mails to send the campaign invitation. It might sound easy but you need some solid strategy and planning to reach out to your influencers effectively. Without a plan, both sending DMs and firing e-mails will be nothing but merely time-consuming.

How you target influencers is critical to the success of your campaign. You need to become an expert at crafting the perfect message while managing massive reach and tracking responses and follow-ups. If you start reaching out to influencers without a plan, you'll quickly get lost in your spreadsheet and far behind your timeline.

However, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by following this step-by-step guide. This article discusses the best strategies for reaching influencers. From building your influencer list, choosing your outreach method, to follow-up and negotiation tips, we've got you covered.

Establishing an Influencer Outreach Strategy

Influencer outreach is not a panacea. You may want to focus on reaching out to a few prominent influencers, opinion leaders, or celebrities. Or maybe you're ready to scale up. In this case, many influencers should be invited to your influencer program at the same time. Why not launch a Brand Ambassador Program for your most influential VIP clients? All of these scenarios require different approaches to reach out to influencers.

Please prepare answers to the following questions so that you can determine how to plan your outreach to influencers.

• Do you use spreadsheets and manual documents or influencer marketing software?
• How many influencers do you need for this campaign?
• What influencers do you contact?
• Are they all from the same niche or social channel?
• Do influencers already know my brand or product?
• Are influencers represented by an agency?

Your answers will help in deciding how to organize your mission. If you're looking to expand your influencer program, we recommend investing in time-saving and technology-driven influencer marketing platform like InfluGlue. On the other hand, if you just want to hire a few influencers to test your potential, a manual approach might work for you. The scope of your influencer recruitment will decide the tools and strategies you need.

Important Tip: In general, we recommend contacting 5 times the number of influencers you want to work with in order to get enough positive feedback for your campaign.

Prepare Your Influencer List

You have completed the important task of determining how many influencers you need for your campaign. But now you need to prepare the final list of influencers. When you search for influencers using influencer platforms like InfluGlue, you may find thousands of influencer profiles that match your search criteria. You can't reach everyone, so start by narrowing down your most valuable influencers. You should analyze your influencer audience, fake follower count, feed content, and performance metrics to choose creators who are best positioned to reach your audience.

For example, InfluGlue will help you create multiple lists of influencers that you can export and share with your team. Plus, the influencer's contact information is already in their profile, so you don't have to spend time researching it.  Our experts will help you with onboarding and once you have compiled a shortlist of influencers, including important details such as social media handles, names and contact information, you can decide how to contact them. Not only that if you want our team can handle that too! We will approach the influencers with your proposals and collect their response to executing the campaign. We are ready to take the load off you, what can be better than this?

Choose How To Reach Influencers

There are multiple ways to reach influencers, depending on your budget, resources, and the number of influencers you need to reach. Review the positive and negative points of each method to decide method is best suitable for your business.

Social Media Direct Message (DM)

Pros: Creators check social media frequently, so there is higher chance of them this message. It's friendly, easy and relatively quick to do.

Cons: Not all platforms allow you to interact directly with creators who do not follow or subscribe to your channel. Messages must be sent manually, one by one, and there is no way to streamline the process.

E-mail

Pros: You can bundle e-mails and send several at once.

Cons: However, it is very difficult to organize and track all individual replies in your inbox or spreadsheet. Managing this manually takes a lot of time.  

Influencer Marketing Software

Pros: Tools like InfluGlue offer advanced email automation. This means you can send personalized outreach emails at scale with editable merge fields. With one dashboard, you can track who opened and responded to your emails and streamline all your communications in one place.

Cons: You need to budget for the costs associated with the influencer marketing software.

Preparing Your Campaign Invitation Message

The next step is to create your first outreach message. This is an invitation to participate in the campaign. Your initial message is important because it should stand out from all other campaign invitations your influencer receives. The purpose of the first email is to showcase your brand, product or campaign while making a compelling value proposition for influencers. She only gets one chance to get them on board, so you'll need to take your time crafting the perfect message.

Here are some key tips for crafting effective outreach messages.

• Showcase your brand and show exactly how your brand assets and products align with your influencer's content.
• Highlight a specific post or campaign you like and be specific about why! Personalization improves response rate by 32.7%.
• Briefly and clearly state the expectations of the campaign (so authors will know immediately if the campaign is capable of being adopted).
• Offer up-front rewards such as free products, flat fees, or the opportunity to earn affiliate commissions.
• Include useful links such as the brand's website and social media profiles so the influencer can easily learn about your online girlfriend's presence.
• Don't forget to include your contact information so we know who to contact if you have any questions.
• Add a clear CTA at the end. Do you want them to respond to your email? Do they need to fill out an online form? Be clear about what your next steps are.

Influencer follow-up

If you don't get positive responses as expected, it's a good idea to send a follow-up email. Wait a few days, then message influencers you haven't heard from to see if they're interested in joining your campaign. Remember to spend time with influencers who are relevant to your priority list and most valuable to your brand. Keep follow-ups short and friendly. You can try catchy subject lines to encourage more influencers to open your email. Deadlines can also be set at this stage, so influencers know how long they have to make up their minds.

Handpicked related content:
5 Influencer Marketing Hacks Brands Needs To Know In 2023 

8 Influencer Marketing Tips For Food Brands and Restaurants 

Closing thoughts

Now that you know what steps should be followed to ensure maximum success in influencer outreach you are all set to begin. Connect with InfluGlue, the leading influencer marketing company in Canada to get professional help with your influencer marketing campaigns. From creating a strategy, finalising influencers, reaching out to them, executing the campaign, to monitoring and collecting the campaign metrics - we have you covered!

To know more about the influencer marketing services and packages of InfluGlue connect with the team now!