How to Leverage Social Influencers and Win Customers

Everyone from startups to top brands have started working with influencers to draw in more customers. Tomoson reports that not only is influencer marketing the fastest growing customer acquisition channel, it’s also the most cost-effective. And 51% of marketers claim to acquire better customers with the help of influencers.

If you’re looking for new ways to acquire valuable customers for your business, it may be a good idea to start working with influencers.

Here are some crucial tips that will help you leverage influencers to win your target customers.

Find the Right Influencers to Work With

There’s nothing more important than finding the right influencers to work with if you’re going to execute an influencer marketing campaign. This is where most marketers struggle with. Econsultancy found that identifying the right influencers is the biggest influencer marketing challenge.

The key to finding the right influencers lies in defining an ideal influencer and using the right tools to look for them. When identifying your ideal influencer, think about your campaign goals and make a list of the characteristics an influencer should possess to help you achieve those goals. This will help you understand how to select only the most relevant influencers out of hundreds of potential ones.

As for the right influencer marketing tools, that are several effective options. HYPR is an excellent tool as it gives you insights into the influencer’s audience demographics in addition to the usual stats like follower count. So you can use it to identify the best influencers whose audience shares the same interests as your target audience.

There’s also Onalytica, which will let you conduct your influencer search based on a number of aspects. You can use it to look for the right influencers based on their category, topic, audience demographic, or content. NeoReach is another great option, as it helps you discover the influencer’s audience demographic along with the brands they’ve worked with.

Execute Campaigns to Meet Your Goals

Just because you liked what your competitors did with influencers doesn’t mean you should copy that specific campaign. And just because a big brand has succeeded with a certain campaign doesn’t mean you should try it out too. Your choice of campaign is just as important as your choice of influencers if you need your campaign to be a success.

In this case, since you want to win customers through influencer marketing you should execute campaigns that are sure to win you new customers. Here are a few ideas:

1. Giveaway Contests

Giveaway contests are an excellent way to draw a crowd and win a new audience over. The chance to win something for free could compel a lot of people to pay attention to your brand. And when an influencer hosts the contest, it gives you more leverage as you’ll be reaching an entirely new audience.

Mommy influencer Katie Stauffer, for example, helped promote kids’ clothing brand Pink Chicken NY through a giveaway contest. The winner will get shop credit worth $400, which is an excellent way to get new customers acquainted with the brand’s products.

To participate, users have to follow both the influencer and the brand on Instagram in addition to tagging three or more of their friends in the comments. This is an excellent opportunity for the influencer and the brand to be introduced to new people. And it could also help them gain new followers.

2. Brand Ambassador Programs

Turn your best customers and biggest fans into ambassadors for your brand so they can have more reason to portray your brand positively and help you raise more brand awareness. But leverage this program further by looking for influencers who are already big fans of your brand so you can turn them into brand ambassadors.

For this to work, you need to build an entire community of influential brand ambassadors instead of just working with a couple of them. You can use the host of social listening tools from Mention to track conversations about your brand and identify your biggest advocates. These tools also let you filter out the most important mentions, which will help you identify influential users who are stirring up a conversation about your brand.

Brands like Glossier have experienced explosive growth with the help of an army of influential brand ambassadors, whom they call Glossier Girls. These Glossier Girls also have a chance to earn from their promotions as they each have a unique URL, which their followers can use to get 20% off on their first purchase. Here’s an example of a post showcasing Glossier products by Helena, a micro-influential brand representative.

3. Honest Reviews

And of course, your campaign wouldn’t be complete without a series of honest reviews from relevant influencers. Reviews work well especially if the product is fairly new or you’re a startup. At this point, most of your target audience won’t have heard about you or won’t trust the product enough to spend their money on it. So it’s crucial that you make a compelling case with the help of influencers they trust.

It’s clear from the Twitter and Annalect study that consumers have almost the same level of trust in influencers as they do in their friends. So having these influencers give their honest opinion about your products or sharing their experience with your service can help you win over new customers.

Huawei, for instance, sent their new P10 smartphone to Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy before it even launched. The YouTuber shared a unique unboxing experience with his fans and reviewed the phone in detail. This video has been viewed more than 4 million times and has received 85,000 likes.

Keep Track of Your Performance

Finally, don’t just sit and wait for the results to show after you’ve executed your campaign. You still need to see how well the campaign is performing so you can understand what else needs to be done. Track the traffic coming from the influencers’ content and see how well the content is garnering attention on social media.

And make sure you track the conversions driven by influencers. This will help you gain insights about what your campaign is lacking and if you need to make any improvements.

Now that you have a clear idea how to leverage influencers, all you need to do is start planning your campaign and looking for influencers to work with.

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant that specializes in sales funnels, targeted traffic and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.