Business influencer marketing
By: Przemek Chojecki
Tags: Influencers, Small Business, Business, Influencer Marketing, Marketing

Business influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has been on the rise since the start of the 2010s with social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube dominating the communication channels worldwide. It was regarded at first as purely consumer platforms and businesses were reluctant to build their following.

However, with the rise of online celebrities, influencers, it became clear how massive audience can help boost sales and brand awareness. Brand deals became a great monetisation source for influencers advertising products and for brands raising their brand awareness and increasing sales. E-commerce and large international brands were especially eager to use influencers to promote their products as they had a clear ROI.

But about small businesses? Can small to mid-size businesses also partner with influencers? The answer is definitely yes, so let me tell you how to do it.

Business Influencer Marketing — a guide to influencer marketing for small businesses

4 Types of influencers

First of all, let’s start with discerning four types of influencers based on their following:

Nano influencers : below 10,000 followers;

: below 10,000 followers; Micro influencers : between 10,000 and 100,000 followers;

: between 10,000 and 100,000 followers; Macro influencers : between 100,000 and 1,000,000 followers;

: between 100,000 and 1,000,000 followers; Mega Influencers: over 1,000,000 followers.

This distinction is important because based on the category you should expect a different quote for the services and different audiences.

For small businesses looking at influencer marketing, you probably want to partner with a nano or micro influencer: someone who has a small but loyal following in a very well defined niche, that might consist of your potential customers. For example, if you’re selling hardware parts and servers, you want to find someone who’s regularly creating content directed at IT administrators. Your audience and his/her audience overlaps.

How expensive is influencer marketing for small businesses?

It also makes more sense financially working with smaller influencers. It’s hard to give a general quote for what to expect because everything depends on:

location (yours and influencer’s),

niche (how crowded it is, the more crowded the lower the rates for nano/micro),

experience (is it the first deal for the influencer)

and so on. However, already a budget of $1,000 should give you the possibility to collaborate on a couple of social media posts or shorter articles with nano influencers. You can also partner by offering your products for free, especially if they are more price (e.g. laptops for a review).

There are many opportunities and the best way to start is simply to ask an influencer whether he would like to work with you on your brand and whether he can give you a quote.

Looking for business influencers

If you’ve decided that you want to try influencer marketing for your business, the next step is to draft a list of potential influencers you might want to work with.

This part is usually pretty straightforward, because you’ll be looking for content that is easy to find and contact the authors of the content.

How to do it?

Let’s say you’re manufacturing a laptop for data scientists. You can start by googling ‘data science’, ‘data scientist’, ‘data science laptop’, ‘data science career’ and go through texts noting who has written them and whether you can contact some of the people (some will be working at larger enterprises). Then you can do the same thing on YouTube, writing down the names of channels that you might want to contact.

Additionally, you can use tools like KWFinder to see — based on keywords — what articles are popular in your niche.

After building the initial list of influencers, simply start writing to them asking whether they want to partner with your business and what they would propose.

In the end, influencer marketing for small business is simply one person endorsing another person’s product.

Potential collaboration

Finally, if your audience is in data science, machine learning or artificial intelligence-related niches, and you want to start with influencer marketing, write to me (for example on LinkedIn). I have over 10,000+ followers across multiple platforms including 4,000+ on Medium, 7,000+ on LinkedIn, and 5,000+ on YouTube.

I’ve done a couple of partnerships in the past and I’m generally interested in helping startups, small and medium tech businesses, get more exposure. Let me know what you’re looking for or simply write to me describing your product or service and I’ll try to help.