How can I use influencer marketing to grow my small business on a tight budget?

My bet is that we are about to see the best decade in the history of influencer marketing globally. It’s not dying, it’s just beginning.

Some companies are going from $0 to $15 million in sales using Instagram influencers (no overhead), so if you’re not using influencers, you need to start now.

Here’s my advice on how to use influencers to grow a business.

Creative Ways of Earning an Influencer’s Attention

You want an influencer’s audience to shop your product, but the problem is that when you’re not very far along in the journey as an entrepreneur, you’re not typically going to have a budget where you can afford to pay influencers, so that’s a real problem. That’s the chicken-and-the-egg scenario here.

That’s why, if you don’t have a budget, your only choice is to think very personally about creative ways of earning an influencer’s attention. You shouldn’t think about what’s in it for you, but what’s in it for them. For example, if I were following a male fitness influencer in New Jersey who loved the Jets football team, I would send him a custom Jets jersey (that I’d get made for them) that says something on it, that also includes my product in the package.

If you were following a woman in fashion who has a dog and what if you just sent her like a customized gift for her dog with your product in it. Obviously, kindness goes a very long way, especially early on.

It’s important to note that a lot of the things you do when you don’t have a lot of money, it’s more about building a good network or the right kind of connection. At the end of the day, influencers are human. They think like us and all of us want to do business with people we know and like.

To build that connection, the first step is to understand what social media platform has the influencers that you want to reach. What I mean by that is, it’s possible that the biggest audience may not be where they spend their time. Like an influencer might have their biggest audience on Instagram, but most of their time they’re on Twitter.

Second, what I want you to do is I want you to leave smart comments on their 5-15 most recent posts on whatever platform that they’re most active on.

So the way it’s set up is, what if every day, what if every new piece of content they put out there, you leave a smart comment on it. Never pitch an influencer until you’ve built some rapport. If someone says yes once every 80 times I ask them, then to land 20, I’m going to have to ask 1,600 people.

Check the Engagement

Some influencers are worth it, some are not. Many business owners do the same thing with influencers they would do with a billboard, they don’t check the engagement.

If you’re a company that’s only trying to sell a certain set of the audience, make sure the influencer fits that part of the audience. A lot of times people go down the influencer marketing path and they are selling sweater vests for Dads and they chose an influencer who has a massive audience of teenage girls.

Forget the big follower number. What matters is how engaged are they on their post? Take out one of their recent posts. Take the total amount of likes and divide it by the total amount of their followers. What you’re doing is taking the amount of engagement and viewing it as a percentage of their entire follower base.

Finally, actually look at the comments. A lot of “Sweet!!” comments look great, but at the end of the day, how many people are there really saying something interesting back?

And while the top level influencers still have a massive amount of clout, for example someone with over 30 million followers on social media, what’s happened is because a lot of us don’t have big budgets, we can’t afford that right? I think micro influencers become important. They cost way less and have a much higher percentage of their audience being invested. More to the point, a small influencer is somebody that really reaches a narrow audience that really cares about what they talk about.

So go after micro-influencers who reach your customer. One could blow up big and change your business, like Fashion Nova working with Cardi B before she got her record deal.

Just Test

There is no typical rate card for an influencer. There’s no single agreed way to track a campaign, either. Instead of debating price, just test. If you do something right and it produces a huge reaction, do it more.