‘People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.‘

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

People talk a lot about influencer marketing and usually make a mess of it. That’s primarily down to one big error.

They target influencers to high up the ladder.

Picture a ladder with 20 steps on it. You’re starting off so you’re on step 1 the influencer who’s going to come up first on your Google search is going to be on step 20.

They’ve spent years building that influence, and they’re not going to risk it on someone they’ve never met or dealt with, would you.

Say that influencer pushed a big giveaway out to their network from someone they didn’t know who turned out to be a spammer. Boom, all those years of hard work gone.

In this post you’re going to learn the following:

• Why influencer marketing
• Why influencers to high up the ladder won’t deal with you
• How to find influencers in your space
• How to find influencers closer to your level
• Spreadsheet & Video showing you how to score influencers to see what level they’re at.

Don’t waste your time with poor influencer outreach? Yes, read on.

We wanted to reach small businesses in the US market. There are a number of things you can do to get access to an influencers network. This time we wanted to run a Giveaway campaign. There are three things every giveaway should contain.

1. Giveaway is highly desirable – A product that influencers audience will want.
2. Giveaway is shocking – Something that’s out of the ordinary.
3. Giveaway is authority leaching – It carries the weight of an influencer.

We picked a free decade of the Teachable platform $6k (shocking). Teachable is a tool used heavily by mompreneurs the audience we were looking to reach (highly desirable). Teachable offered unpublished content (authority leaching) in the offer and I put in a 1-hour 1-2-1 session.

All in all the giveaway was worth over $6k. So a great giveaway that scored well on all three points.

Giveaway boxed up. Next step lets get some influencers to share it out. We had no relationships in the US market so we were starting from scratch.

Mistake One: Every search I did brought up the same names, Pat Flynn Passive Income, Tony Robinson, Tim Ferriss

I thought well if they’re the influencers then they must be the people I’ve to target. So I opened up a spreadsheet and started to populate it with their contact email address, bio, social media stats etc. These influencers were just too far up the ladder for me, so this was a waste of time.

Mistake Two: I sent them an outbound email with an ask straight up. The ask was a light ask to share my giveaway that I had packaged in a pre-populated ‘tweet this’ link. So, they don’t know me and I’m asking them to do something. Stupid right.

How did I know this was a mistake because after emailing 150 people on my list and mentioning them with over 400 mention tweets I got 1 response to say no thanks and about 3 retweets. That was two weeks full-time work for two people, so a months work if you were on your own.

Takeaways:

• Buy this giveaway software from King Sumo if you want to run giveaways
• Score your giveaway against those 3 bullet points
• Build relationships first

Influencer marketing in a nutshell: Find leaders with a list (bigger than yours) of people in the niche you’re looking to target. You give that influencer something for their audience that allows them to provide value to them or something that helps them promote themselves to their list. If they’ve released a book buy 20 copies and run a giveaway so they can give their audience free copies of their own book. They’re usually busy so to get access to their audience a social share is a low friction way to get to their audience, you can use products like ‘Click To Tweet’ to do that. Ideally, you want them to send a mail to their audience. That’s the ideal situation but you’re going to want to have a good relationship with them before asking that. That email list is everything to them.

Takeaways:

• Always try and make it low friction
• Don’t start with an ask, build a relationship first
• Get a list of 30 influencers in your niche, that’s enough to manage

Think about it, you’re starting with zero subscribers/customers. Over the years have worked hard to build a list of 20-40-100,000 subscribers. They too had to build relationships with influencers and do a lot of giving before asking for help. They, like you, are only interested in stepping up the ladder not stepping down. These two points will be on their mind when you go for the ask. Are you bringing value to their audience? Are you bringing risk to their audience? If you’re starting from scratch you only offer one thing, and that’s risk. A risk that if they promote you you’ll spam their audience. A risk that your product will be crap. A risk that your service will be crap. Risk you won’t deliver

If the top influencers are on step 10 of the ladder, and you’re on step 1, that gap is too big and the risk too high. Would you risk it?

Takeaways:

• Be mindful of that risk you can bring and the anxiety they’ll feel.

Finding the influencers is easy, they’ve been working pretty hard on being found. So do a search for “industry round-up posts’, there is full strategy list for finding influencers from Bryan at Video Fruit Look to see do they do podcasts or youtube interviews. Look at the people they’re interviewing. Look at who they talk to you in Twitonomy

Take about 5 and score them using the below strategy before you spend all day building our details to find out they’re too far out of reach.

Takeaways:

• Test with 5 to get a feel for where you are
• Put the time into this it will save you in the long run

If you’re on step 1 of the influencer ladder what you need to do is find influencers on step 2 or 3. Your not such a risk to them, as they’re more open to building a relationship then the top influencers and aren’t getting the attention they are. Run some campaigns with step 2-3 influencers and you’ll go from step one to step 3. Maybe an influencer on step 5 was interviewed on a step 3 influencer podcast when they were starting out. If you get interviewed with that step 3 podcast you can leverage it. That step 5 influencer will have a relationship (trust) with the person on step 3 that interviewed them on the same podcast as you were interviewed on. Now you’ve got something in common, de-risking them.

Repeat the process with influencers on step 4, 5, 6, till your an 8. Then leveraging your previous relationships to de-risk yourself and put them at ease. Repeat and repeat.

Takeaways:

• Find influencers closer to you on the ladder
• Use one to move sideways and then up

If you have any further questions on influencer marketing or using this influencer scorecard please put it in the comments below. They’ll all get answered by me. Thanks again