How to Reach Out to Influencers

Influencers have a powerful say—or, as the name implies, ‘influence’—over their followers. We tend to imitate what influencers look or do, what products they use, sometimes even subconsciously. And we are therefore more likely to trust a brand if our favorite celeb talks about it. 

However not everyone knows how to make the influencer marketing work well for their brand. This means you can easily fail if you don’t consider some very important points, especially at the stage of outreaching influencers. 

In this article I will share some useful tips and tested strategies for nailing your influencer outreach. 

Let’s jump into the meat of things: 

Pre-outreach is more important

If you think direct contacting is the most important stage of influencer marketing, you’re on the wrong track. 

Actually, a well-run pre-outreach stage solves many more problems than just contacting people.

Why?

Because the more time you spend on researching the market and learning about your influencers, the greater the chances of your success are.

Here are a few important steps you should consider before starting your current outreach.

Do market research

Researching the market thoroughly is the key to every successful marketing campaign, and influencer marketing is no exception. 

Before considering doing an influencer marketing and especially before influencer outreach you should first learn what the market trends are. When I first started doing influencer marketing I used to pay a little attention to the data and market research. Later, when I understood the importance of it I had already wasted my time on nonsense. That’s why I advise you to analyse market trends, gather information about your customers’ needs and preferences, find your competitors and explore everything about their marketing success and failures. 

Look through all the possible social media platforms to find out if there are any posts or reviews of that kind of product and how they performed. 

During your research try to concentrate on the number of views, likes, and comments. This will provide you a baseline for how influencer marketing might work for your product.

Identify the right influencers for your brand

Firstly, understand your product’s positioning, only then attempt to understand your target market. 

If your target market is local, then there is no need to find influencers from other countries. But if you want your brand to be identified internationally, you should discover which targeted countries will have the biggest effect.

For example, if your target market is the US, there’s no need to go after an influencer with a mostly-French audience. 

Then after finding the right location, the next step is to clear out who is your target audience, and in what niche your brand can fit most effectively. If your product is something related to fitness, find fitness influencers whose audience is interested in sports products. These steps will help you to move in the right direction. 

How to find Influencers?

When it comes to finding influencers for your brand, utilizing influencer marketplaces and influencer discovery tools can greatly streamline the process. These platforms act as a centralized hub, connecting brands with a wide range of influencers across various niches.

Influencer marketplaces, such as Viral Mango Platform, connect brands and influencers in one platform and allow you to find a lot of influencers who will apply to your campaign. ViralMango offers the advantage of convenience and access to a diverse pool of influencers.

On the other hand, influencer discovery and anlytics tools employ advanced algorithms to identify relevant influencers based on keywords, hashtags, and follower counts. These tools offer in-depth insights into an influencer’s performance metrics, audience demographics, and content quality. Although they may require a subscription or license, they provide valuable data for informed decision-making.

While influencer marketplaces and discovery tools offer efficiency, it’s essential to acknowledge their limitations. They may not capture all potential influencers in your niche, and some influencers may not be registered on these platforms. Therefore, it’s crucial to supplement your search by manually exploring social media platforms, engaging in community discussions, and monitoring industry events.

By leveraging the advantages of influencer marketplaces and discovery tools, along with manual research, you can identify the right influencers who align with your brand values, target audience, and niche. Remember, a thoughtful approach to influencer selection will lead to meaningful collaborations and maximize your brand’s impact.

Consider having shared values with influencers

Define the character of the influencer and imagine the content they would produce if they promote your product. Do you have shared values?  It will help you understand the right angle of outreaching them.

At first sight, you may think that an influencer has all the above-mentioned qualities and fits your brand perfectly, but if they don’t share your brand values can they present your product from the right angle?

When we were promoting a fitness product to encourage a healthy lifestyle, we were searching for influencers who had not positioned themselves within the typical weight-loss diets and exhausting gym training markets. 

We found an influencer who seemed like a great fit at first sight. Nonetheless, when we dived deeper into his page, we noticed that he’d mainly been propagating weight loss, so we understood that he could potentially cause harm to our brand instead of spreading awareness about it.  After properly analyzing his account we have decided not to promote our product on his account.

Find the right contact details

After researching and identifying your influencers, the next step is to find their contact details. This is the key of your success when trying to get amazing deals with influencers.

Some Instagram influencers add their contact addresses to their bio, but some influencers don’t because on Instagram business accounts there is a button where users can add their contact information. 

As for Facebook influencers, you can find their emails in the “About” section.

Youtube influencers’ contacts are also available in the “About” section. If not, there are usually website links in those sections, and you can find the contact information on their websites. 

Get your influencers to learn more about your brand 

Let them notice you before outreaching for a collaboration.

During this preparation stage of your influencer marketing campaign and before influencer outreach, try to determine as fast as possible which influencers you want to work with, so you can start following them on social media platforms right away. 

In the case of Instagram influencers, you can turn on notifications for their accounts and be among the first ones to see and react to their posts and stories. 

Engage with their posts intensively, so they can see that you are really interested in what they are passionate about creating. You can also comment on their older posts.

When done on a regular basis, it can be a super-effective strategy for making influencers notice your activities on their accounts, and thereby, you pave a way to start negotiations for your campaign.

 

Avoid spam

It is very risky to do bulk messaging because there is a high chance that you will appear in your influencers’ spam folders. 

To avoid this, I suggest you whitelist the email you are going to use while outreaching. It is preferable that you start whitelisting your mail at least a month before your influencer outreach. 

If you don’t have enough contacts, you can ask your friends for help. Ask for their emails and send them a message like this.

It’s current outreach time

1. Craft your perfect pitch:

To make your pitch catchy for influencers, try to pay attention to these 3 points.

Personalize your message. 

Try to be as specific as possible from your very first pitch, so the influencer will understand why you have outreached and what expectations you have from them. 

To create a perfect pitch, always personalize your message. It is a very important step as it increases your chances to be answered. When you showcase a personalized approach to influencers, from their psychological point of view it makes them understand that you didn’t just do bulk messaging but you have researched about them, and you are informed about their lifestyle, favorite things, etc.

Make influencers feel special. You can add some specific expressions in your messages. For example the ones you have noticed on the captions of their social media accounts, the ones they use most of the time. Another variant of making them feel special is to write something unique about their accounts or blogs. You may ask how can you find out unique things about them? The answer is very simple. Believe me,  if you do proper research and look through your target influencer’s post and stories you may notice something very special even at first sight. 

Highlight the influencer’s benefits. 

When conducting an influencer outreach, always try to set out their benefits first. What will they get from that collaboration? Why do they have to promote your brand? 

Sometimes when this part is unclear for the influencer, chances are high that they will not get back to you, even if you follow them up for 3 times.

Pay special attention to your calls-to-action.

The right call-to-action is also of key importance when outreaching influencers. 

Whenever writing to an influencer, don’t forget to conclude your pitch with a question they can neither skip nor answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For example, your message may finish by saying “We can set up a call this week to discuss the possible collaboration that will bring value to both of us. Shoot me an email if you are interested” 

2. Contacting via Email and/or Direct Messaging 

As we all know the most popular way of doing outreach is via email. Here are 2 of my favorite tools I use for outreaching by email.

Influencer outreach via email

Streak is a very good tool which helps you to bulk message, and makes it simple to manage your everyday email workflow. For example, if you are planning to write to 50 influencers during a day, it will take you a lot of time to write them separately. Streak is a good solution to automate this process. 

Via Streak, you can create pipelines with the list of influencers you want, snippet your pitches and what is more important, you can track whether your messages are being opened or responded to, directly within each email. 

So you don’t have to go open Streak every time you want to see your open rate. 

When you enable Streak on your email, you see an “Eye” on the right side of your mail. If it is green, then your email has been opened. You can even check on how many times and from where your email has been viewed.

Mailshake is one of the best tools for email outreach. It helps to automate everything you do manually. 

Mailshake’s biggest advantage is that it not only allows you to automate your first pitch but also add up to 4 follow-ups and schedule them on the days you want. After you receive a reply from your outreach or follow up, it counts the contact as a lead and stops sending further follow-ups, so you can take care of the rest showing a personalized approach to every influencer that replies. You only need to schedule everything and wait for it to work.

How to message influencers on Instagram?

As we know outreach via email is always preferable, and it highlights your professional approach to influencers, but sometimes influencers don’t get back to you even after 3 follow-ups. 

The next step you can take to make them answer is to send them a direct message on Instagram. In contrast to emails DM messages should be short and more to the point.

Try to be laconic in your message, and add a good call-to-action.

Be Professional

Always remember that 90% of your campaign success depends only on you and your professionalism. 

Be clear with yourself, do thorough research, understand your objectives and goals.  Approach properly to each influencer as they have different personalities and the same approach to everyone can fail everything you seek to gain. Negotiate wisely to take your marketing campaigns to the new heights. 

Stay tuned for more tips to smash your campaigns.