Guerilla marketing - Influencer collaboration strategy
Is your brand on a limited budget and need to stretch every dollar?
Here is a quick tip on how to work with influencers for free or little cost
But first a video to show you how powerful working with an influencer can be this is...
(Original video credit: @therealstanym & @dominikborsellino)
In the video, they made a premium brand with a low quality, but still delicious, product (microwave ramen) but gave it a luxury perception by working with influencers to create hype around their brand. As well as staging it nicely.
Now he paid them and you absolutely can do that, if you have the budget collaborations are usually relatively cheap averaging $200-500 per collaboration.
If you think that's on the expensive, let me remind you of the video and how quickly he got an ROI by investing in the collaborations.
BUT...
If you're looking for a free or low cost way to dip your toes in, let me give you a strategy to set this up for free or at little cost. Let me tell you a story that outlines my strategy.
When I was running my former blog, I was working on a topic that the community had a lot of questions around. So I created a post and a paragraph with my answer to one of the questions.
Then I reached out to the influencers in the space with 10-50k followers. I told them I was working on an article on this certain topic and would like their input on it. I asked them to write a short answer of 4 sentences or less and gave them a couple of the questions to choose from.
Note: I DID offer to pay all of them but all of them submitted responses for free. I also offered to link to their website or Instagram page.
I reached out to 10 people and got responses from three. I added mine in for 4 total and then those that submitted responses I'd ask if they would share it on their page. They did and we all launched it live.
I watched as the views climbed, I almost couldn't stop refreshing my site.
In the first hour it had out performed every single article on my site. Even those I had put some budget behind to promote.
It is still to this day one of my best performing blog posts of all time in terms of traffic and visits.
Why did this work so well?
1. Cross promotion, I offered to promote them on my website for free along with other people of influence in the space
2. Offered payment, I know their time is valuable, everyone's is. So that's why I offered to compensate them. Offer this and actually mean it. Even if they require compensation, you may be surprised at how little it is for a small task. Especially for something that helps the community they also serve.
3. I had been following them for a while (slightly familiar) - and had brought up specific content of theirs that I liked and was sincere about it. Because I actually did like their content.
So how can you do this?
Personalize a short message for each individual influencer you reach out to. It's okay to use an outline but customize the message for everyone separate.
Show interest in them and bring up at least 1 specific post that you enjoyed. Ideally closest to the content you're trying to create.
Offer to pay them for their time.
Once you get one yes, use it to provide social proof for other influencers.
Keep it casual and simple.
An example outline of this would be:
Hey, (influencer name)
I really liked your post today/other day on (specific post), (benefit you got from it)
I'm putting together a post/video/article on (topic) because it looks like a lot of people in our community have questions around it.
I wanted to know if you would be interested in giving your take on (topic). It's only a few sentences/short reel that we plan to go live on (date)
We've already got responses from
Influencer 1, Influencer 2, Influencer 3
and would like your input on it.
I know your time is valuable so if need be we can discuss compensation for you response. Have a great day, keep the great content coming
(your name)
I hope this article has been helpful to you.
And if you need further help reaching out to influencers, text us at 585-502-7980 or submit a form through our contact page and lets set up a time to chat on getting you set up with collaborations.