How Partnering with Influencers Can Help Your Start-Up

Learn how to build and nurture influencer partnerships that you can leverage to grow your presence and brand online

influencers talking
Table of Contents

New start-ups emerge on the scene all the time and it can be quite the competitive field when you launch. As you begin the journey that is "new business management", recognize that there will always be competition with other companies. Instead of spending loads of time building products and services, you could devote some of that focus on marketing the brand. The best way to accelerate awareness is to partner up with an influencer. Social media has taken over, opening up new levels of dialogue between businesses and customers.  Keep on reading to find out how an influencer can help your newly initiated project. 

Build Brand Awareness and Trust Naturally 

If you want your company to thrive in this constantly-changing environment, it is critical that you build brand awareness. Before anyone will use your service or buy your product they need to know who you are.  It’s hard to convince customers to buy from you when they don’t know you exist in the first place. Get an influencer to promote your startup. Influencers have impressive follower bases, so they can attract many, many viewers. You can get tangible results for your marketing campaign.  If you take a quick look at how followers interact with influencer posts, you’ll see that engagement is more important than the number of followers. 

One step you can take is to find an influencer that suits your brand. Pursuing big name celebrities will likely not lead anywhere. A micro-influencer can help you develop personal connections. Besides the fact that influencers can reach wide segments of the target audience, they instill trust with your  Just so you know, people are more likely to trust influencers than celebrities.  Partnering with a micro-influencer will also be easier on your budget, while a big Insta-celebrity will require a much bigger financial  investment.

Promote Your Startup Without Being Too Pushy 

Influencer marketing isn’t pushy. This could be why it is can be so  successful. People willingly opt in to follow influencers. They’re curious to view their content, be inspired and maybe learn a thing or two. If an influencer promotes your brand, you avoid appearing too spammy. ( That is if an influencer knows how to do so in a natural way)  The sponsored content doesn’t bother anyone as long as it’s aesthetically pleasing. The viewers see happy, positive content. There’s no “Buy now” or “Get 10% off” which appears very "salesy".  

Blog posts and other types of shareable content are successful because they tell stories. They add value, provide a perspective, and prove that something meaningful is going on.  Influencers are the means to promote those stories and show the value of your product of brand. Consider using influencer content in your next marketing campaign. It can be a helpful  approach to take when you want to change up your marketing strategy.  It is also a way for your brand to get qualitative, shareable content out into the world . (Remember - if you  re-post an image or video make sure to credit the influencer in a tag. )

Here are other tips on how to use influencer content: 

  • Optimize Your Ads for YouTube, Facebook, And Twitter 

Often content created by influecers were originally created for mobile. This means that it was specially created for mobile devices. Mobile is the tool that makes everything happen. Even if influencer-generated content is increasingly consumed on mobile devices, you should optimize for desktop computers too.  You want to get the most out of your influencer content, no matter what device your potential client is using. Optimization is key.  

Thanks to a couple of simple tricks and edits, you can breathe new life into the content and make a big difference in your marketing efforts. You can add animations, sounds, and so on. It’s recommended to keep the length short and to include the best things first and pay attention to grammar mistakes.

As a rule, influencer marketing doesn’t go beyond the influencer base. If you want, you can increase the reach of your content. The only thing you have to do is to push it through content distribution platforms. This way, it’ll be disseminated to large and targeted audiences. The right people will see your promotion.

  • Include Neat Call-To-Actions 

If you use influencer content to populate your social media channels, include call-to-actions. They encourage their followers and subscrbers to take action, which leads back to your brand. If there’s no stimulus, people won’t know what to do next. Most likely, they’ll click to another article and forget all about you. Determine what goal you want to achieve (increase subscriptions, boost sales, get readers to check out a content piece) and write a call-to-action. 

Pay close attention to everything from placement to format. Most importantly, don’t ignore the language. According to the experts at PickWriters, grammar is more important than content. Sentences that aren’t properly structured are hard to decipher and drastically affect readability. Proofread everything you use and make sure the language used by your influencer is aligned with your brand.  

The grammar police won’t find you, but readers are likely to become irritated. You also do not want to offend potential customers, either with incorrect spelling/grammar/word usage or by including "blue humor" or swear words. 

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Get Access to New Followers 

How many followers do you have on social media? This is a great question that many new business owners wonder about.  It is an important to ask yourself because each follower is a potential customer and also serves as a bridge to other potential customers. You can use your follower base to grow your business. An influencer can give you access to many new followers right away. As mentioned earlier, the number of followers doesn’t matter as much as the engagement. An influencer who is able to engage with viewers in a way that promotes their own engagement with the video/article or photo indicates that they are saavy with viwer engagement. This is a key feature you should be looking for when considering which influncers to work with.

Getting more followers isn’t as easy as it was a few years ago. Not only have algorithms changed, but also there are many creative brands online. You want those who follow you to be real followers and not just bots or spam accounts. Those types of accounts seldom click on links, retweet/regram the content or engage with you in conversation. It won't really do much for your brand to have a bunch of followers who never engage. It is much better to have a small but relevant audience that clicks, shares and comments.

To sum up, influencer marketing has the power to bridge the gap between startups and their audiences. More and more organizations are choosing to work with influencers because they drive awareness, build trust, and inspire a sense of urgency to take action. Perhaps you never considered working with an influencer as part of your marketing campaigns. Hopefully this article explained why it just might be the right choice for you and help get your brand some needed awareness and  user engagement. Good luck!



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