How To Get Influencers To Promote Your Products (Even If You Have A Small Budget)

Do you want to try your hand at influencer marketing but aren’t quite sure what you can do with a small advertising budget?

You might feel like you can’t compete with bigger brands whose marketing budgets seem bottomless, but in reality, a smaller budget will force you to seek out smaller creators who are known for having higher engagement rates than larger creators.

In this post, you will learn how to get influencers to promote your products.

1. Create a marketable product

This step may seem obvious, but there’s a good chance that some of you out there are overconfident about the marketability of your products.

Answer these questions just to be sure:

• What problem does your product solve?
• Who is your product for?
• Does the product have a searchable keyword?
• Does the product generate a consistent level of interest on Google Trends?

If you’re having trouble answering these questions, chances are your product isn’t as marketable as you think it is.

If you really want to be sure, pre-sell your product to test if it’s something that your audience would pay for.

2. Understand why influencer marketing is so effective

Influencer marketing is the practice of marketing your products by having influencers promote them.

There are a lot of benefits of influencer marketing:

• Cheaper in some cases
• Allows you to access an audience that’s larger than your own
• Allows you to access your target market early on
• Influencers often have higher engagement rates than brands

As such, if you want to see a high return on investment (ROI), you’re better off paying an influencer to promote your products than you are promoting them yourself through your normal marketing channels.

3. Create a marketing kit for your product

Influencers create what’s known as a “media kit” when they’re on the lookout for sponsorships.

A media kit is a PDF file the influencer shares with a brand that contains important metrics, such as the influencer’s follower count, engagement rate, average number of views, average number of engagements, affiliate marketing stats, and stats from previous sponsorships.

You can create something similar for your product by creating a marketing kit.

Include the following details in your marketing kit:

• Introduction – Let the influencer know who your brand is, who you are and who your team are
• Company goals – Share why you created your products plus which communities you’d like to connect with and why
• Product details – Introduce your product and list its primary features
• Value proposition – Explain what’s special about your product. Why should the influencer’s audience buy it? What problem(s) will it solve? How will it improve their lives?
• Testimonials – If you’ve already had customers buy your product, or you’ve had early testers, ask them to write testimonials you can include in marketing materials, including this marketing kit
• Target market – Share who your target market is (men over 50, adults aged 18 to 30, etc.)
• Demographics – Share your own demographics from your social media profiles as well as your website. Which age demographics visit your website the most? What’s the gender distribution among your social media audience?
• Important metrics – Share any metrics you feel influencers would find relevant, including your average review rating on different review platforms, the number of website visits you receive, the average number of views and engagements you receive on social media, the number of sales you make on a monthly or annual basis, the number of email subscribers you have, and your follower counts. When influencers make content to promote your products, you’re going to share that content through your own content marketing channels, so they’ll likely be interested in your metrics as well

Canva has hundreds of media kit templates you can easily repurpose into marketing kits. Just make sure you edit the colors, fonts, icons and images to suit your own brand.

4. Become more active on social media

It’s a lot easier to form relationships with creators if they’ve heard of you. And since influencer marketing is part of your product launch strategy, you need a different way of letting them know you exist.

The best way to do this is by gaining notoriety in your niche outside of your products.

Become more active on social media by creating original social media content, responding to comments and leaving comments on content related to your niche.

It’s best to choose social media platforms that your audience uses the most, but you can also focus on platforms the most popular influencers in your niche use.

5. Learn about the different types of influencers

It’s easy to put all influencers into a box, but social media is actually a lot more complex than that. In reality, there are several different types of influencers.

The marketing world categorizes influencers in two ways: by the type of content they create and their size.

For starters, some creators target specific niches while others don’t really have one. They make videos for trends, share vlogs, make comedic skits and create just about anything they think their audiences would find funny or entertaining.

While it might sound exciting to partner with a creator who attracts all kinds of consumers, it’s actually much more effective to work with creators who share the same target market as you.

The other way to categorize influencers is by the number of followers they have:

• Nano influencers – Influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers
• Micro influencers – 10,000 to 100,000 followers
• Macro influencers – 100,000 followers to 1 million followers
• Mega influencers – Over 1 million followers

You can even categorize influencers by the type of content they create, if you wish. Content types include images, short-form videos, long-form videos, podcasts, and text-based content.

Micro and nano influencers often have the best engagement rates, even if they don’t receive as many views as larger creators do.

Plus, their fees are usually lower than that of larger creators.

6. Know what to look for in an influencer

If you’re an unknown brand, your first stint with influencer marketing may make you feel quite vulnerable.

Much of your efforts will be put toward convincing influencers that your product and brand are good enough to promote.

However, you must also consider yourself. If your product truly offers a lot of value to your niche, you need to act like it and ensure the influencers you reach out to are good enough for you as well.

These are the most important qualities to look for in an influencer:

• Engagement rate
• Audience demographics
• Content quality

Engagement rate is the number of social media users who interact with a post compared to the number of users who view that post.

Engagements include likes, comments, shares and follows.

If a post received 100,000 views, 20,000 likes, 10,000 shares and 500 comments, it received 30,500 engagements and 100,000 views.

To turn those figures into an engagement rate, you’d divide the number of engagements the post received by the total number of views it received, then multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage.

In this case, 30,500 divided by 100,000 is 0.305. Multiplying that number by 100 turns the figure into an engagement rate of 30.5%.

The higher, the better.

For audience demographics, it’s important that you pick an influencer whose audience matches your own. This will increase your odds of attracting potential customers who are actually interested in your product.

Finally, pay attention to the content each potential influencer you want to work with creates.

Is it high quality, even if it’s meant to be comedic? Do they cover products well and fairly? Do they produce different content types? Do they follow a consistent publishing schedule?

The answers to these questions should all be yes. Focus on influencers who can check all four boxes.

7. Find suitable influencers to partner with

The easiest way to find influencers to work with is by searching for them on social media or by using a dedicated influencer marketing platform, such as Traackr, Upfluence, GRIN or Aspire.

Each platform works differently, but most allow you to search through a marketplace of influencers, view various analytics that let you know if they’re the right fit, set budgets, manage campaigns and even analyze results.

Most importantly, you can view each influencer’s cost per engagement (CPE).

If you can’t find suitable influencers to work with through an influencer marketing platform, you’ll need to go the old school route and find influencers yourself.

Go to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, and search for keywords related to your niche.

This will allow you to find influencers who create content for your niche.

Remember, while nano and micro influencers don’t bring in as many views as larger creators do, their engagement rates are usually higher, and their sponsorship rates are usually lower.

So, if a micro influencer has an engagement rate of 5.5% on Instagram, which is much higher than the industry average of 1.8%, and they receive around 5,000 views per Instagram reel, you can expect around 275 of their audience to be actively engaged with their sponsored posts.

Does that mean 275 of them will engage with their post enough to view your product page? Not necessarily, but it’s best to get your product in front as many actively engaged eyes as possible.

Here are a few basic steps to follow to find the right influencer:

• Open a social media app, such as Instagram or TikTok, and enter a popular search term for your niche.
• Watch a video, and if you like that creator’s content, go to their profile.
• Calculate the following metrics:
  • The total number of views their last 10 videos received. Divide that number by 10 to get the average number of views their last 10 videos received. We’ll call this Figure A.
  • The total number of likes, shares and comments their last 10 videos received. Divide this number by 10 to get the average number of engagements their last 10 videos received. We’ll call this Figure B.
  • Then, divide Figure B by Figure A, and multiply that number by 100 to get that creator’s average engagement rate from their last 10 videos.
  • Then, open a percentage calculator tool, and enter that average engagement rate in the percentage box and Figure A in the other box. This new figure represents the average number of users who engage with this influencer’s content.
• Use the calculations above to determine if an influencer appeals to you.

It’s exciting to get your product in front of as many eyes as possible, but since you’re working with a smaller budget, you need to be more realistic and stick with influencers you can afford.

These calculations will help you vet influencers so you only contact those who are likely in your budget.

Another alternative would be to enlist the help of an influencer marketing agency to find influencers for you, but going this route often comes with inflated rates since the agency will be taking a cut from the influencer’s earnings.

To give you a more realistic rate, research by Shopify states that Instagram influencers charge around $100 per 10,000 followers. Sprout Social says the same, but lists the figure as “$10 per 1,000 followers.”

Note: If you need help gathering engagement metrics at scale, you’ll need an analytics tool. Try signing up for a free trial of Social Status and checking out their influencer analytics. This will help you prioritize faster.

8. Reach out to influencers

If you’re not sure if you want to sponsor creators just yet, find a few influencers’ PO boxes, and send them PR (press release) packages instead.

Personalize packages for each individual influencer you send one to so they’re more likely to feature your package in their content. Don’t expect to get a lot of attention from an influencer if you’re not willing to give it.

When you pitch your collaboration to an influencer, let them know what type of collaboration you want to do:

• Giveaway – You offer them a free product to give away to their audience
• Sponsored post – You pay to feature in a small portion of a post or an entire post
• Commission-based partnership – You give the creator a special affiliate marketing rate
• Long-term sponsorship – A combination of all three. You pay the influencer on an on-going basis to appear in their content regularly. You may even give them free products to give away from time to time as well as a special affiliate marketing rate

Include your marketing kit, and explain the goals you have for your campaign.

Most importantly, emphasize why you’re getting in touch with this creator. Do you like their content? Do you have similar audiences? This can sweeten the deal.

Finally, let the creator know about any time constraints you have, especially if your product hasn’t been released, yet, and you want to use influencer marketing as part of your launch strategy.

Be open to negotiations, and be kind and courteous throughout the entire process to improve your chances of forming long-term partnerships.

Final thoughts

Whether you’re an established brand or a content creator that’s launching a new product, influencers offer you the ability to reach a highly targeted audience.

All without having to build that audience yourself.

The types of influencers you can work with will depend on your budget.

With more budget, you can work with influencers with a much larger audience.

But you don’t need a big budget to get started. There are plenty of smaller influencers you can work with. For example, nano influencers with 1K-10K followers would be a good place to start.

That said, not all influencers are created equally. You’ll need to focus on those with higher engagement rates.

If you need help finding these metrics, sign up for a free trial of Social Status and use their influencer analytics.