Lessons

Lesson Info

Working With Influencers

In this following, up with wrapping up with this course, I want to talk about scaling up. So what sense, what spencer was talking about was, you know how when you start losing that novelty, he does say, like, you know, your fans eventually will they will eventually outgrow your products and outgrow your brand. So in marketing there's, this term called your customer average life span or lifetime value. So your customer is not going to stick with you for the entire time that you're in business, they're going to move on to the next thing. They're going to find some other, some other shiny objects to be fascinated and passionate about. So once they're done with your products, it's not, you know, it's, not personal. They've just, you know, people change, right? We go through motions, we are environments, change our likes and dislikes change andan trends, changes well, so it's, totally normal that eventually people might start to outgrow your own brand in your product. So in terms of scaling...

up one great way, as spencer mentioned that you can start that you can not. Fallen to that, that trap for that experience that I went through, where I started to see that my sales weren't doing really good, and I was still putting in a lot of effort to my sales to prevent that from happening, you can work on expanding your reach and focus more and getting new likes to your instagram into your facebook profile facebook page, and one great way is we can scale up with influencers, so we talked a little bit about that through this workshop, but let's get a little bit more focused on this. So what you want to do is reach out to other pages or other brands that are similar to yours, and, you know, the larger the following they have, the better it is for you because then you're going to be exposed to that many more people. And I meant to ask this of spencer, but when I was using sold seat, something like this was possible. Where say, for example, if you guys remember, I was talking about this, uh, facebook page that I partnered with, she has chocolate, chocolate and more. She had two point five million followers or fans, what I could potentially do with her is I could offer to her to say, hey, let me make for you an exclusive product. That you're selling to just your your fans and to your audience. And then what I can do is insult c. I can set up the entire listing on my account and then I can once it kind of gives me a special unique. You are l that I can then start. Let me backtrack that so I set the sail up on sold theme and then I d have heard that information. So I give the influencer here's the product image I want you to use here's the text description I want you to use and she can post all of that out. And then what I would need from her is the girl from that post on her page. Then I can take that u r l I can put it into salt sea and it will connect her post on her page to my sould see back end. So when the sails air coming in that's all working towards me like when customers are actually paying for the products, the money's going straight to me and this is a great way, as I mentioned, to reach new customers. But what you can do in terms of that revenue share is you could pay them a commission for every for every sale that they make. Or however you decide you want to split it with them, maybe they're okay with just doing a flat rate fee for especially if you're working with someone who is completely new to social media sales and there, unsure if they're going to make any money from this, you could potentially just pay them a flat rate feed two or three hundred dollars, maybe I'm depending on how large they are or how much they like, you know, they really like your stuff. Maybe they will charge less, but that way, at least you're they for sure, are getting something out of this. So even if the sale didn't go so well, at least you know they're protected, so it could be that way. You could have them, you could pay them a flat rate feet, or you could decide it works better. I think if you could arrange a commission so kind of a revenue sharing things so everyone shares on the risk and everyone shares on the successes. So if you do really well, they get paid an equal amount and you get paid and equal amount as well. So how do we find these people? Spreadsheets are your friend, so if you it really helps keep things organized because as you see here, there's a lot of information that you want to be gathering from your research. When you look for people to work with, you want teo find their facebook page or their social are their instagram handle, or if they have a blawg, you also want to get their first name. You want to get their direct email address, and I say direct email address because sometimes you might be working with, uh, an influencer or facebook or instagram page or blogged that is working in a team of people. So for example, if there's like info at blank, that might be a general email address, and maybe the owner of this page could be something like may at blank. So if you can find the direct email address that works best, if you can, on lee, find one email address that's fine, too, because that's most likely the only e mail address that they have and I have listed on here any personal notes that you can find on this influencer or on this blogger. So what I would really recommend for you to do is do not just find them and say like, wow, they have a lot of followers, I want to work with them, but to really get to know them to look through their posts if they have a blogger go through their archives and see what they like see what their family they talk about, their family, maybe you can find out that they have kids or something. Maybe you can find out when their birthday is, and then you can tie it in with their birthday. Or maybe they're blawg anniversary or whatever that might be. So any personal notes that you can find on them listed out on the spreadsheet and what that's going to help you with also in a practical sense, is when you do a pitch to them, you d'oh get to them in a more personal level. You do end up being a lot more engaging, a lot more friendly and a lot more. You're going to be warmer to them, like the warmth is going to show through in your emails because you're going to sound very genuine and it's not going to sound like you're just in it for the money, you know. So in order to start doing your research on finding influencers, I did mention this at the start of the course, but think about what general theme your brand falls under. And I think it might be hard for some of you to think about this because it does require you to kind of take a step back, and for a lot of us who are working so closely in our own businesses, answering that question can be kind of hard, so you know if you need to ask customers or if you actually do craft shows and live events, it's a great a place for you to get customer feedback and to see what topics you think your general theme or your aesthetic or your style falls under a smart just you can if if you can kind of design your products and your brand into a general theme, it's going to make your marketing a lot better because then you can start finding this groups of communities that congregate over general themes like there's a whole bunch of people on instagram who love drew z rings help him saying that right, juicy on dh then they're a bunch of people who love to do yoga so there's huge communities out, they're on instagram on facebook. So if you could think of your your shop and your products in that theme sense, what umbrella do you fall under that's going to make marketing a lot easier? Another really great, great question for you to ask yourself and to make a list off. And to just really be aware of this at all times. Who are your complimentary brands? Who are your competitors? Brands. So think about like, I work with a company that sells party supplies. Right? So what if you could partner or reach out to other people who sell other party supplies? You're not necessarily competitors because you could be selling different party supplies. But you all fall under that same umbrella of parties or event planning, for example, can you do you have any questions on this so far? Yes. This may be really simplistic, but so then what will the distinction be between somebody who's, complimentary and competitors. Okay, that's a good question. So a competitive I would categorize as someone who sells exactly the same product issue, and so I wouldn't necessarily work with them. But what I would, what it actually helps you do is in researching other people that your competitors has worked with. So then it's more likely that this influencer who's worked with your competitors would work with you as well, because they've worked with your competitors before. That makes sense. Kind of makes sense, okay, yeah, okay, good, um to do the actual search unfortunately, I'm sad to say that there's no really easy way to do this there are directories that you can access but you have to pay a lot of money for to get for like if you want to have a whole list at your fingertips off bloggers or influencers on youtube or instagram or facebook to reach out to but those directories interestingly, they're normally targeted at really be big brands like toyota and nike, so they're expecting you to pay hundreds of thousands dollars for the subscription to something like an online directory but just try it out and just search actually on google to see if there are existing online directories that are free because they're always coming out with new stuff. So what used to be around last year is no longer around and what wasn't available last year might be new this year. So the first thing I want you to try searching his online directories for influencers or bloggers but in a more practical sense and tio kind of really get into doing the dirty work if, for example you're general theme falls under yoga, then you could search for something like you'll go lifestyle blogger or yoga youtube account or yoga youtube celebrity or you yoga youtube just start with something like that and then just start poking around on fate on google to see what results have been coming up so it's a lot of dirty work, but I don't haven't found a better way to do it on this. So in terms of your competitors or complementary brand names, this is a different way that you can use google search too fine influencers or bloggers that you can work with you could do lifestyle blogger, brand name review or fashion blogger brand name review or just blogger brand name review or you too paul brand name review and basically what this helps you do is your kind of writing on someone else's coattails if you see that this influencer or this blogger has talked about your competitors before or your complimentary brand before, they're very likely to also want to talk about you because you know they're interested in this kind of product. So now we're getting into actually writing them an email pitch right once you started creating your spreadsheet and every week you're adding new people into your spreadsheet it's a great idea to actually know set a goal for yourself to see how many people may be five people that you want to add into your spreadsheet every week on dh, then just continuously keep building on that list for yourself that's always a good idea, but the very first thing that you want to think of now when you're emailing them, your pitch is your subject line because if your subject line doesn't catch their attention they're not going to want to open your email and then, you know, it just stops there, right? So some of these great subject lines are pretty simple. Um, but subject lines with that that end with a question mark, so if you can kind of format your subject lines so that it's a question I found us really well for two reasons. One reason not many people are using questions as the subject line eso it definitely stands out in in in someone's email inbox, so as you can imagine, someone who has a million followers on facebook is probably getting a ton of emails right? Or if you're a huge blogger, you're getting hundreds, if not thousands, of emails from other brands and other businesses wanting to work with you and feature with you so it's really important that we we send our email pitches with really great subject lines to really get the attention and stand out in someone's email inbox another really great, but really easy subject line that you can use is just your brand name plus their brand name or their block name or their, you know, tiny hands plus chocolate, chocolate and more, and I've seen a lot more people who are using this more often these days, but I've also seen that it just really works. Like I have friends who are huge bloggers who have big businesses who often get pitched two for doing guest posts and they open emails like these so it's a good one to try out do we have questions about how to search or any kinds of subject lines before I move on to the next slide your questions about influencers in general okay sure yeah paintings by k gilmore asked should we start the smaller shall we start with smaller influencers and work up yes yes I definitely recommend that it's going to feel for one reason it's going to boost your confidence when you start reaching out influencers or bloggers who are smaller in size they're probably not getting as many emails is someone who has ten times they're following size so reaching out to people who have smaller followings increases your chances of working with them and for if you guys who have you haven't pitched before and if you haven't tried to collaborate with people before sometimes hitting that send button can feel kind of scary so to help get through that fear on dh to help make sure that you go through this process because this can be really powerful for your business reach out to smaller bloggers and smaller influencers first if it's going to be easier for you chances of being featured are going to be a little bit higher so just for that little boost of confidence I do recommend that you do start with smaller bloggers but I also don't want you to think small you don't have to just work with smaller bloggers there's no reason why you don't deserve or you shouldn't work with someone who has ten million followers it's just going to be a little bit it's going to be pretty it's going to be hard to reach those people and tto find the right person to contact at that point but definitely possible yeah and then on the other side of the gamut abby seven three two was wondering how first she says great class and then she says how would we get the email dresser content and form a famous person to ask them tio being influencer like how do we contact those people? Yeah yes so finding email addresses is also one of those things you just have to google so the first thing you want to try it right you find their blawg or you find their website go to their contact page a lot of the times the list their email address there but if they don't they're probably going to have just a contact for him ideally try not to use the contact form ideally you want to look for an email address so if you can't find an email address on their contact page on their web site or blogged, start checking out their social media so if they have a youtube channel go to youtube and on the about tab they normally list their email address on there too sometimes it's kind of hidden sometimes they'll want you to type in like some security code for you to see or show that e mail addresses address on dh if it's not on youtube you can check on on instagram sometimes influencers and these big bloggers who have a large falling they know that people are out there who want to collaborate with them because potentially they could make money out of collaborations right? So they want to make it easy for people to reach out to them so check their instagram a lot of times people will also list their email address in their bio section and if you can't find it on instagram, check out their facebook page and click on in four about where it will show you a list of like the long description of their brand or product the short description when the business was founded and a lot of the times in there too you will find an email address the worst case scenario if you've done all of those steps and you still can't find someone's email address, try google try searching for example if you were trying to search for my email address tiny hands, email address or tiny hands and then do that at sign just to see what might come up in terms because email addresses all have that at you know, info at tiny hands online dot com, so something might pop up from there or, you know, may park at may park email address, for example, something might come up worst case scenario. If you can't find an email address there, then you can use the contact form, and there have been very, very few people that just absolutely give you no way to contact them. If you absolutely can't contact them, go to twitter and try to build a relationship with them, follow them on twitter retweets some of their tweets if they ask questions, answer their questions if they have a comment about something you can just, you know, talk back with them, start a conversation with them and then eventually when you when they've acknowledged you so when you maybe one day you reach, eat one of their tweets and one day they will acknowledge you insane, like thanks for the retweet and then they tag you at may underscore park that's a great time to jump in there and say, hey, by the way, I have a great idea for a collaboration can I e mail you it's been almost, I would say maybe ninety percent success rate that when you do something like that, they always almost give you their email address. So that you can send them your pitch and what's. Great about that, too, is that they know it's coming. So the chances of them opening that email is going to be a lot higher because they're already familiar with who you are. That's. A great question. Thank you.