Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about how to reach influencers, because influencer marketing is getting bigger and bigger, because a lot of the attention is on what? It's on YouTube, it's on Instagram, and whatever new social channels are going to come, influencers are getting bigger and bigger.
As a matter of fact, we were just joking the other day, he was talking about somebody else and he was saying it's crazy, because there are these Instagram influencers, they might have a couple of hundred thousands, or a couple of million followers, and they just push a sunglass out there and net millions in sales just like that.
So, how do you go about finding these influencers? I'll start it off by saying well, you should go after the micro influencers first, the people that are on their way up, because if you're trying to reach a Kim Kardashian for example, or a Kendall Jenner for example, they're not going to respond to you. You've got to aim lower first, and you've got to aim for people ... it's probably better for you to go for micro influencers, which have a couple of thousand, like 5,000 to 20,000 plus followers, and that are really targeted to your niche.
So, if you're a food blogger for example, or a travel blogger, you find these people. And one easy way to do it is open your Instagram, search for these specific hashtags, look for people that are near you, and then just DM them. And you're going to see that these people are open to collaboration, and you can even go on Google right now and look for these lists of people that are open to collaboration.
And then the final thing I'll add to, we can elaborate on this a little more later, is there are Instagram pods, where there's groups of people ... They're all promoting each other, pushing each other up. And they also know influencers as well, and then from there you can work out a deal, you can barter, you can pay them on a package, whatever it is exactly, that's how you get started.

Neil Patel: Sadly, influencer marketing doesn't work the way most of you guys think. I was talking with the guy who created Fit-T, and he was crushing all of our Instagram. And I had a good conversation with him, he first told me that when he started out paying all these influencers on Instagram, was A, really affordable, and B, it converted really well. And he would pay anyone with a large following who looked healthy, and just get them to mention the product, being like, "Hey, if you drink this it'll make you more healthy, skinnier, lose weight," whatever it may be.
And he said over time, as people started copying, and other people started promoting products, influencer marketing didn't work as well. In which you had a ton of people who would see the brand, but the conversions didn't work s well. A, because people started charging more, and B, because everyone started doing it, so people were like hey, these influencers are just promoting whoever's paying them.
So, Eric mentioned about the micro influencers. When I had that conversation with him, he said something that really resonated. And he said the only way to really get a ROI today is you have to pay super relevant influencers who have the ideal customers that you're looking for. And if you don't pay super relevant ones, it just doesn't convert as well.
Going after Kim Kardashian won't work, nunless you have a mainstream product that her audience really loves. So, don't just go after the biggest, go after the micro ones, like Eric's mentioning. They're much more affordable, and when you're negotiating a rate with them, whether it's video, or whether it's a picture, think about the timing too. You can reduce your cost drastically by only paying for the first 12 or 24 hours of that video or image staying up, because after 24 or 48 hours, or even a week, heck if you want to really go crazy, the view count on that image or video is going to be so small it doesn't even matter if it's up or not.
So, pay people only for a specific time frame, like a few days, because it'll save you a lot of money.

Eric Siu: Yeah. Since we're talking about reaching influencers, you have to think about how you can, to Neil's point, what he just said, how can you be more creative with the deal? Also, these influencers are getting bombarded all the time with, "Oh, can you just do a post for me, 12 posts? Can we do a package?" Or whatever. But what if you did what most people aren't doing, yes from time to time you'll see this, you'll see people doing contests, or you might see people doing giveaways to get more engagement. And that might be more compelling. Or maybe something that really interests your influencer, maybe you're looking at what they are, what really picks their interest, right? And then figuring out how you can do something like a creative campaign around that.
So, going the extra mile, thinking about it a little deeper is going to allow you to get their attention, just because a lot of these people are starting to get messaged and bombarded all the time.
Neil, anything else to add?

Neil Patel: No, that's it from my end.

Eric Siu: All right, so that's it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check our marketing tools that will grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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