Influencers can be a great addition to affiliate marketing programs. When an influencer endorses your product, the people that follow them may see their endorsement in the same way they’d likely see a recommendation from a friend or family member. That can boost your company significantly.
If you’re looking to incorporate influencers into your affiliate marketing program, then here’s how to find and benefit from them.
Tips for Finding Influencers
Before you can start benefiting from influencers, you first need to find ones that are interested in working for your brand. Here are three tips that can help you find influencers who might want to work with you.
- Browse around some popular social media apps
The first way to identify potential influencer marketers is just to start browsing around popular social media apps that you want to use for influencer marketing. Look for hashtags that relate to your brand and aim for individuals who have both a decent number of followers and a fair amount of engagement with their content.
For example, say you want to advertise your soap brand on TikTok. You might start by looking around at videos using different cleaning-related hashtags. If you find a video with over a million views, then you could go to the creator’s page and see how many followers that creator has and how many views their content usually gets. If they tend to get lots of engagement and don’t already have a soap partner, then you could reach out to them about becoming an influencer for your company.
- Look at who your competitors are using for influencer marketing
If you’re really struggling, then you might start by looking at the people your competitors are using for influencer marketing. It’s unlikely that any of those people will sign up to be your influencer, as their connection with your direct competitors will likely preclude them from partnering with you. However, you can use their content as a jumping-off point to find other people.
For example, imagine that you were trying to advertise your stuffed animal business on Instagram and were having a hard time finding influencers. The hashtag “#stuffedanimal” brings up people who are selling their own stuffed animals, whereas the hashtag “#teddybear” brings up people talking about their dogs, who look like teddy bears. Instead, you could go to one of your competitor’s partnered influencers, and it turns out that they own an arcade and stock your competitor’s stuffed animals in one of their arcade machines. This opens up a completely new avenue for you to start researching to find your own influencers.
- Incentivize referrals from your existing affiliates
Finally, one of the best ways to discover influencers is to give your affiliates a bonus if they refer someone to your program and you accept that person into it. Content creators, influencers, and publishers often make friends within their circles, which means they might know other influencers who could be interested in signing up and helping you push your brand.
This is one of the key reasons you need to develop affiliate relationships. If your affiliates feel like you’re really interested in helping them build their own business, then they’ll be more likely to recommend you to their friends. If you don’t focus on building those relationships, then you’re more likely to lose them to another affiliate program.
How to Get the Most out of Influencers in Your Affiliate Marketing Program
So, you’ve gathered some influencers into your affiliate marketing program. How do you make sure you’re using them to their full benefit? Here are four tips to help you use influencers effectively in an affiliate marketing program.
- Manage and track influencers just like the rest of your affiliates
Influencers direct potential customers to your business just like any other affiliate. While the process of finding and working with influencers may be different, understanding the data associated with their account will be largely the same. The Refersion platform can help you track all of your affiliates, giving you the data you need to capitalize on influencers and affiliates.
- Stay in contact with influencers as much as possible
Even more so than many other types of affiliates, it’s important to build a relationship with influencers. Remember, the people who purchase from an influencer partnership want to feel like they’re getting a referral from a trusted friend. That means you need to show influencers that your product is something they would genuinely recommend to a friend.
- Consider personalizing the referral structure for influencers
If your current affiliate marketing program works largely through links, then you might want to consider changing the structure for influencers. It’s common for influencers to instead use personalized coupon codes or referral codes. On many social media websites, it’s difficult or impossible to embed a referral link into a sponsored post, so coupon codes have become the go-to for influencers.
- Make sure the influencers you’re working with reflect your brand
Above all, the influencers that you’re working with should be a natural extension of your brand. If you run a vegan food website, then it could be a very confusing partnership to suddenly take on an influencer who’s known for grilling huge cuts of meat every weekend. This could actually negatively impact your brand identity unless you’re able to naturally work it into the influencer’s content. Consider talking directly to your influencers about how to create a partnership that works for both of you.
The Bottom Line
For many companies, an affiliate marketing program is a great way to get your company in front of new people while only having to pay when you make a sale. Influencers can be a great add-on to that program.
Once you’ve recruited influencers into your affiliate marketing program, use Refersion to track data surrounding the clients they bring in.
