Local influencer marketing is particularly suitable for independent shops and local businesses as it can generate great bang for buck. In this post you will learn how to find local influencers online, nurture them and how to enlist them to help market your business.
Tired of reading? – you can watch this social media tip on youtube.
Let’s start by thinking about some of the reasons influencer marketing is important:
- A recent Nielson study found 83% of us trust the opinions of friends and family and 66% of us said we trusted the opinions of others found online. In comparison only 42% of us said we trusted display adverts online.
- And we’re online more and more – especially on mobile phones, using Facebook and YouTube.
- Finally with the rise of ad-blocking, traditional display advertising is becoming less and less effective – that means word of mouth must become a key channel for your marketing strategy.
Who are influencers?
While any customer can spread the word about your business, there are some customers who are more influential than others – they might write a blog, have thousands of followers, or have a moderator role in an online group.
Influencer marketing enables you to focus on those customers who, if they spread the word about you, will reach a larger audience and have more impact on them.
What are the steps of a local influencer marketing strategy?
1. FIND INFLUENCERS
So how do you go about finding local influencers?
Well, since a top influencer for your business is as likely to be a local hairdresser as the local mayor, ou’ll need to do some sifting to find them.
There are lots of tools out there. Personally I use rise.global and a combination of Twitter Bio Search using a local hashtag and combine with Klout scores to create my influencer lists.
Then I keep it up to date weekly by refreshing their Klout score and I’ll also add new people as I discover them.
2. NURTURE INFLUENCERS
The next step is to nurture the influencers on your list. Like any human relationship start by listening – tune in to their social channels and look for opportunities to like and comment on what they are saying.
In this way you can gradually build a relationship with influencers you’re looking to connect with.
3. MAKE CONTACT
Finally you need to make contact. When making contact it’s best to be as clear as possible about what you want and what the benefit is for the influencer.
You can ask for an online review, or ask them to guest post on your blog.
Holding events either online or offline can work well – I heard a fashion boutique held an online chat about the latest fashion trends while a pizza restaurant invited local influencers to a mozarella tasting session to get help deciding which cheese to use in their pizzas! Both are great ideas.
So now to summarise what we’ve covered – the need for a local influencer marketing strategy as word of mouth becomes a key channel.Then 3 main stages: Finding influencers, Nurturing them and Making contact.
If you’d like to try making your influencer list on rise.global go ahead, it is completely free to make your list. You only need to pay if you want to keep your list up to date each week – in which case you can use my special code to get 5% off – 17YTTB