Last updated on
February 16, 2024
New companies may have difficulties gaining notoriety or building their reputation. Conversely, well-established brands will experience expansion plateaus at certain moments in their evolution.
Here’s the solution to both these issues:
Influencer marketing gives you access to a larger audience. As you’re getting more leads and social media followers, you can build a more loyal brand community.
Consider these stats:
And most importantly, 40% of consumers use ad-block to hide your well-crafted, targeted ads.
Conversely, influencers have worked hard to build fan communities that go over the five-figure mark in some cases. You can tap into that pool if you know which influencers you should recruit.
Pro tip: Don’t jump in with an influencer simply because they have a high number of followers. The crucial metrics that suggest a person’s real potential to influence others are comments and likes.
And here’s another thing:
Build awareness for your brand by working with influencers relevant for your brand. That’s why you need to establish clear campaign objectives and the influencer’s role during your marketing campaign.
But that’s a discussion for another time. Now let’s focus on the advantages of leveraging micro-influencers to gather insight into your product.
Micro-influencer marketing is all around us, so you may already know how this strategy can help your business. For instance, you know that influencers will:
Wait.
Can it all be so simple?
Technically, no.
It’s easier to address customers who are already loyal to your brand because they resonate with your style and brand philosophy. Plus, they’re already buying your products, so they’re more likely to choose you over the competition if you’re top of their mind.
What about potential customers who don’t know you exist or who are loyal to your competitors?
That’s why you need micro-influencers. You can engage them to learn valuable insights about your audience or new markets that you could get into.
Remember that these influencers spend a lot of time on social media like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, so they have a better pulse on what’s going on.
They also know what will be going on.
Therefore, you can get insights into the next significant trends to tap into.
How do you do that?
Ask the influencers to be brutally honest about your brand, especially what they hate about it and why they think their followers aren’t buying your products yet.
You can use various online forms or questionnaires to get the discussion started, but we’ll discuss that below.
Afterward, you can take it a step further with qualitative research, such as direct interviews to brainstorm ideas with them.
The best name for this research strategy is crowdsourcing knowledge. This information will help your brand move further into new markets because you’ll understand how to relate to people who aren’t your customers yet. Create a searchable database in Excel to gather, structure, and analyze the data, so that you can refer to the findings later on.
The first question to consider is:
Where do you find these influencers?
You can try a platform like FameBit, or tools such as Onalytica and Modash to connect to influencers. You can also search for them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Besides, you should already be following some prominent influencers in your niche. If you couldn't find the influencers appropriate to your industry on these channels, you can find influencers by scraping Google.
Remember: Choose someone relevant for your company and who already has followers galore on the right platforms.
For instance:
Make sure you’re using an online database to record all the crucial information about your influencer, such as:
Conversely, you can use an AI tool to help you get to the bottom of all this. Some platforms worth considering are:
Sounds complicated? That’s why many businesses contact digital marketing agencies to increase their ROI.
But if you want to do it by yourself, here’s our advice:
Learn how to talk with your influencers.
Remember that influencers receive a lot of spam plus lots of requests for pro-bono advice. As a result, much like that 40% of consumers that block your ads, influencers may block your emails too. So you need to learn how to run your outreach without looking spammy.
So your best bet is to start by doing them a favor.
For example, you can:
But you should also know how to address them. Instead of writing, “I did you this favor, now help me with some insights on my product/ audience,” you should say: “Your blog/ Insta gave me an excellent idea for a product/ post/ e-book that we could work on together.”
Remember: send personalized emails to as many influencers as possible if they’re relevant to your brand.
If an influencer doesn’t reply within three to four business days, try to contact them again. You can use their social media profiles or contact forms, but don’t push your luck. If someone doesn’t answer, don’t harass them with more than three messages at a few days intervals.
Pro tip: Use hooks and CTAs throughout your email to ensure success.
You should also use personal notes, such as calling the influencer by their name to make sure they open your email or sharing a personal story.
Once you get the conversation rolling, ask the influencers to review your brand.
Most influencers will accept because people who love being in the limelight also usually love talking about their opinions and passions.
How to ask for advice is crucial.
Although most influencers like sharing their insights, they will get bored quickly if you ask the wrong questions.
That’s why you should build complex questions worthy of an expert, not something that you can easily find the answer to on Google.
Here’s how to implement this strategy:
BuzzSumo has an excellent question analyzer that allows you to search their database of questions by keyword, domain, or subreddits. This database comprises millions of questions that real people ask on popular forums such as Amazon Q&A, Reddit, or Quora.
So, you can use this tool to search for your primary keyword and build an exciting questionnaire.
Typeform is another quality platform you can use because it allows you to engage your audience smoothly. Besides, Typeform has larger completion rates so that you can get more answers and, therefore, more insights into your brand and audiences.
Typeform is better than BuzzSumo if you want more structure and help along the way.
BuzzSumo only lists suggestions of questions, whereas Typeform helps you build funny quizzes, surveys, and forms. These tools will keep your influencers engaged enough to answer all your questions because they ask just one question at a time and use impressive visuals.
But here’s another advantage:
Typeform uses conditional logic.
So, based on your influencer’s answers, you can ask the right follow-up questions instead of making them go through a useless survey that feels more like an interrogation.
That’s how you can get relevant and helpful insights to expand your company.
All you have to do is choose the template you like and build your form. It takes minutes to do it, after which you can send the link to your influencer.
Bonus: You can see completion rates and export this data to your preferred analysis tools or Google Sheets.
You now know how micro-influencers can assist your market research strategy. Crowdsourcing knowledge is an essential vector of keeping your brand top of mind or tapping into new markets. Micro-influencers always know what’s going on in the world, and they can also anticipate forthcoming trends.
Besides, they’ve honed their skills of understanding what people want and what makes them tick. These psychoanalysis tools are essential for your brand because all companies can be classified into two groups: those going through a crisis and those going through an expansion phase.
As such, micro-influencers can help you with valuable insights during both these phases, but you need to ask the right questions. That’s why you should consider using an intuitive platform like Typeform that builds engaging questionnaires based on natural logic. After you compile more answers from your influencers, you can compare results, see what pops up, and decide on the best narrative for your brand.
Aqsa Mughees works as a Content Lead at Mailmunch with 5+ years of experience in creative content strategy. With a grip in digital content creation for the tech industry and an undying love for writing, she is crazy about helping businesses grow through content marketing.
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