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What is influencer marketing and how to do it in 2021, from practice to strategy [including examples and templates]

By: Arik Marmorstein, Spectroomz founder

Spectroomz lets you and your team hire an online researcher so you can take smart, research-based, decisions without losing focus on where you are really needed.

This is the 2021 ultimate influencer marketing guide. I will cover:

Contents:

1. What is influencer marketing

2. How to find social media influencers

3. How to contact influencers (including templates and examples)

4. How to negotiate a deal with an influencer

5. Instagram story vs a post

6. Influencer Contract Template

7. Tracking your results

8. Influencer marketing agency vs DIY influencer marketing

9. Should influencer marketing be part of your strategy?

   
   

According to Wikipedia influencer marketing definition is: 

“A form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field”. 

Most promotions take place on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook. I’m writing this guide following my experience in my previous company promoting a consumer social app in the US. I tested influencer marketing as one of our user acquisition tactics. We worked with about 10 influencers who used Youtube or Instagram as their main channel. We did the process of hiring them alone, as well as with an influencer marketing agency to compare results. 

Influencer marketing platforms

There are many influencer marketing platforms that connect you to influencers such as SocialBakers, Upfluence to name a few, there are many more.

The idea is simple. You post what you need on these platforms, and basically start getting offers. A lot of the offers are automatic and create a lot of noise.

Actively search for yourself

From my experience, it was better to look for the influencers myself by typing the relevant hashtags on Instagram or Youtube. You get to see some of their content and understand if it’s a good fit by their style. Eventually, it’s faster since you are pro-active and don’t waste time waiting and checking non-relevant creators. 

How to find relevant hashtags

SparkToro is a great tool (with a free plan) that lets you enter a certain topic, website, social accounts, and outputs information about your audience like which websites or podcasts they listen to, what Youtube accounts they follow, and also what common hashtags they use. This is very helpful. I reviewed SparkToro here.

Searching for influencers on Google

Once you found the relevant hashtags, you can use Google advanced search operators to search Google for relevant profiles.

For example, when I do this search

I tell Google to search for UK med students only on Instagram.com.

If I’ll add words like “business inquiries” I increase the chance of finding relevant people with many followers since they usually are the ones who will be relevant for business inquiries.

After you have a list of influencers

When you find someone relevant, there are tools that can help you understand their numbers (average views, average engagement, and even a ballpark of the price per post). The best tool I found was Markwatch (mainly for youtube, but also for Instagram), but there are more (look for Chrome extensions that analyze Instagram accounts). 

You can also do it the old-fashioned way:

1. Check out previous content created by the influencer and calculate the average views, likes, and comments of their last 10 posts. 

2. Give comments 2 points and likes 1 point when you check the engagement. 

3. Don’t take into account content which has far too many views, it might be promoted. 

4. Also, pay attention to how much time passed to get the number of views from the day the content was posted. If you want fast results (and less focused on long-tail effect) that’s an important part. 

You’ll find the contact details of most influencers in their bio (if not, learn how to find emails in this post). In most cases, it won’t be their personal email but a business one. Set a list of the influencers and send them all one email. I used Mixmax (here’s a Mixmax review) to do so but there are other options out there like ConvertKit which I currently use (I reviewed ConvertKit as well).

Send 1-2 more emails to those who didn’t reply.  Below is an example of an email I sent. Keep the email short, but give enough info and try to make the process shorter (instead of waiting for them to answer and then set a call, I tried to get a time for the call in their first reply). 

Some might think a call isn’t needed, but I wanted to know if the influencer installed the app and if he’s truly excited about it. If he/she isn’t, I can sense it easily in the call (got this important tip from other marketers as well). 

Additionally, ask them for screenshots of their demographics. This is something you don’t see in the email below, but can totally be part of the initial email.

Email Template (below is the example I sent)

Hey [Name],

I'm [your name] from [your company] (very concisely give credibility to your company) and I'd like to offer you to become a paid content creator on [your company]. [Explain what your company/product does concisely and clearly]. Below are a few examples of [your product, show the influencer what will he/she promote]:

[link 1]

[link 2]

We think you'd be a great fit and wanted to offer you to create [tell the influencer what you expect to get from them (one post/day etc.)]

If you are interested, let's set a call? Can you send 2 options for a call?

Best,

Arik

Here’s the full version we sent (obviously we included the name when we reached out)



If you are not talking to big influencers (>1M followers), and you are looking to get many influencers at once, try to come with a fixed price and say this is your budget. It’s more efficient. We paid them a CPM (cost per 1,000 views) of US$ 12-25 and offered a bonus on every follower they get inside our app (someone who follows their profile in our app) just to give more motivation (we offered a fixed price which reflected the CPMs I mentioned). 

Make sure you remember that number of followers ≠ unique impressions. It’s more like 1%-15% (best cases) of the followers. Try to set a simple contract they can sign online (see below the influencer contract template I shared). Make sure they won’t remove the post after a while. If they insist, make sure the pricing reflects that (and also ask yourself if this influencer is the right one for you). 

As for payment, some influencers requested all upfront, some 50% and some were willing to get it after the post. One influencer didn’t post although they got paid and simply didn’t reply. Add a demand to get screenshots of the post/story results a day or so after they were posted. This is super important! 

As for the creative, you can ask to review it before they post it, but if you feel you are talking to someone who is excited about your product, give them creative freedom. They know their audience better than you. 

Agents and influencers will try to push you towards posting an Instagram story and not a post. One of the benefits of a story is that the influencer can attach a link and make a call to action that will lead to the destination (app store for example). 

They do it because it’s only for 24 hours (make sure they don’t remove a post after 24 hours if you paid for a post and not a story) and it’s generally less visible. We saw X7 impressions on a post vs. a story. I’m not saying Stories are bad. The fact you can send people outside when they swipe up is important in some cases. But make sure you don’t overpay since you’ll get fewer impressions.

This is the Influencer contract template, make your own copy (file>make a copy) and adjust accordingly (this isn’t legal advice, just something we used that worked well). 

In order to track results use a trackable link (AppsFlyer is one (expansive) example if you want to track app installs) and associate it with your app analytics (Amplitude, Mixpanel etc.). You want to know if the promotion is meeting its goals. In our case, we wanted to know how does the retention compares to other sources, as well as which influencer brings the best results. If your goal is to get sales, there are referral tools you can use to know who got to your site from the Influencer’s post. You can also enable the influencer offer a special coupon code to their followers and track their impact that way.

We tried both. Obviously it depends on the influencer marketing agency (the one we chose was highly recommended by two reliable sources), how much time you have to deal with it, your budget and more factors. Since we tested several acquisition channels and influencers’ marketing could be significant, we wanted to do a small A/B test between us and them. We got better results in all aspects (including negotiation and pricing) and it didn’t save too much time (you still have to be involved to some extent). If this channel was beneficial for us, we would probably keep it in-house (even hiring someone for that would have been an option), and giving different influencer marketing agencies a try once in a while.

Influencers’ marketing is extremely time-consuming. You need to find the right influencers, contact them (and get them to answer), negotiate, work on the message, explain your goal and make sure they execute properly.

The effect of influencers’ marketing is limited. You see 150K followers and think you’ll get great outreach + good results since the influencer has credibility with their followers right? Not necessarily. We have chosen relevant Instagram and Youtube influencers which had anywhere from 30K-300K followers. In one example, an extremely relevant influencer with which we had a very good working relationship got us less than 5 app install from all of his/her 50K followers. The post got 51K impressions (it was featured in Instagram’s Explore section) because his audience really engaged with the post, which is very good, but it’s a whole different thing to leave Instagram or Youtube in order to download an app. 

As one of the more professional and reliable agents told me:

“it doesn't matter how "influential" a person is; to get a new user to leave the main platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook to visit a new website or download a new app is very difficult. People are bombarded by posts and content on a daily basis, so to make that extra step of doing something out of the ordinary (download a new app) is like a chore for them! The only successful campaigns I've seen are when there is a big-budget involved, and this means recruitment of 100s of people”.

I’m less optimistic about influencers marketing (or should we call them creators marketing?). I would think twice before using them in order to drive social app installs, and if I did, I’d make sure I have enough budget for many influencers in order to create that social feeling EVERYONE is using my app (critical mass). I’d be more open towards this if I’m selling something and the ROI results are super clear.