One of the more sobering facts of starting a small business is that you can have the best product, the best designed store and the best customer service, but you still may not sell anything. One of the hardest parts is getting those first few people to see your brand. You’re often competing with big-time industry giants who spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on huge media buys and pay-per-click ads. If you have a limited budget, bidding against corporations on ad networks can quickly drain your cash reserves without much return.
That can be helped with collaborations between creators. One of the easiest and most effective tactics for expanding brands today is influencer outreach. Instead of shouting into the void of cold digital ads, you tap into the trust, reputation, and organic reach that content producers have built up with their fans over years. When a creative puts your product out there you get a warm introduction to an audience that’s ready to listen.
It doesn’t have to be a chilly, uncomfortable effort to connect with creators. It really comes down to a few easy steps: Look for compatible mates. Send heartfelt messages. Bringing real value. Build genuine, lasting relationships. At VA Staff, we often help growing companies to simplify creator research, build outreach pipelines and run successful influencer campaigns without the hassle.
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This is a helpful guide to handling creative partnerships and beginning to build brand awareness.
1. Design your campaign strategy and outreach objectives
You have to know what success really looks like for your business, before you ever send an email or DM. Trying to reach out blindly often leads to confusion and wasted product samples.
And also spend some time defining your main goals:
- Brand Awareness: Are you just trying to get more folks to know your name and visit your website?
- Social Proof & Content: Do you want to feature great pictures and videos from influencers on your own social media accounts?
- Direct Sales: Want to create immediate checkouts with trackable links or custom discount codes?
- Grow Your Followers: Want to grow your own brand’s social media platforms?
Define your main goal first, linking it to core metrics like site traffic, code adoption, or follower growth. Link this goal to a particular event, such as the launch of a new product or a seasonal sale or an advertising campaign of a signature product. This makes measuring your work much easier and keeps it grounded in reality.
2. Find Your Perfect Influencer Persona
Not all accounts with a large number of followers will perform well for your business. For real results, you need to visualize your ideal mate.
Think about the tone of voice, visual style and overall feel that will work best for your business. A line of minimalist skincare with a pastel motif requires a very different voice than a rough outdoor gear company.
Instead of hunting down accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, look for nano-influencers (1K to 10K followers) and micro-influencers (10K to 50K followers). Creators in these ranges tend to have much higher engagement rates, because their content feels real, intimate and relatable. Look for people who are already talking about topics related to your niche, whether it’s local pet care, sustainable fashion, or home cooking.
3. Discover and Assess Prospective Content Creators
Now you know who you want to target, it’s time to be specific and start screening profiles. Huge numbers of followers are very misleading, look at how their audience behaves not the number itself.
Quick things to look for while browsing:
- Read the comments. Sincerity in comments: Is it just a sea of generic emojis and bot spam, or are there real people asking real questions and giving intelligent answers?
- Posting Frequency: Do you post a lot or do you go weeks without posting?
- Past Collaborations: See how they do sponsored posts. Do their sponsored features seem natural or do they just give the impression that you are watching a commercial?
- Where Your Audience Is: The bulk of your audience should live in the same areas you serve with your goods.
As you locate suitable candidates, put together a short list of prospects including the creator’s name, email address, social media accounts and a brief description of why they impressed you.
4. Once you’ve engaged with their content, reach out.
Cold emails that aren’t completely cold perform a million times better. It might just take a few days to get a creator’s attention and dramatically increase your open and response rates.
Access the primary creator profiles from within your business profile. Engage with their posts for a week or two and leave relevant, sincere comments. I really enjoyed watching your video and learning about [particular topic. I was wondering if you’ve ever tried [similar method or strategy].
Plus, when your name comes up in their inbox later, they’ll be much more likely to think of you as an active follower, not a stranger asking for a favor.
5. Construct a Transparent and Fair Value Proposition
It takes real time, work, and talent to create quality material. Moreover, if you want artists to promote your company, you must give them something of value for their time.
Choose the option that is best suited to your current budget:
- Product Gifting: This is when you give away free items in exchange for an honest review or post. This works well if your product has a high retail value or if you have nano-influencers.
- Affiliate Commissions: Earn a percentage of each sale made using the creator’s unique code or link.
- Flat Fees: A flat fee for each story, video, or post.
- Special Discounts: Offer a discount code that is exclusive to the community of creators.
Be very upfront with what you’re offering and what kind of deliverables you’re looking for. Are you looking for a couple stories of updates? A quick video?
6. Write a Personalized, Engaging Cold Pitch
When you’re ready to send it, make sure your message is kind, direct and genuinely personal. Creators are frequently sent copy-and-paste templates and can easily spot a generic mass message.
Begin with their birth name. Post a recent post, video or piece of content that greatly inspired you. Then, give a two- to three-sentence summary of your company. Tell them what you do, what you stand for and why you think your brand would be a complement to what they already have. Don’t be a hard seller, be casual.
7. Write an action-oriented subject line or opening
If you are sending an email, the subject line is the only thing that will determine whether it is opened or deleted. Skip the boring ones that usually come through as automated marketing emails like “Paid Partnership Inquiry” or “Business Opportunity”.
Instead, opt for topic lines that sound friendly and natural:
- I thoroughly enjoyed your last video on [Topic], [Creator Name]!
- Quick question for [Creator Name] + [Your Brand Name]
- Sending a little gift to [Creator’s Name].
If you’re sending direct messages on TikTok or Instagram, keep the same informal tone in your first line. Make sure the brief message preview that appears on their screen displays their name or a unique aspect of their page.
8. Make your pitch clear & sharp
Nobody wants to be greeted with a big wall of text from an unknown brand. Break your pitch up into short paragraphs and keep the formatting clean so that someone can quickly scan it in twenty seconds.
Keep your proposal simple. No strict norms or rules at the start. Don’t start talking about the details and the contract stuff until they have shown some interest. “Would you be interested in getting a free package to try out?” is an example of a friendly and casual inquiry to end your note that makes answering obvious.or “Is it possible for me to provide a brief description of the way our creator program operates?”
9. Streamline Your Follow-Up and Outreach
Outreach management is a busy moving thing. If you message thirty creators without a mechanism in place, you’ll miss great interactions.
Create a simple plan for tracking and staying on track:
[Target List] -> [Pitch Sent] -> [Follow-Up Needed] -> [Terms Agreed] -> [Product Shipped] -> [Content Live]
Keep a record of all communications, responses, follow-up dates, and package tracking. Don’t panic if a creator doesn’t get back to you right away. Inboxes get clogged up. Then, send a friendly check-in message three to five business days after that.
At VA Staff, we build these very tracking tools and follow up daily so business owners just come in when it’s time to verify the relationship.
10. Have a clear campaign objectives and deliverables.
When you have a creator who’s agreed to work with you, send them a basic creative brief. This will prevent future misunderstandings and make sure everyone knows what is expected of them.
Your brief should contain:
- Highlights and features of the product to emphasize.
- Account tags, appropriate hashtags and dedicated trackable links.
- Types of Content and Best Times to Post
- Usage rights: Are you allowed to repost their content on your pages or use it in ads?
Guidelines are useful but it’s just as useful to let creators express themselves how they want to. People follow them because they have that personality. People will scroll past a post if it sounds like a corporate script.
11. Campaign Performance & ROI Monitoring
Once the postings are live, go back and look at your numbers to see how it all turned out compared to your goals.
Watch for these easy warning signs:
- Custom Promo Codes: How many orders were generated from the creator’s code?
- UTM Links: How many people clicked on their link to visit your website?
- Engagement Metrics: Number of Likes, Comments, Shares and Saves for the content?
Use these results to see what worked and what didn’t. You may discover that informal video reviews generate twice as many purchases as professional photos, or that micro-creators in a specific sub-niche surpass their peers. Use those lessons to make your next outreach effort even better.
12. Build long term partnerships with Creators
The best results for influencer marketing come from longer-term partnerships rather than one-off posts. Viewers see consistently the same brand over several months and the trust naturally develops.
Send a quick thank you note each time a post goes live Give credit, repost the post on your company’s official channels and leave a positive comment on their upload. Deliver agreed cash and complimentary items on time. Encourage your top creators who generate a lot of engagement and sales to become long-term brand ambassadors so you can grow together.
Are You Ready for Influencer Marketing? Finding How to
Before you reach out to creators, make sure your company’s backend can handle the increased traffic and attention.
Look for these simple signs of readiness:
- Product Quality: Your fantastic product or service is prepared to be tested and appraised by real users.
- Website Optimization: Your ecommerce store is mobile friendly, fast and appears safe.
- Stock & Budget: You have a small amount of money for shipping/creator fees and some extra stock to give away.
- Customer Profile: You know the qualities of your ideal customer and the kind of content they like online.
- Management Capacity: You have a system or team member to facilitate communications, deliver packages and answer questions from creators on a day-to-day basis.
How to reach out to Influencers
Are you ready to start your first campaign? Here’s a useful checklist to help you organize your daily activities:
- Keep your online image current: To keep your brand looking fresh and polished, make sure you keep your website and social media accounts up to date.
- Choose Your Offer: Select to provide commissions, flat rates or freebies.
- Make a list of your goals: Identify micro-influencers (20-50k follower range) who align with your target audience.
- Make Your Outreach Work: Welcoming and malleable, with lots of space for customization.
- Target list engagement: Like and comment on a few days’ worth of recent posts.
- Send out your pitches: As you send out your tailored messages, log each outreach on your tracker.
- Follow Up: Please follow up if you don’t hear back in a few days.
- Send and Monitor: Reach out to interested creators, send your products and monitor the campaign’s effectiveness.
Summary
You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on eye-catching advertisements or get large celebrity endorsements to reach out to small businesses. It’s about finding relevant stories, delivering the right value, building authentic human connections. Collaborating with micro-creators who have a dedicated fan base can assist in establishing authentic brand awareness and generating a consistent flow of customers to your store. Start small, send personal messages and be consistent and over time those individual connections will grow into a powerful group of brand advocates.
FAQ
So what’s the difference between a macro-influencer and a micro-influencer?
Micro-influencers tend to have between 10,000 and 50,000 followers, while macro-influencers range from 100,000 to a million or more. Micro-influencers typically have more tight-knit communities and better engagement rates, making them a great option for small businesses on a tight budget. Macro-influencers are much more expensive and their recommendations might not seem as personal, but they have a massive following.
What is the contribution of merchandise or cash from a small business to a partnership?
It really depends on the size of the account, what types of materials are required and industry norms. Nano influencers (fewer than 10k followers) are often happy to do a basic story or post in exchange for a free product ($50-100 value). Along with charging a nominal price of $100-$500 per post depending on the amount of work involved, consider giving the product away for free to larger micro-accounts. Asking creators what they normally charge is a good way to start a conversation.
Should I DM influencers on social media or send them an email?
In general, it is better to have business conversations rather than email, especially if a creator has a contact email address in their social media bio. This makes it much easier to keep track of information and attachments. But if no email, then a nice DM to me on Instagram or TikTok is fine. You might want to try starting a quick and casual conversation and keep the DMs a little shorter.
How long does an influencer outreach campaign work?
It generally takes three to six weeks from the time you send your first outreach message to the time the material goes online. That schedule involves back-and-forth communications, mailing sample packages, content production and final document approvals. Most often you’ll see a bump in site traffic, new followers, and sales in the first 24-48 hours after a creator posts.
What if the influencer doesn’t respond to my first message?
If you don’t hear back from me right away, it’s ok. Messages get pushed down quickly. Creators are inundated with notifications all day. If you haven’t heard anything, try a short, friendly note three to five days later that refers back to your original letter. If they ignore you the second time, just move on to the next creators on your list. Be polite. They may yet be a great campaign partner in the future!
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