Wondering if influencers can help you grow your business? Wondering how to work with influencers?
To explore influencer marketing, I interview Adi Arezzini on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.
Adi is an influencer marketing expert. She’s the CEO and co-founder of Teami Blends—a lifestyle brand that creates products inspired by the natural benefits of tea.
You’ll learn Adi’s strategy for working with both micro-and macro-influencers, find out how to research and reach out to influencers, and discover what types of offers work best for influencer marketing campaigns.
Listen to the Podcast Now
This article is sourced from the Social Media Marketing Podcast, a top marketing podcast. Listen or subscribe below.
Scroll to the end of the article for links to important resources mentioned in this episode.
After departing from the military, which she had joined at age 19, Adi began looking into a digestive issue that was causing her discomfort. Through that journey, she developed a 30-day tea-based detox program, which was the catalyst for starting her own business, Teami Blends, in 2014.
She was 23 years old and shipping tea out of her bedroom with no idea how to get her products into Whole Foods or other retail stores.
She and her business partner noticed that a lot of people were promoting products and brands on Instagram, and decided to use the platform for their own marketing. Adi didn’t have the money for photographers or videographers, nor did she have influence of her own, so they decided to use the influence of others to promote their products.
A lot of people talk about influencer marketing as an idea but they don’t know what it actually takes to make it happen. Adi started with an Excel spreadsheet and a lot of time and patience. Through trial and error, she discovered an influencer marketing method that works.
Today, Teami works with approximately 1,000 influencers every month on an ongoing basis and has grown into a multimillion-dollar brand. The majority of sales come from influencer marketing, and 70%–80% of people find out about Teami for the first time via influencer marketing.
Why Working With Influencers Succeeds
The beauty of influencer marketing is that it works on any social media platform. For instance, in addition to Instagram, Teami is working with YouTube influencers because that content generates perpetual views that can be indexed in search.
The value of influencer marketing—especially to smaller businesses without huge social media profiles—is two-fold.
The first advantage is the power of being recommended by someone people trust. People will almost always prefer a word-of-mouth recommendation from someone they know or trust to an ad featuring a stranger.
The second advantage is social proof. When an influencer recommends your product, their audience will ask questions about your product, check out your social profile, and visit your website. Teami gets thousands of new followers every week, not from growth tactics that involve hashtags and giveaways, but from massive social media exposure via the influencers they work with.
The combined downstream effect of those mentions and that social proof is that even if your product isn’t right for someone who hears about it, they’ll remember your brand when it’s right for someone they know.
Micro-Influencers vs. Macro-Influencers: What’s the Difference?
Influencers are often categorized by audience size. In Adi’s business, she views anyone with between 5,000 and 100,000 followers as a micro-influencer, and anyone with a following in excess of 100,000 as a macro-influencer.
Depending on your product and your target market, you’ll have a pool of both micro- and macro-influencers to work with.
In Adi’s experience, you can work with micro-influencers to create a commission-based partnership, which is extremely important for profitability. Macro-influencers, on the other hand, typically get paid up front; macro-influencers will rarely work with you on a commission basis.
Influencers make the jump from commission to a flat fee when they’ve reached a certain level of influence and performance, and feel that they deserve to be paid up front.
If you’re going to pay a fee up front, the key is to negotiate and understand the risk involved versus the anticipated return. You have to be okay with the possibility that you’ll lose that money. Each month, Teami tests new macro-influencer relationships and assesses who was valuable at a given rate and who wasn’t. They find a few who were very worth the money and a few who tank. She notes that while she’s at a level where she can take those risks, she wouldn’t suggest it for someone just getting started.
Influencer Marketing: Strategy and Tips
When she started, Adi worked only with micro-influencers and she suggests others follow her lead to gain confidence in choosing which types of influencer accounts work for you and which don’t.
She wants to emphasize that working with micro-influencers can be very simple.
First, you find and reach out to your micro-influencers and agree to partner. Then, you send them your product and follow up to make sure they receive it. You agree on a time for them to post about your product and give them direction on what kind of content you want them to produce—a video, story, picture, selfie, reel, IGTV, and so on.
When considering the creative, it’s important to recognize what’s already working well for an influencer. If someone’s feed is built around pictures of her babies and suddenly a very professional, staged-looking photo of her on the couch holding a product is inserted into her feed, you instantly know it’s an ad and you don’t want to trust that influencer.
Teami actually sends links to content from the influencer’s profile to show examples of what they want the influencer to do. With that direction, they can create the content that seems native or looks organic to their feed.
You also give them a unique discount code to share in their post so you’re able to track sales from their audience. Adi notes that three sales per week is a good average for a micro-influencer working on commission.
Begin by testing 50 initial micro-influencers in slightly different niches, maybe yoga accounts, food accounts, and recipe accounts.
When you identify influencers who are delivering sales, take a deeper look at them. What is it that works for you? Perhaps she’s a mom with a recipe account, is really authentic with her fans, and her fans ask her for a lot of recommendations. At the same time, you may find that micro-influencers niched in yoga didn’t generate any sales so you can remove yoga influencers from your outreach.
Extracted from the publication of Michael Stelzner on Social Media Examiner