How to Ask an Influencer to Promote Your Product

 Even if you are confident in the quality of your product line and are excited to partner with influencers, it may feel intimidating to contact influencers out of the blue with a collaboration opportunity. 

When considering how to ask an influencer to promote your product, what do you say? And what is the best way to reach them?

These questions are common for beginner influencer marketers. And the good news is that it is easier than you think. We’ll share best practices of how to find the right influencers, provide ideas on what to say and how to say it to partner with the best influencers that align with your brand.

The search to find the right influencers

In most cases, working with the right influencers is the key to your campaign success. Your influencers don’t just need to be authentic content curators, they also need to be a good fit for your brand.

Avoid influencers that are willing to promote anything.

First, it’s important to know that there are an increasing number of aspiring influencers that are quick to promote and less aware of how promoting anything “off the street” can negatively impact their personal brand. 

The influencers you want are the ones that put values and quality content first, brand promotions second. When these influencers do promote products, they demonstrate a clear affinity for what they are posting about and use that brand excitement to achieve a better connection with their audience.

Find influencers that align with your brand and would use your product.

There needs to be a significant amount of relevance between the lifestyle that the influencer promotes and your products. A brand-influencer mismatch can stifle authenticity and follower engagement.

It’s essential that your influencers know how to use your products. When influencers take this approach, they will resonate better with their audience. It also makes your job easier since the influencer clearly loves your brand – it’s just a matter of coordinating campaign details.

For example, Lume Cube creates versatile lighting solutions. Its product naturally fits with professional photographers and remote workers that need lighting for video calls. That’s why Lume Cube targeted influencers with these characteristics and has seen remarkable results through their influencer program.

Check the influencer’s engagement rate.

Follower counts can help you gauge the size of an influencer’s audience, but the number of followers can’t tell you how connected that influencer is with members of their audience. To measure the relationship strength between influencers and their followers, you need to check engagement metrics.

Engagements are predominantly likes, comments, and post shares. After partnering with an influencer, you’ll have access to more engagement metrics, such as link clicks and coupon code redemptions.

But when recruiting influencers, you should primarily examine an influencer’s post comments and shares. Likes can be a helpful metric, so long as you understand that liking a post may not indicate much by way of thoughtful interactions between influencers and followers. But when a follower takes time to comment or share, you can view those engagements as quality interactions.

It’s important to gather as many different engagement metrics as possible so that you get a fuller view of that influencer’s audience relationships. For example, if you notice that an influencer is using campaign-specific hashtags, you can perform a search to see how popular that hashtag is. Also, remember that each social platform offers users different options to engage posts and other users.

If you’re using an influencer marketing automation tool , the platform will automatically calculate influencer engagement metrics for you. To manually calculate an engagement rate, simply follow the formula below:

Total number of engagements / Total number of followers = Engagement Rate

Perform an influencer analysis.

Sometimes you can distinguish between good and not-so-good influencers by looking at their latest posts and audience responses. But many things that set quality influencers apart are not that obvious.

That’s why many marketers employ influencer analysis tools. You can perform in-depth influencer research by looking at post consistency, aesthetics, and relevance between sponsored posts and the influencer’s personal brand.

Another popular technique is influencer mapping. With this approach, you can compare multiple influencers and rate their effectiveness based on the following metrics:

• Overall influence
  • Prominence
  • Reach
  • Value-alignment
  • Authority
• Overall opinion
  • Opinion consistency (on values and issues)
  • Willingness to engage on those opinions