In every niche exists tastemakers. These people are amassing powerful followings via Instagram, Twitter, Youtube and host of other social networking sites. With just one recommendation of a product, brand or event, they can alter the purchase decisions of their online community. Lindsay Fultz, influencer marketing expert, will give awesome insight and tips on how to partner with these influencers to get potential customers to choose your brand.

[smart_track_player url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/startsomeshift/SSS_005.mp3″ title=”Finding Influencers & Getting Them to Sell Your Brand” artist=”Lindsay Fultz & Lara McCulloch” ]

In this episode, you’ll learn more about:

• How to find influencers…even in a very niche market
• The secret formula to identify a REAL influencer who can create massive awareness and action for your brand
• How to get them interested in your brand, even when they get hundreds of offers from other brands every week
• The legalities of working with influencers and how to avoid being sued or alienating your potential customers
• How Lindsay generated $50,000 in charitable donations through 1 influencer
• How she leveraged Influencers to generate massive conference awareness
• Specific wording and tactics she used to sign up A-list influencers for her campaigns

Links, tools & resources:

Lindsay’s Sample Influencer Marketing Campaign Template FTC Guidelines for Influencer Marketing Lindsay’s Twitter and Instagram Template (Video and Pictures) The Playlist Live video (participants to use #AskAnInfluencer on Twitter) How to calculate an Influencer’s Engagement Ratio:

• An influencer with an engagement ration of 10% or higher is considered elite.
• Calculate the # of retweets, favourites, comments, likes, shares and then the quality of engagements (i.e. are comments about the content posted or pictured? Or are they “1st to comment” type of engagements? If they are about the post and what is pictured, chances are if they engage with your brand in social the comments will also be branded and provide a lift.)
• In terms of the time period to determine engagement #s, I always look at everything above the fold of a page mobile and web and then back 10-20 or so posts/pictures/videos, depending on platform.

Lindsay’s DOs and DON’Ts for Influencers… DOs:

• Give campaign goal/theme/guidelines to influencers
• You have creative control.
• Submit (insert type of media) that are authentic to your personal brand.
• I have them submit content for review x amount of days prior and review and approve. I send 3-5 samples to the brand for them to also review and ease fears of not being in creative control.
• Give influencers their own individual tracking link. Custom bitlys are memorable and look less ad-like. If you’re promoting a product, influencer promo codes are nice and trackable. Bonus: give them extra product to giveaway so they can ask their fans to do upload a picture using a hashtag. Great for user-generated-content.
• In addition to having them be social influencer reporters and cover the even pre, during, post etc with exclusives put the influencers on a panel. At the Long Beach Convention Center Sight, Sound, Space relaunch the social influencer reporters closed out the education sessions with a master panel session that David Adler moderated. During media day, the influencers also got interviewed by top event industry publications which resulted in additional coverage for their brand.

DON’Ts:

• Submit ads.
• Don’t post any ads x amount of days prior to campaign and x amount of days post campaign. (Typically I say 48hrs).

Thank you so much for listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons to the left of the post. You can also share the love by taking a moment to rate/review the Start Some Shift podcast! And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic updates!