Today, social media promotion is an essential part of the marketing strategy of any business. Sponsorships and collaborations with creators now are seen as one of the most efficient ways of marketing and have almost substituted traditional paid ads.
However, many business owners, mainly because they assume it’s expensive and they don’t know how to find the perfect match, they dismiss the idea of creator marketing as their main marketing strategy.
In this blog post, we’ll prove that hiring a creator has thousands of benefits for a business and how you can do that for your brand.
But in the meantime, let’s first find out what exactly are social media creators.
What Are Creators?
First of all, creators are intuitive storytellers who are crucial to the advertising ecosystem, especially on today’s social media platforms. Typically, they are public figures, industry experts, or celebrities, but they can also be proficient videographers, graphic designers, photographers, videographers, or video editors that businesses can use for different advertising objectives.
Even though their creativity is the main focus of their work, they stand on the line between business and creativity, navigating the available business opportunities. According to the 2019 Survey from Rakuten Marketing made in the U.S, 66% of consumers trust a product as long as a content creator recommends or promotes a brand. The same survey shows that 89% of women are inspired to make a purchase based on a recommendation from creators, compared to 83% of men.
Download List Of All E-Commerce Platforms
Additionally, creators are well-informed and experienced in creating product-driven, as well as lifestyle content.
Finally, they have a unique style of expressing themselves, varying from a specific product category to a specialized field, and have well-versed content for different brands in a variety of industries.
How to Find Relevant Creators
In order to find the right creator for your business, you need to check out these points:
– Relevance of audience (does the creator have a relevant audience for your business)
– Engagement metrics (how much she/he engages with their followers)
– And, number of followers (what is the size of their following on the relevant social media platform)
In the next part, we’ll help you find the best creators from which your business can have the most benefit on social media platforms.
1. Check Your Followers
Let’s assume that your business already has some kind of social media presence. If that’s the case you can try to find some creators among your own fans. You can easily look into your follower list for users with 1,000 followers or more, particularly on Instagram and Twitter, the two best platforms for this method. You can use these 9 tools to track your Instagram followers.
The next step is to inspect their profiles and pick apart those that have content related to your business. Eventually, you can approach the creator with different kinds of collaboration suggestions, such as discount coupons or free products in exchange for promotional posts.
There are many reasons why you should go with this approach. First of all, the creator is already familiar with your business and there won’t be any need for additional explanation. Furthermore, since they are already your fans, their post will be completely natural and authentic, and you can easily convince them to post about your brand.
On the other hand, with this approach, you might struggle with finding people with a niche related to your business. Also, opting to collaborate with content creators from your circle, there is a possibility that you can miss more influential creators.
2. Check Your Competitors Followers
If you don’t already have followers, or your competitors have a larger following on Social Media, it would be great to have a tool to find them. Just about three out of four marketers in the U.S. believe that creators have a huge impact and drive sales for brands, and more importantly, 67% say that they are able to tell when creator campaigns directly drive sales.
For finding creators you can use Influencers Club products and get insights into your competitors’ followers and locate your relevant content creator there. Their research team of 40+ people will find the emails of your competitor followers.
Additionally, there are 29 other data points, such as phone numbers, biographies, categories, and the number of followers which can be used to find the perfect creator for your brand.
After you have the list of all the creators you need, you can utilize the emails and get in contact for collaboration.
You can check out Influencers Club’s pricing here.
3. Use Bloggers to Promote your Business
These days there are more than 570 million blogs on the Internet, with more than 30 million users by 2020 in the USA alone. Data shows that:
-77% of people regularly read blogs online
-a successful blog takes 4 hours to make
-every day around 7 million blog posts are published
-up to 67% of bloggers who post everyday claim that they are successful
-61% of users in the U.S. have bought a product or a service after reading a blog
With so many bloggers on the internet, you can find the creator that fits you the most among niche bloggers, especially the ones who are located in a certain region. And the answer for that, like for most other things is the almighty Google search.
For example, if you have a clothing brand in Toronto, Canada you could do a Google search for fashion bloggers + your location (or even top fashion micro-influencers).
Let’s say we choose Jodi Lopez, number 5 from the list above. The first step is to open their Instagram, and in the description, there is an email and link to her webpage.
After we follow the link to her webpage, we can easily find the contact button and send a message with an offer for collaboration.
If you’re not sure how to approach bloggers, follow these next steps and you should have great success.
– Start with an informal introduction and be direct in your communication. Tell them up front if you want them to write a review of your product or service.
– Investigate their profiles beforehand and see what kind of collaborations they did before and if they match with your brand, so you can save time and ensure you have a mutual interest in working together
– Be sure to be specific when you’re reaching you and the offer you’re willing to give
– Be personal and focus the communication on each individual blogger, avoiding the generic type emails that we regularly get
– Don’t be afraid to show creativity and an exciting angle to encourage their evolvement (in example: promo discounts, giveaways, product reviews, how-to guides)
Other than Google search, you can use Alltop (https://alltop.com) to find your perfect partner, to create a list with all of their information. Alltop is a website content aggregator, collecting blog posts and content from popular websites all in one place. This provides a simple and effective way to scan through what you need, and then click through the link to be taken directly to a specific blog. It’s important to note that Alltop is completely free to use, but is mainly text-based, so you can’t expect a lot of photos or graphics there.
4. Use Hashtags to Find Creators
Instagram is the best social media platform to perform hashtag research in order to find social media creators, even in 2024. Posts with at least one hashtag statistically get 12.6% more engagement than posts without hashtags. They help content creators get more followers, improve engagement rates and build a community around businesses, but can also contribute to helping you find exactly what you need if done properly. So, let’s dive in.
The most popular hashtags on Instagram are used daily by millions of people. The most popular ones like #love, #instagood, or #photooftheday won’t get you anywhere. You need to be specific with it. Rather than using the most popular ones, it’s better to find and use more niche, smaller hashtags that have engaged an audience that is relevant to the industry your business is in.
For example, your business is a workout gym, avoid searching just the hashtag #gym since it has almost 210 million posts.
Let’s say we choose the hashtag #gymrats, which has 1 million views. After a quick browse, we can find the perfect creator that can promote our gym.
Using this method you may familiarize yourself with content creators who have significant reach and following, and at the same time avoid the creators that have millions of followers and are out of your reach. If you have trouble finding those niche and industry-specific hashtags, Hashtagify: Find and Analyse Top Twitter and Instagram Hashtags is a great tool for this research. It can help you understand what hashtags are popular at this moment, what are the monthly and weekly trends, and the recent popularity of certain hashtags.
5. Use every channel available
Other than Instagram and Twitter, quality creators can be found on many other platforms. Google Alerts and Google searches for keywords relevant to your business are really helpful. There are many Facebook groups that can be related to your business, as well as LinkedIn groups. It has to be noted that as platforms, LinkedIn and Facebook are unalike to Instagram and Twitter, and the creators behave differently there.
How Much Should You Pay Creators?
Social media experts agree that there is a big value in using creators for your marketing efforts. Their valuable insights and connection to their followers can give your business a significant brand awareness at a cost much lower than paid advertising, meanwhile getting authentic and organic content for your brand.
In the beginning of influencer marketing, popular social media stars in exchange for free products would take on brand partnerships. But, those days are over – and while there are many smaller creators who would still exchange free products for promotion, today’s most popular Instagram content creators are charging a lot of money to create content for brands, as their main source of income.
In 2024, these costs can go from as little as $100 up to $1 million per post. The price range is so large simply because there are a variety of factors that impact the prices.
In today’s market, there are two types of creators:
– micro-creators (between 1000 and 100,000 followers on a specific platform)
– macro-creators (more than 100,000 followers)
1. Facebook
Facebook, with more than 1 billion daily users, provides creators and companies extraordinary access to consumers. Potential prices on the platform can average $25, per 1000 followers. So, a creator with 100,000 could charge $2,500 and the price for someone with 1 million followers could be $25,000 per post. There are some cases in which these rates may exceed, for example, if you want a video created by the creator, or if you want them to visit your location.
2. Instagram
Approximately 80 percent of the 1 billion users of Instagram follow a business. Most of the creators are exactly there, and the prices start from $10 a post, per 1000 followers. Prices may vary of course, and some celebrities charge more because of their reputation outside of Instagram like professional soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, who earns $750,000 per post published for his 140 million followers.
And while these kinds of partnerships can give your brand a lot of exposure, sometimes it is more beneficial to partner with a creator from a niche market. The real gain here is based on that micro-creators can speak directly to your audience and have a lower price point of $10 a post, per 1000 followers.
You can use this cost calculator to check the marketing prices for Instagram. (https://influencermarketinghub.com/instagram-money-calculator/)
3. Twitter
Twitter has a smaller audience than Facebook and Instagram, with 330 million users. This platform offers the lowest creator marketing prices, with $2 per post, per 1000 followers. For example, a creator with 100,000 followers could charge $200 per post.
Generally, if creators on Twitter have more than one million followers, they’re well-known outside of this social media, which will make the prices go up but can provide your brand with extra exposure.
Creators with the mass following have a wide range of interests and a lot of people from different backgrounds follow them, which could mean that you can focus on a specific targeted audience, and that collaboration doesn’t give any long-term value for your brand.
4. Blog
Many of the creators on social media maintain a personal blog. With it, they can connect with your target audience in a different way, and that could cost around $60 per post, per 1000 unique visitors for this service.
Factors like the industry you’re in, the topic, and the length of the blog may factor in shifting the price points.
Blogs can deliver the best results, and while more expensive than other platforms, blogs can be 37% more effective for creator marketing than other social media platforms, like Facebook.
Use Influencer Club to Find Creators at Scale
Influencers Club is the largest influencer database in the world with millions of contacts with email, phone numbers, and 25 other data points.
It’s the best place for finding emails from your ideal creators and influencers. By combining filters like a number of followers, niche, keywords in bio, and tons of other techniques we’re able to narrow down our search based on your specific requirements.
Book a free strategy call with our expert team and get more information on how to use these emails.
