Being a startup business, your current focus with marketing goals should be getting your name out there and being noticed by the right people. But, due to the limitations of the budget, you are unable to fulfill your goals.
If you are in the same situation, then Influencer marketing being a highly-efficient and cost-effective marketing method is the perfect opportunity for you.
Influencer marketing for startups can help you enhance your business reach and connect with your potential customers.
Ready to leverage influencer marketing for your startup?
We will discuss everything about it in this blog. Before that let’s take a look at the different types of influencer marketing collaborations you can explore for your startup growth.
Types of Influencer Marketing Collaborations To Deal With
It’s better to understand what are the possible methods for an influencer marketing collaboration for your startup on the basis of your requirements. Here are the different types of collaborations you can deal with.
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Sponsored Collabs
The oldest and most effective way to carry forward an influencer marketing campaign for your startup is by doing sponsored collaborations. Under this type of collaboration, you can share a photo, video, or reel created by the influencer, where the influencer is responsible for promoting your offer or products in a natural way so that the customers don’t feel like the influencer is selling something.
A study by Influencer Marketing Hub stated that micro-influencers are playing an exceptional role for startups and businesses. Even though their followers are fewer than macro or mega influencers, the micro-influencers audience is more engaged and action-taking.
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Affiliate Link Strategy
Startups can also develop a unique affiliate link for various influencers, which the influencers can promote using their channels. This directly helps the startup in enhancing its reach and sales. Affiliate links can be helpful for influencers as well, as they can get around 10-15% of every sale made through their unique affiliate link.
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Giveaways
You can collaborate with influencers to give a giveaway to his/her audience. By developing a giveaway-based influencer marketing program, you can easily create a buzz around your startup’s name.
You can also develop a 2-3 step content for the audience, which the audience would have to fulfill to take part in the giveaway.
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Brand Ambassadors
If you are looking for long-term influencer partnerships, who can help you create your regular social media content, then Brand Ambassador based campaigns are the perfect option for you.
A number of businesses create macro and micro-influencers as their brand ambassadors which enhances their reach and generates sales. If you are unaware of the right ways to leverage influencer marketing for your startup, then make sure to follow the upcoming section.
Effective Ways To Leverage Influencer Marketing For Startups
| Year | Number of Users in Billions |
| 2019 | 3.4 |
| 2020 | 3.6 |
| 2021 | 3.78 |
| 2022 | 3.96 |
| 2023 | 4.12 |
| 2024 | 4.27 |
| 2025 | 4.41 |
More than 90% of marketers suggest investing in influencer marketing and that’s because they understand the potential influencer marketing holds.
Currently, there are more than 3.5 billion active users of social media platforms and by investing in influencer marketing for your startup, you can tap into them easily.
Let’s understand the ways that can help you leverage influencer marketing for your startup.
1- Search For The Right Influencer:
The first step in building an influencer marketing campaign for your startup is to search for the right influencer for your brand. Finding influencers manually is the perfect way to do so. As it gives you a better idea about their engagement rate, the audience following them, how effective their previous influencer marketing campaigns were, and many more.
Working with the right influencer is a key factor behind the success of your campaigns. The influencers who are relevant, highly engaging, authentic, and resonate with your brand values can contribute exceptionally to your influencer marketing campaign.
Factors to consider when selecting influencers for your startup are as follows:
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Audience:
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The major reason behind selecting the right influencer is that you are able to reach your target audience. Hence, it’s important to work with influencers that have a relevant audience for your startup.You can take advantage of the audience demographics feature offered by influencer marketing platforms and tools to identify which influencer has an audience from your target location, age, and gender.
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Engagement Rate:
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Engagement rate is one such metric that shows how well the audience responds to the influencer’s content. To check out the engagement rate on a post of an influencer, you can add likes and comments on a post of the influencer, divide the total by the number of followers the influencer has, and multiply the final result by 100.
You can also use tools to find out the engagement rate of influencers online.
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Relevance:
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Make sure to work with influencers who are a good fit for your startup. For example: If you are a real estate startup, you would not want to collaborate with influencers from the food blogging industry.
By collaborating with relevant influencers for sponsored posts, you will have an enhanced ROI.
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Content Quality:
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By working with an influencer you give them complete freedom to create the best possible content for your sponsored posts. Hence, the content quality of the influencers will be representing your startup.
That’s why select influencers create high-quality content that is a perfect fit for your brand image.
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Frequency of Content:
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When you are looking for the right influencers it’s important for you to keep an eye on how often the influencers publish content. Select influencers who post their content with a perfect balance between normal and sponsored posts.
You should also check out the comment section of the sponsored posts of influencers. If there are negative comments it means the influencer must be promoting a lot of brands/products.
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Values:
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More than 60% of consumers trust influencer recommendations, you just need to check if the values of your brand resonate with the influencer. To learn more about an influencer’s values, you should check out their bio, post captions, and stories as well.
By having a look at these factors you can get a good enough idea about their likes and dislikes. This evaluation process would be highly effective for you to select an influencer with the right values for your startup.
2- Work on Creative Ideas
One factor to integrate into influencer marketing campaigns for your startup is “Creativity” as it will help you in attracting the attention of your target audience. Your campaign should be both informative and entertaining to create a buzz.
Make your influencers understand everything about your startup and the goals you have in your mind regarding the campaign. Along with that, you should also provide influencers the freedom to work on creative ideas, as they know their audience better than you.
You can offer suggestions to the influencers around the content for a better output.
3- Set SMART Goals
The SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) foundation works effectively for startups and business growth. If you are able to understand the framework of setting SMART goals, then there are high chances of your campaign succeeding.
For an influencer marketing campaign, it’s important to set SMART goals before launching. Startups should have a clear idea about what they want to achieve.
Some common goals startups should consider for their next influencer marketing campaign:
- Enhance brand awareness
- Fetch more followers
- Build a loyal community
- Generate more leads
There are a lot of startups that create unrealistic goals and they are never able to achieve even 1% of them.
Hence, by setting SMART goals, you can push yourself further, give yourself a sense of direction, and help you achieve your goals effectively.
4- Focus on Micro-influencers from your niche
In a Linqia Survey, it was found that more than 89% of marketers prefer working with micro-influencers because they have a better grip on their audience and their audience is more action-taking.
Hence, you can expect a better ROI by finding micro-influencers from your niche. Startups and micro-influencers are the perfect combinations, these influencers build personal connections with their audience, which can lead to a better impact.
Some benefits of using micro-influencers from your niche are:
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Higher Authenticity:
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If you have a look at the journey of most of the micro-influencers, you’ll come across they have built their following from scratch by focusing more on their content quality and relation-building with their audience.
Although they have few followers, those followers listen to the influencer, which can directly enhance your campaign’s ROI by dealing with such influencers.
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Cost-Effective:
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When you have a look at the per-post pricing of macro or mega influencers, they charge thousands of dollars. On the other hand, micro-influencers charge between $150 to $550 for a single influencer marketing campaign, which can help startups save a lot of money.
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Better Conversion Rate:
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Whenever micro-influencers say something about a startup or a brand they are heard by their audience and their opinion plays an important role in the life of their audience, which later can help in generating better conversion rates.
5- Barter Collabs
Influencer marketing for startups can be a challenging task, firstly because it’s a bit difficult for you to choose the right influencer, and secondly, most influencers charge a lot of money for sponsor posts.
Hence, to solve this issue you can move forward with influencers who are ready to work with your startup for free products or services from your end.
This type of influencer collaboration is called the Barter Collaboration. In this way, you create a win-win situation for both the startup and the influencer.
We hope these tips must have given you an amazing idea about how to leverage influencer marketing for startups.
6- Content & CTAs
Another important and effective way to leverage influencer marketing for your startup is by focusing on the content and CTAs that are going to be in the sponsored post.
Although you can offer complete creative freedom to the influencer, to make the content more effective and to the point you can integrate the best copywriting tips and work on the intent of your content.
Top Influencer Marketing Trends To Follow in 2023
In 2021, more than $3.6 billion dollars were spent on influencer marketing in the US and these stats are increasing exceptionally with every passing year. Till now we have discussed how we can leverage influencer marketing effectively for startups.
Another way to leverage influencer marketing is by focusing on the top influencer marketing trends.
Some of those trends are as follows:
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Brand Leveraging Micro-Influencers The Most
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Micro-influencers are social media personalities or accounts with followers ranging between 10,000 to 1,00,000. Launchmetrics found out that micro-influencers have the higher Media Impact Value (MIV).No matter if these influencers have a lesser following, their audience engagement is higher, even better than a few celebrities or mega influencers.
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Repurposing Influencer Marketing Content on Social Media
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Another trend that is being followed by brands is to repurpose influencer marketing content for different social media platforms. In this way, brands are able to carry forward cross-platform promotions without spending any extra money.
Most brands will be opting for influencers who can use storytelling marketing strategy for promotions of startups/brands, and later the companies can repurpose their content on various platforms.
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More Video Content Will Be Pushed
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It has been noticed that video content is loved by the audience, as it is easy to understand, and that’s why most social media platforms are pushing video content over static posts.VideoWise did a study and concluded that brands/startups were able to add 999+ hours on time site per month just by adding influencer videos to the product pages.
Final Words
Startups have a lot of issues to tackle on a daily basis and a limited marketing budget is one of them. By leveraging influencer marketing effectively for your startup you can overcome marketing limitations and achieve your goals of better brand visibility and higher conversions.
Jessica Robinson loves to write interesting and knowledgeable blogs regarding business management, education and life to satiate the curiosity of her lovely readers. Currently, she is serving as a content manager at the ‘Speaking Polymath’. Every piece of content that she writes demonstrates her immense love and passion for her profession.
