Howdy, side hustlers!
What do you think of when we mention social media influencers?
We’re betting that the moment you read those words, the Kardashian-Jenner gals, and their respective Instagram posts immediately popped into your minds.
In truth though, social media influence goes far beyond celebrities like Kim!
Consider these Statista findings:
- Influencer marketing was worth $13.8 billion worldwide in 2021, double the market value from the year before.
- Instagram is the most popular platform for influencer marketing. With 6.12 million sponsored posts on Instagram in a year, the platform’s influencer marketing value is about $2.3 billion.
- Companies are known to spend their marketing budget on YouTube posts featuring influencers (While YouTube is technically a search engine and not a social media platform, it’s another important channel used by influencers)
- TikTok is another popular platform for influencers.
- For every $1 spent on influencer marketing, the average return on investment (ROI) is around $18.
So, what is the relevance of all this to your side hustle?
The experts have spoken: According to a study by Influencer Marketing Hub in 2021, 90% of marketers give influencer marketing a big thumbs up.
This is probably the foremost reason why you should, too.
And that’s what we’ll be talking about in this newsletter.
Now let’s go influencing…
What you can expect from this week
- Trends: From the latest to the greatest, we’ve got you covered on what’s hot and what’s not in the side-hustle-verse.
- Strategies: How to get influential people to endorse your products or services and watch your business expand!
- Tool of the Week: Out of the thousands of influencers, how do you find the ones that best fit your brand? This tool does it for you and then some.
Trends
The results are in and what can we say, influencer marketing is here to stay for the foreseeable future! Check out the below graphs to get more key insights into influencer marketing and how it can amplify your side hustle.
Consumer Trust: Influencers Vs Brands
New data released by Matter Communications reveals consumers are spending more time and increasingly engaging with influencers on social platforms. The data shows the majority of consumers find these influencers’ content appropriate and helpful – with an overwhelming trust in influencer content over posts from brands, impacting purchasing behaviors.
Influencer Marketing Tracking Sales
Although there are many potential goals for an influencer marketing campaign, it is clear that the majority of businesses now undertake influencer marketing to drive sales. 71% of Influencer Marketing Hub survey respondents stated that they track sales from their influencer campaigns.
Those who tracked sales from their influencer campaigns were asked about their methods of determining these influencer-generated sales. People could select multiple options if they used more than one. The most common method (45.5%) was to use referral links. Other methods used included coupon codes (25.4%), email addresses (15.6%), and product SKUs (7.6%).
Popularity of Influencers by Type
The vast majority of businesses prefer to work with influencers who have a well-established following of between 100k and 500k followers.
Influencer Engagement Rate
Here we can see that the engagement rate for TikTok influencers is high at all size tiers.
Perhaps this relates to the strength of TikTok’s algorithm in targeting content to match the interests of its viewers. TikTok is likely to be intelligently targeting the videos of its most popular influencers into many users’ For You feeds.
Influencer Marketing Effectiveness
Unsurprisingly, considering the overall positive sentiment expressed about influencer marketing, just over 90% of SocialPubli survey respondents believe influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing.
Strategies
According to a 2023 Digital Report, there are 4.2 billion active social media users, equivalent to 58.4% of the world’s total population.
That’s a lot of entities — individuals, organizations, and companies. Some of them may even see your posts, and that’s a fast and inexpensive way to reach many people.
Social media marketing is an inexpensive strategy to promote your side hustle business. For starters, creating an account and posting are free.
You can also write and design your own posts if you are so inclined. If not, hiring a writer and a graphic designer is affordable as well.
However, in the game of probabilities, there is a higher chance of social media users finding your content when it’s posted by someone with millions of followers.
That’s where social media influencers can help.
What is influencer marketing?
If you are one of the billions of social media users (as you likely are), you might have come across a person showing off a product or reviewing a service. Their caption usually encourages thousands or millions of their followers to purchase it just like they did.
Influencer marketing is leveraging the clout of social media influencers to promote your side hustle. It’s an ingenious way of nurturing your brand by “encouraging” popular individuals (not necessarily celebrities) to post about them on their accounts.
In the early days, influencers were given free products or services in exchange for their endorsement. Now that the influencer marketing industry has boomed, they are compensated with money. Depending on their follower counts, some even receive thousands or millions of dollars per post (nope, not a typo).
Influencers’ marketing posts are getting creative, too. Many produce videos and write long-form content. The top ones are hyper-aware of trends and are immediately on the bandwagon to influence a wider audience.
How does social media influencing work?
A brief history of influencer marketing from Forbes: It dates back to the Roman Empire when gladiators endorsed products. More than a millennium later, royalty became the most sought-after influencers. Fast forward to the 1900s, and you have the enduring Coco Chanel still influencing people’s fashion perceptions.
However, it wasn’t until the last decade or so that the word “influencer” caught on. Social media made influencing seem organic, too.
Before the term influencer became mainstream, influencers merely showcased their favorite things on social media. This action prompted a trend among their fans.
From hairstyle and apparel to food and travel destinations, if there’s a famous face and name attached to it, then it’s bound to catch on. And, more importantly, sell.
Interestingly, influential individuals aren’t just in the league of Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo, the most followed person on Instagram. Or famous Vine comedian Lance Stewart, Facebook’s most followed.
One can be just an ordinary Khabane “Khaby” Lame, an Italy-based Senegalese who is now the most followed TikToker.
Doctors, lawyers, carpenters, and crafters with at least a thousand followers on any socmed platform are also considered influencers. All because they are authorities in their respective fields and have the potential to impact the buying behavior of their tribe.
So, introducing your side hustle to the world via influencer marketing is more about choosing the person who best fits your specific trade.
Is influencer marketing good for growing a side hustle?
The ROI should be a good enough indicator that influencer marketing is an effective approach for amplifying your side hustle.
Note that influencer marketing involves more than asking influencers to market your products. Creativity plays a big part, too, in ensuring your brand stands a chance against its competitors.
But the most important factor you should focus on is providing a great product or service on which influencers would be happy to stake their reputation.
Here are examples of side hustlers who applied those principles and grew their business through social media influencer marketing:
Case study 1: ButcherBox
Everybody wants healthy food. And if it tastes delicious, that’s an added bonus.
ButcherBox set out to provide high-quality and humanely raised meat products and wild-caught seafood. It started as a Kickstarter campaign, and caught the eye of health advocate and author Chris Kresser. Kresser tweeted about ButcherBox, and his followers were among the first to take note of the brand.
Source: Chris Kresser Facebook Page
Michael Salguero, the brand’s CEO and founder, then reached out to other food and health bloggers, especially the Paleo diet influencers, who further helped popularize ButcherBox products. The brand currently has over 10,000 clients and makes around
$20 million yearly.
ButcherBox played smart. It reached out to health influencers. What worked for the brand was that their promotions struck a chord, and their products added value.
Your take-home message – If your product is top quality and genuinely meets a need, influencers will be enthusiastic about promoting your brand to their followers, whether they are paid for it or not. That’s something you want to think about when looking to promote your side hustle.
Case study 2: HiSmile
Influencers like Addison Rae and Billy Hadid are out of the league of most small startups. And HiSmile, a teeth-whitening brand, was one such startup. But that didn’t cause them to lose heart.
The brand also knew it had a gem in its arsenal: an at-home teeth-whitening kit.
HiSmile decided not to waste time and effort chasing after big-name influencers. Instead, they sent out their kits to many micro-influencers in exchange for shoutouts on their respective social media. And only if their product worked for them.
The result? Even though they did not have millions of followers each, every signal engagement from all the micro-influencers the brand targeted began to add up. HiSmile’s marketing team also noted that micro-influencers had better engagements than those with larger followings.
Your take-home message – Marketing will be part of your side hustle. And, your limited budget doesn’t have to be a handicap. It’s all a matter of strategy and reaching out to the right people. And if you believe in your product or service just as HiSmile did, then you will have no problem getting influencers to endorse it to their followers.
Case study 3: Nadaré Co
You can make your side hustle go viral too. All it takes is ingenuity and a dash of creativity and panache. And when it does, the side hustle, a.k.a. the brand becomes the influencer.
Nadaré Co is the perfect example of this. Founder Andrea Norquay wanted to offer affordable, high-quality jewelry to the market. Days before the official launch of her brand in 2020, she decided to share TikTok videos on how to fashionably use Nadaré Co. products. The tips kept on coming as the views kept increasing. And Norquay is now an influencer in her own way.
Your take-home message – This marketing campaign was essentially free. Nadaré Co. didn’t pay an influencer to showcase the brand’s jewelry. There were no expensive video shoots either. It was just Norquay showing off her products and offering tips to a fashion-conscious audience on TikTok. You can do the same with your side hustle. It’s all about concept and creativity.
How to find social media influencers
There are several types of social media influencers:
- Nano-influencers – 10,000 or less followers
- Micro-influencers – 10K to 100K followers
- Macro-influencers – 100K to 1 million followers
- Mega-influencers – 1M+ followers
So many influencers, so little time? True, but also so many ways to skin that cat.
Here are some methods it wouldn’t hurt you to try:
Old-school research
Perseverance always pays off, especially when paired with a methodical approach. Follow these steps:
- Launch a beautiful but professional looking socmed page.
- Post regularly using eye-catching and well-designed images accompanied by information-rich copy.
- Amass followers to build your credibility. You don’t need a lot—100 will do. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Just check this extensive guide from Sprout Social.
- Scour various social media platforms for journalists and influencers relevant to your product or service. Use hashtags to filter the results. Let’s say your side hustle is selling workout outfits or providing video exercise classes. Type any of these on the search bar: #Fitness #GetFit #Cardio #FitLife #FitnessMotivation.
- Follow the ones you think would be open to endorsing your brand. You will know this by scanning their pages for posts where they recommend certain products and/or services.
- Leave comments on those posts praising the merchandise and commending the influencer (but not to the point of patronizing). Then ask them nicely if they would be interested in trying yours, too.
Keep your feet grounded and your expectations low to avoid the heartbreak of rejection. You probably won’t get a nod right away or from the first influencers you approach. But if your offer is irresistible, you’ll eventually stumble upon an acceptance. Remember, perseverance is key!
The good thing about this approach is that just one influencer can deliver results that greatly impact your bottom line. Imagine if only 10% of their 1 million followers bought your product/service. That’s a cool hundred thousand sales!
Search engines
Specifically, Google, which is usually your answer for everything. Why should it be any different when it comes to social media influencers?
Use keywords related to your side hustle and just add “influencer.” For example, if your business is dropshipping craft supplies or selling online courses on crafting, you should search for “craft influencers.”
To further narrow down your search, take a hint from Google’s suggestions, as illustrated below.
For sure, there will be thousands of hits. How do you determine which way to go?
Always check the number of followers and their level of engagement. They should be at least a nano-influencer (10K followers).
However, having ten thousand plus followers is not enough. Their community should be highly engaged, preferably with comments stating they purchased the endorsed products. And if they share those posts, too? You’ve just hit the jackpot.
Influencer marketing platforms
If there ever was a marketplace for people, this would be it.
An influencer marketing platform offers a database where you can choose influencers according to your side hustle’s niche. Once you make your selection, it will provide contact details so you can reach out to them.
These are currently the top influencer marketing platforms that serve various needs:
- Grin – perfect for eCommerce businesses, also offers relationship management
- Upfluence – affordable pricing for small and medium sized side hustles. Comes with a Chrome extension
- Creator.co – ideal for small businesses with busy owners who prefer an automated yet thoroughly-vetted list
- Influencity – offers over 60 filters, and if you’re a stickler for details, you’ll be able to deep dive into the comprehensive profiles of the influencers
- #paid – great for side hustlers looking to integrate Facebook and Instagram ads with influencer marketing campaigns
- Hire Influence – U.S. Agency Awards’ Marketing Agency of the Year 2021, it includes article and image pitches from content creators
- Influsoft – provides analytics into users’ engagement with influencers
How to Work with Influencers for the Best Results
Nano- and micro-influencers handle their social media themselves, which makes it easier to make an arrangement or deal. Larger accounts usually have their own managers to deal with projects.
Just like dating, your first criterion should be compatibility. You wouldn’t want an omnivore to peddle your vegan food products, would you?
To ensure you connect with the right influencer and have a successful socmed campaign, be prepared with the appropriate approach and language at every step of the process.
Step 1: Send out an attractive proposal
Clearly explain your side hustle and discuss the goals of the particular campaign you’re asking your chosen social media influencer to join.
Here are the basic things you want to achieve:
- The influencer posts about your side hustle on their social media account(s).
- They let you be a guest poster on their socmed pages.
- They review your product or service (positively, of course!)
Step 2: Collaborate, don’t dictate
While you may have a vision for your side hustle, you should trust that influencers have reached their status their way.
This is why shared value is essential. There will be a better collaborative spirit when both parties agree on the principle behind the business.
If you have to impose your concept on the social media influencer, there should be some sort of compensation.
Step 3: Offer compensation
Both nano- and micro-influencers will accept free products or services in exchange for a social media post or shoutouts. Those with a larger following will expect monetary compensation.
Influencer rates vary greatly depending on the number of followers, their engagement level, the scope of work you need them to do, and the content medium (text, image, or video).
The standard formula for calculating an influencer’s rate is:
$100 x 10,000 followers + extras
This Instagram Influencer Pricing guide from Hootsuite will help you determine the type of influencer you can commission based on your budget.
Step 4: Giveaways
In any marketing campaign, giveaways are surefire ways of increasing engagement. You can arrange one or several with your influencer, which they will announce on their social media accounts.
The item(s) should be related to your side hustle to ensure brand association. You may even include your own products if they’re branded or not too pricey.
This type of campaign is a win-win strategy since it can also help the influencer gain more followers.
Tool of the Week
Convinced that social media influencers can indeed grow your brand? Great! Now all you need is a handy tool to boost your influencer marketing campaign.
Check out HypeAuditor.
This digital tool offers:
- An influencer database with more than 50 million names
- Over 35 metrics that evaluate influencers from Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube
- Management and monitoring of influencer marketing projects
- Insights on your competitors
- Emerging trends to help you anticipate future needs related to your side hustle
- Trend analysis and influencer analytics
It’s free to sign up for a HypeAuditor account. A monthly subscription will start once you build a campaign.