MBA2621 Q&A Wednesday: Should I Pay an Influencer to Promote My Product?

0:09Dave asked this great question here on Q &A Wednesday today and the truth is it can work but it could also flop like really bad. So we're going to break down how to do it right so you don't burn your budget on a shout out that doesn't move the needle in your business.

0:31Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Before you drop a dime on any influencer, you need to ask yourself some important questions. Here are some of them. Do I want sales or do I want exposure? Is my product ready for primetime? Is it ready to fulfill on the promise that I'm making with this marketing? Do I know who my exact audience is? If you're still in the early stages of testing and messaging and building your list and getting feedback, this might be a premature marketing activity.

1:15Why? Because an influencer post won't fix a weak offer, okay? You need to make sure that your whole sales funnel is rock solid, that you have data to prove through previous customers going through it that you have something that works, that people want at an offer they can't refuse. Then you are ready to do something like influencer marketing, And you're going to do it right through the steps I'm going to share. Let's start with some brutal honesty. Not all influencers are equal. Don't get distracted by big follower counts, okay? I found that micro-influencers, people with like 5 ,000 to 50 ,000 followers, they often drive more trust and engagement than someone with like millions of followers.

2:00Why? Because their audience is tighter. They're more connected. And they're actually paying attention to this person. Remember, you want influence, not just impressions. You want to make an influence on this audience to show your product in the best light possible and show the value of what you offer. So I recommend you find those people that are up and coming, that have a following, that are engaging. And you can find these people quite easily on social media, whether you're using X or you're using Instagram or whatever it might be. You can see their track record. You see how much they post. You could see what kind of engagement they have on their posts.

2:40People, are they commenting? Are they liking? What are they saying? To give an example of what I'm talking about, there's an Instagram account that I follow that is not absolutely humongous. They don't have millions and millions of followers. They actually have around 130 ,000 followers. That's a lot of followers. It's outside the kind of the scope I talked about, but they're still new and they're called Super Retro, at Super Retro Podcast. And they talk about all this different 80s and 90s and early 2000s nostalgia. So if I sell the retro t-shirts or have even like a retro branded business that sells maybe stationary that is from back in the day, so they would be perfect for my business, for my brand.

3:17Because if you go to their Instagram and look at their posts and the comments in those posts, people are just absolutely in love with these hosts, with the people that run this podcast and run this Instagram account. Like big brands like Porsche and Gucci would die for this kind of engagement on their profiles because people just really adore their content. And when people love something, they trust it, okay? So getting in front of these types of influencers really, really work. But we don't want to jump in head first. Instead, we want to test the waters. So instead of paying upfront for a post, try this.

3:53Offer the influencer the product for free. Whatever your product is, if it's digital, if it's physical, say, hey, I'd love for you to take a look at my product. It's absolutely free. If you genuinely like it, we'd love to do something together. Then you have a couple of options. One, you can just pay for a sponsored post where they talk about your product. They demo it. They show it. They show why they love it to their audience. And you pay for that post. Some people, they kind of come up with a deal where they do this more than once, or they do it on not just one channel, but other social media channels that they're a part of or have accounts with.

4:30And that's a good option. So they are getting paid for their time and their endorsement. And for these micro-influencers, a lot of them are not making a lot of money. So if you're offering something like$500 or$1 ,000, that's not typical for that type of account size. But the impact you're going to make is probably going to be more, depending on, again, many factors, the audience, their engagement, all that kind of stuff, than running a Facebook ad. We're going to talk about how to optimize our sponsorship to get the most out of it. but this is actually a pretty good exchange of value and money for this type of audience.

5:09Another option is that you have an affiliate arrangement where you give them an affiliate link and then any sales that are made through that affiliate link, they get some sort of ref share, 20, 30, 40 % of the actual sale. Of course, you got to know your margins. You got to know what you're able to do. And usually you're going to be paying them an amount of money that's equal to what your cost per acquisition is anyway through other forms of marketing like running ads on Facebook. If the influencer believes in what you're selling, they'll be more invested in it and they'll be more into promoting it.

5:40And that's why it's important for them to make sure they demo the product, they use the product, and they actually like it before you agree on anything. The influencer's job is to do all that and to give you a great campaign and to be authentic with their promotion. Your job is to track and measure everything. If you go down that paid route and you're paying them, whether through affiliate or through a sponsored spot where you pay them for their efforts and their time, give them some sort of way to track their efforts. So regardless of what they're doing, whether it's a sponsored spot or an affiliate spot, give them a link that you can track, like a unique link.

6:16Like you'll hear on this podcast often when I'm doing sponsor spots, it'll be the company's URL slash MBA. And the reason why that company gives me that URL so they can track our performance. You should do the same so you can track their performance. You want to track clicks, you want to track opt-ins, you want to track conversions, you want to see what your efforts are getting you. You want to measure ROI as ruthless as possible in your first experiments so you could see if you can continue to double down on this. When I did this, where I sponsored newsletters, different creators' newsletters, I really digged into the data and realized, wow, this is actually pretty good value.

6:51I'm actually making more money getting more leads through the sponsored newsletters, I would say three or four times more than going with ads. So I just kept on doing it over and over because the ROI was incredible. But I would not have doubled down and continue to do it if I was going on hunches and guesses. I knew because I had the data and I was tracking. That's the thing. Don't trust how you feel about it. You need to make sure you have the information to base your decision on. So should you pay an influencer for their influence. Yes, but only if you have a solid product and offer that has been proven already.

7:31You've targeted the right audience for your product or service, and that audience really would just gobble up what that influencer would present to them. And three, you track every dollar spent and everything in that campaign to know if you're getting a return on investment. If you get those right, influencer marketing can really work beautifully. This is what I found in my own experience. But if it's done wrong, it could just be like an expensive Instagram post. You don't want that to happen. Now, I have a special piece of advice if you're selling digital products, whether it's courses, coaching, software, templates, whatever it might be.

8:06If you want to get the most bang for your buck, I highly recommend that you drive traffic to something free. So the influencer can market something that's really cool, that's absolutely free. So you get the most people going to this page and giving their name and email address, joining your newsletter, joining your email list for something that's absolutely amazing, but free. This could be an online course or mini course or masterclass. This could be a webinar. This could be an on-demand email course I've seen work really well. This could be a template. This could be a cheat sheet. This could be something that's really easy to consume and get a win out of, but is absolutely easy to get started because again, they're not paying anything.

8:43Now, the reason why I recommend this is because you're getting people on your email list, allowing you to then nurture them and then convert them into customers later through your nurture sequences on your email list. This lowers your cost per acquisition dramatically because it's much easier to get people onto an email list with their name and email address in exchange for something really valuable than getting them to buy directly. At the end of the day, marketing is about relationships, not just reach. the right influencer is someone who actually believes in what you do and is willing to tell their audience why and that's where the magic really happens start small stay smart and remember if your product delivers real value it will speak for itself and your influencer will have a very easy job to promote it and a very easy job to kind of recommend it to their audience if you want to continue to learn from me then you should join our three things newsletter over at 100mba.net.

9:41It's absolutely free. And it's my way to coach you from afar. I do this newsletter because I want to give you some essential things every week to work on. Three things, actually. One, something to think about to improve your mindset and be more resilient. Number two, something to do so you're getting better and you're moving forward in your business every week. And number three, something to learn so you're skilling up and becoming something new week after week. Again, it's absolutely free. If you just go to 100mba.net, sign up for any of our freebies or templates or guides and you'll get added to our newsletter automatically thanks again for being part of the hundred dollar mba show being a listener being a subscriber if you haven't subscribed yet go ahead and do that and i'll check you in the next one take care