How to collaborate effectively with tech influencers to get more exposure for your tech brand.

The arrival of influencers into the world of communication changed everything. Before that, it was much easier for a brand to create awareness about a product or service among its consumers. Brands were using TV spots, newspaper, radio or display to touch their customers and people were listening to the commercials advert.

But the world today is much more competitive and noisy, people are exposed to hundreds of adverts per day. In this situation, there is no way you can properly catch the attention of your target if you don’t have a good advertising strategy.

But in this noisy world, and thanks to social media, in particular, new voices can be heard. The voice of consumers and among them, the voices of influencers are some of the most important. Influencers create a community around them and their credibility helps shape opinions about products and services. According to a study, influencer marketing is estimated to be a 5$ to 10$ billion market by 2020.

In this enormous market, it can be very hard for a brand to find the right influencers to fit its strategy.

I/Understand the market of influencers

You need to understand that influencers are their own brand and so when you collaborated with them you need to understand every aspect of their “brand”. There is a different type of influencers and you have to make sure to understand with which category you want to collaborate and why :

Micro influencers

They have a rather small community, followed by a few thousands of people. A lot of the influencers are in this case. This allows them to create relevant content for their audience and communicate a lot with them. They are present on social media, blogs, websites, and forums. Due to the size of their community and their relation with them, they have high engagement rates that are interesting for brands. And of courses, they are cheaper than the bigger ones because of their reduced audience.

Celebrity Influencer

Unlike micro-influencers, celebrity influencers are followed by millions of people and are well known in many industries. Their opinions influence a lot of people because they are seen as models for a lot of their followers. Collaborating with them allow you to potentially reach a lot of your tech target and even if people don’t buy your product, this allows you to gain credibility and create a good image around your brand. Since celebrities are so well known, they’re effective at reaching multiple audiences across various channels.

Blog influencers

A blog influencer is someone who writes his blog and has thousands, or millions, of subscribers and readers. Their reach and influence their audience in every article they create. This type of format does not appeal to everyone but it can be very interesting if your audience is present and active on this type of content. 

To collaborate with a blog influencer, you may write a guest post for their blog, ask to be mentioned in one of their posts, or sponsor a post about one of your products or services. If you sponsor a post on the influencer’s blog, you can also provide images of your products for them to share as well.

Social Media Influencer

Social media influencers are well-recognized on social platforms, such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. They are followed by thousands or even millions of people on their different platform. This diversity allows them to reach a different audience on multiple platforms and with a different format. Social media influencers share content about a wide range of topics such as health, workouts, cars, diet, outdoor activities, travel, fashion, art, tech, beauty, and interior design.

II/ How to find influencers suitable for your tech brand

a) Describe your objectives

First things first, you need to be clear about what are your objectives for this campaign. What do you expect from this collaboration? What type of KPI do you have?

Do you want to sell? gain followers? visibility? traffic?

Those objectives should be understood by the influencers and the strategy of communication base on that

b) Search the “type” of influencers you need

You need to think of the strategy you want to have to reach your objectives. What budget do you have? Who is your target? Wich message do you want to transmit?

Determine if your audience aligns with the influencer’s audience.

For example, you can try to reach your target by contacting 10 micro-influencers or contacting 1 celebrity influencer. With the same budget but not the same benefits and disadvantages.

c) Do research

Remember Google search is your friend if you search well you will surely find some interesting leads.  Social media is also a good way to find them,  search for keywords and phrases, specific users, hashtags, and tagged audience members on specific posts.

You can also pass by a platform or an influencers agency that can search influencers for you but this option will cost you a certain amount of money.

Be careful because some influencers buy their followers or collect them in a “follow-back” way may not make much of an impact to their audience. You need to make sure his audience is a genuine one. 

III/ Now that you found an influencer what to do?

a) Before reaching him

Now that you have your strategy, your objectives and an influencer in mind it’s time to take action!

Before even speaking to him/her you need to continue your research by observing how he interacts with his audience. What time he posts? When? How many times per week? Did he have already collaborate with another brand?

Follow him everywhere, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… and create interactions with him by commenting, tag him in your content, interact with his community.

b) Reaching him correctly

Continue for 3 to 4 weeks before reaching him by a message on the platform or by email. When you will do that this way you will know a lot of things about him and this allows you to create a personalized message. Remember they need to feel special for your brand. 

In the proposition you will create, you need to complete what they can expect from a collaboration. Those expectations are often linked to their freedom about content creation. If the contract fits with his objectives and criteria he would be more willing to accept it.

b) the relation during the campaign

During all the campaign and even after you need to keep in touch for every action of the influencers, every step of the creation to make sure the objectives are respected and also the content suit your message. This is why you need to give him every information possible about the brand, the product or service you provide.

Reward him, every time you are happy with the content he creates for your tech brand. It can be money but also a gift, for him or for his community. Give them the opportunity to share a coupon or a discount code to encourage his community to buy your products.

Encourage User-Generated Content with Giveaways or contest… 

The more you create interactions with the community, the more you will receive feedbacks and data to improve your offer, your future campaign or your strategy.

IV/ The results

During but more importantly after the campaign, you should measure your results to see if it was a success and you reach your objectives.

Different aspect can be measured :

• Engagement (Likes, shares, comments, Retweets, mentions, direct messages, and reposts) on every platform the influencer use.
• Reach, how many people the influencer has been able to reach (you can see that on the statistics of every content shared).
• Data, you can have a look at every data that you achieve to collect thanks to operation such as a contest, giveaways but also on your website.
• The brand audience, an influencer campaign is very interesting to gain a lot of followers on your social media platforms. You can compare the number of followers you had before the operation.
• The ROI, Calculate the return on investment by dividing the benefit by the cost of the influencer marketing investment.

Don’t forget to use tools such as your website statistics but also Google Analytics to see the difference between the situation before and after the tech influencers campaign.

Article was written by Ambre Kerleau 

This article is also available on Medium you can find it with this link.

If you want other advice about how to carry out a strategic branding and communication campaign to stand out in your tech market feel free to contact us 

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