12 Tips for Efficient Influencer Outreach

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When you see a brand's product trending on social media, do you wonder how it happened? Often, posts from popular creators kick off this organic engagement.

With influencer outreach, you can gain the attention of creators or influencers whose audience aligns with your target creator marketing. This guide will discuss how to pitch these online personalities to promote your business and boost your visibility.

We’ll also introduce you to Megaphone’s viral on-demand platform. This valuable tool can help you achieve your goals, such as growing your LinkedIn and X accounts with organic engagement.

How Does Influencer Outreach Work

Influencer outreach is the process of contacting influencers to discuss brand partnerships. It typically involves research and communication via direct messages or emails.

This is not to be confused with a brand pitch when an influencer reaches out to a brand for collaboration.

How Does Influencer Outreach Work?

The influencer outreach process begins with researching the right influencers to partner with. Aim to find creators who align with your goals and target audience to ensure a successful partnership.

Next, you’ll contact your chosen influencers to gauge their interest in working with your brand. If they respond positively, you can discuss the collaboration details, including the compensation, timeline, and deliverables.

Why Focus on Influencer Outreach?

Some marketing strategies can be transactional, but influencer partnerships are relationship-focused and mutually beneficial. You gain access to their followers, and they get to try your products or services and get paid. And both you and the influencer get fresh content.

Whether you work with a smaller group of reliable influencers or with hundreds at once depends on the resources you have to manage those relationships.

As of 2024, 38% of brands have partnered with 10 influencers or less. The remaining 62% have worked with 10 or more different influencers, and 15% of those have worked with over 1,000. Your outreach process is about finding a few you’re comfortable with and scaling as your budget and bandwidth allow. However, always remember to focus on your company's individual relationship with each influencer.

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Benefits of Influencer Outreach

Boost Your Brand Recognition

As influencers create content featuring your products, increased brand awareness will inevitably grow among their followers. This is especially helpful for new ecommerce businesses that don’t have an engaged audience. It’s also a fantastic way to create hype around a new product or collection launch.

For instance, Athletic Greens used TikTok influencers to spread awareness of their nutritional supplements among health-conscious Gen Zers. These social media influencers created content that showed how the supplement can become a part of their audience’s daily routines.

The campaign’s success speaks for itself. The hashtags #athleticgreens and #athleticgreenspartner have over 90.6 million views and 39.5 million views, respectively.

Reach New Target Audiences

Influencer marketing can help you find untapped markets and reach wider audiences. Take the food brand King's Hawaiian, which partnered with creators to create its own #foodtok. They worked with 16 creators who produced slider recipes for 'Slider Sunday' using the brand's delicious sweet bread. They used hashtags like #mealinspo to reach new viewers.

The key lesson here is to identify and collaborate with relevant influencers whose social following overlaps with the niche audiences you’re trying to reach.

The first step to encouraging sales through your social media? Build an engaged social following with influence marketing.

As influencers talk about you and get their audience's interest in your brand, their followers will likely follow you, too. This will hugely benefit your social media marketing efforts.

Partner up on giveaway campaigns with your social media influencers. Asking people to follow your brand in return for a chance to win a gift will work a charm. After all, everyone loves a freebie.

Receive Valuable Product Feedback

You can also use influencer marketing to source feedback on a new product, collection, or product feature.

Because many influencers engage with specific niche audiences, they’ll have valuable insights into what your ideal buyers look for in a product. Plus, they can share detailed feedback by trying your products for themselves.

Feminine hygiene company Thinx did just that. They invited 25 influencers for a slumber party event in Los Angeles to get feedback on their new athleisure line. Thinx used the information they gathered to launch clothing their consumers would be interested in and grew their sales by giving influencers unique discount codes. This led to $810,000 in revenue with a per-customer acquisition cost of $35.20.

Enhance Your Brand's Credibility

Content that talks positively about your brand can help you build a good reputation and is essential for enhancing brand awareness. As influencers discuss you and endorse your products, you’ll slowly build trust with your target audience.

Skin + Me uses influencers and user-generated content (UGC) in their Facebook ads. From people unboxing their products to before and after videos to show how their skin has improved after using their products — this is sure to build trust and credibility with their target market. This tactic has worked so well that customers often post their own before and after pics in the comments section showing the improvements they saw in using their products. This just adds to the positive perception of your brand when customers are making purchasing decisions.

Drive Sales and Repeat Purchases

Influencers can help increase sales directly as they share discount codes or recommend your product and indirectly as your brand awareness grows. Intimates brand KNIX collaborates with influencers for this reason — using custom discount codes to drive sales.

For example, influencer Hilary Henderson promotes Knix's products via her Instagram page. You can grab her discount code, HILARYHCOMEDY_KNIXLOVE by checking the post descriptions. Every influencer has a different code, so when someone uses it in their online store, it's easy for the team at Knix to know which influencer has had the most impact.

Moreover, if your current customers see their favorite influencers share content about your products, they'll feel encouraged to place repeat orders.

Generate Fresh Content for Your Audience

If you're a marketer, coming up with new and creative ideas is part of the job. But it can get tiring having to continuously think of new ideas, especially if you're a small team. Experienced influencers can bring fresh, out-of-the-box marketing ideas to the table. They'll have a new perspective on your brand and can offer creative ways to promote your product - with little effort on your part.

To find influencers or manage your campaigns, look at our list of influencer marketing tools ideal for small and growing brands.

Use Micro-Influencers to Keep Costs Down

Another benefit of influencer marketing - and one your boss will love - is that it can be cost-effective. Running influencer campaigns is 30% cheaper than most advertising and marketing strategies.

For this very reason, Doe Lashes‘ founder, Jason Wong, chose influencer marketing over other paid ads for the first 4 months of his brand’s launch. Jason found that sending a shipment of lashes to micro-influencers would cost less than $10 per shipment. And if he made even one sale from an influencer, he’d break even. If he got 2-3 sales, he’d profit and slowly start gaining traction. This is precisely what happened. One month of influencer marketing led to $2.6K in daily sales by effectively reaching niche audiences!

Educate Your Customers with Influencer Content

A non-salesy way to market to potential customers is by educating them on how to use or style your product — depending on what you sell. By thoroughly briefing influencers about your product, you can allow them to create content that educates their target market about your product in an engaging manner.

Not only does this help grow your sales, but it encourages customers to create user-generated content featuring your product. This, in turn, gives you more exposure and grows brand awareness. Take a page from Supergoop's TikTok influencer marketing campaign. The sunscreen brand reached its ideal audience by pairing with influencers in fashion, lifestyle, and beauty niches.

Their influencers made creative content that highlighted Supergoop sunscreen's features in a light-hearted and entertaining way. This aligned with the brand's voice and educated the influencers' followers on the importance of wearing sunscreen. They also showed how Supergoop's clear SPF50 differed from the traditional, white-cast sunscreen people are used to. Here's a peep:

Build a Bank of Content for Repurposing

Finding time to create high-quality content can be challenging if you're a small or growing marketing team. You're already busy with product shots, banner ads, email campaigns, etc. Working with influencers means that content is created for you, and you can repurpose it across your campaigns and channels.

Brands like Starface, for example, use pieces of content created by their customers to enhance their checkout.

Using real people will add a personal touch to your brand's online store, helping reduce friction when customers are ready to buy.

However, you'll need to keep track of contracts and image usage rights. If you have content from last year's campaign, it is essential to determine if you have permission to reuse it the following year. Using content without permission can lead to some severe brand damage.

Collect Data to Understand Your Audience Better

Next on the list of influencer marketing benefits is the advantage of collecting data about your niche audiences.

As gathering third-party audience data becomes more complex, working with influencers can help you source audience data. The more data you have, the easier it is to create better, more audience-relevant marketing content. Your influencer will have data on audience demographics.

That’s age, gender, and location — broken up into the different social platforms they work on. They’ll also be able to tell you about the engagement, reach, and impressions their posts get. This will be useful in understanding how well your campaigns are going and whether they resonate with their audience.

For direct sales attribution, it’s worth setting up tracking codes to see who’s clicked through to your website and checkouts. You’ll need to give this to your influencer before they start the campaign. However, not all influencers are open to sharing their audience analytics.

Building long-term relationships with influencers often leads to them giving you access to the demographic data they have from social media platforms and any other tools they use. This, in turn, helps you make better-informed, data-driven decisions.

Work with Experts to Boost Brand Authority

If you’ve good brand authority, your customers view you as the subject-matter expert in your industry. Growing your brand authority will increase brand awareness and give you a better chance at helping prospects overcome objections.

To increase brand authority and focus on enhancing brand awareness, you could interview experts as part of your content strategy, create a podcast, run webinars, and be a guest on other people’s platforms.

You could also enlist the help of an expert influencer.

Turn Influencers into Brand Ambassadors

Another key benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to build long-term partnerships with your content creators, which can increase brand awareness. If they try out your products and genuinely love them, they’re more likely to post about them organically and recommend them to friends and people outside of their following.

Just look at this case study from Grin, who helped online brand Inkbox create an influencer campaign to build a community of brand ambassadors. They got 70+ creators to post about their products across different marketing channels. This, in turn, created a 40% uptick in unprompted creator posts. If you can cultivate genuine connections with your influencers, you can turn them into loyal brand ambassadors.

Strengthen Your Online Community

Online communities are fantastic places for like-minded people to connect, chat, swap tips, and share advice on particular topics. Communities mainly flourish on social networks, which makes them a great place for brands to build connections with their customers. (Look at big brands like Gymshark and GoPro to see what we mean.)

But building a sense of community isn’t easy. You must establish a loyal customer base, a good online following, and an emotional connection with your audience. This is where influencers can help.

Take Lick, a UK-based paint brand. They took a slightly different approach and encouraged their Director of Interior Design to be their ‘internal’ influencer. Having this regular face show up on socials is essential in building a strong bond with their community. Here’s what Amie, Head of Social Media and Creators at Lick, says:

“It's nice for our community to know that there are real people at Lick, like Tash, who help our decorators with and advise on particular topics. This is important for our brand values as well. It's also given us a unique way to lean into video content across our key platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Plus, Tash creates the colors, so who better to tell our community about them than the person who makes them?

Get Better Quality Leads

As we mentioned, 82% of brands say they see better ‘quality’ leads from influencer marketing campaigns over any other campaign, especially when targeting niche audiences. That’s quite an impressive stat, and after learning about the influencer marketing benefits in this post, you can see why. By partnering with influencers who talk about your specific niche, you can reach a loyal audience that’ll be genuinely interested in your products.

Megaphone is a viral on-demand platform designed to boost your online presence authentically and organically. Our software connects you with influential creators in your niche, helping you grow impressions, followers, and leads without relying on paid ads. Using Megaphone, you can increase impressions, followers, and leads without relying on paid ads. Key features include:

A sophisticated engagement network,

A private engagement pod service (coming soon),

Diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon).

Megaphone caters to startup founders, marketers, emerging creators, and ghostwriting agencies seeking to amplify their digital footprint and social proof. Our complex matching algorithm ensures you partner with your field's most suitable and valuable creators. Go viral today with our viral on-demand platform.

12 Tips for Efficient Influencer Outreach

1. Use Megaphone for Influencer Outreach

A sophisticated engagement network,

A private engagement pod service (coming soon),

Diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon).

2. Research Your Influencers

Invest time in thorough influencer research before sending an outreach email to influencers. You want to ensure you’re working with the right influencer relevant to your brand and ideal audience.

Look into the influencer’s content. Browse their blog posts and social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok to ensure their niche aligns with your goals.

Confirm that the influencer’s messaging and style are a good fit for what you want to communicate to your target audience.

For instance, Blue Canoe is an eco-friendly eCommerce fashion brand, so it made sense that they partnered with Instagram influencer @anettemarweld, a fashion model.

Examine the influencer’s engagement rate and audience demographics on social media platforms. Consider metrics like the influencers’ follower size. Go for influencers with an audience that’s similar to your ideal customers.

Also, the influencer you choose to work with should have a significant level of engagement on their platforms. Engagements here refer to likes, comments, shares, and similar metrics.

Additionally, look for previous campaigns the influencer has worked on to see if they align with your brand or product.

Browsing Annette’s Instagram profile, you’ll notice she’s had similar partnerships with other sustainable brands. Here’s one with True Botanicals, a sustainable makeup brand:

Knowing your potential partner inside out will enable you to tailor your email and demonstrate a genuine interest in their work. Your research will serve as the foundation for building a meaningful connection for your marketing campaign.

3. Reach Out the Way Influencers Specify

Most influencers have a specified method for you to contact them. This process is usually found in their Instagram bio, either an email address or a simple message saying ‘DM for collaborations.’ Following these instructions will ensure the influencer doesn’t accidentally miss your message or collaboration opportunity.

4. Establish a Connection

Start a friendly conversation with them when you’re ready to reach out. Show an interest in their work as an influencer and not just what you want them to do for you. Remember what you liked about their content, and explain why your brand and their image could work well together. Influencers want to develop good relationships with the brands they work with, which will get you started on the right foot.

5. Know What You Want

Clearly understand your campaign objectives and what you expect from the influencer. Be specific about your deliverables and the ideal time frame you’re aiming for. Whether it's brand awareness, product promotion, or event coverage, communicating your goals helps the influencer understand their role. The more details, the better, so the influencer has a clear direction and a good idea of what you seek.

6. Be Open-Minded

It’s easy to jump on board with the first influencer to agree, but be patient. Some influencers are of higher quality than others; sometimes, you won’t catch that until you converse with them. If you suddenly find out that they are taking a while to respond, maybe this isn’t the influencer for you now. On the other hand, don’t expect a reply right away, either. They are busy, too, but if an influencer is serious about working with your brand, you shouldn’t have to chase them.

7. Don't Focus on Only One Type of Influencer

Don’t limit yourself right out of the gate by focusing on one type of influencer. Think about your brand and how you can incorporate diverse influencers into its image. An eclectic mix can broaden your reach and expose your brand to different audiences.

8. Craft a Catchy Subject Line

Typically, you expect an influencer’s inbox to overflow with dozens of emails. In this case, your subject line is your first impression. Make it count.

Create a subject line that piques curiosity and conveys the value of your email.

Avoid generic phrases and opt for something attention-grabbing. For instance, you can use a question. See this influencer email that SERPed.net sent:

Posing a question can pique your influencers’ curiosity and get them to open your email. So, “What do you think about promoting sustainable skin cake?” could be better than “ Help me promote my skincare brand.”

Also, when you use a statement, make it exciting. For instance, instead of “Collaboration opportunity,” try “Let’s create magic together.”

Avoid spammy subject lines with phrases like “click now” or “interesting offer.” These will only irritate the influencer and cause email service providers to send your email to the spam folder automatically. So, be cool yet subtle.

Here’s another thing to note about crafting a unique subject line— don’t overthink it. It’s okay to keep it short and straightforward. If funny or quirky works with your brand image, try that.

Overall, your subject line has one goal: to entice the receiver to open the email. That’s what you should focus on.

9. Personalize Your Email

The days of sending generic, one-size-fits-all email outreach to influencers are long gone. Personalization is key to capturing an influencer’s attention. Clean your email list before sending emails to influencers.

In the SERPed example, the influencer’s first name is used. This makes it easier for the influencer to warm up to you, and the email feels less robotic and more personal.

Some popular email marketing services allow you to configure your email to deliver automatically with the recipient’s first name. You can easily find it with the “first name” tag, as seen in the example below:

Personalized emails go beyond addressing the influencer by their name.

Tailor your message like it was specially created for that particular influencer.

Provide some context as to why you reached out to them and why you believe they would be a good fit for your brand. It’s a good idea to mention the specific content that resonated with you.

You could even include a link to your website with a copy tailored specifically for them. You must create a landing page with personalized variables like the influencer’s name. So, when they click the link to know more about your company, their name in the copy will immediately catch their attention. You’ll leave a lasting impression on them for your personalization efforts, increasing the likelihood of them responding to your email.

You should also close the email with your first name. Preferably, use a personalized email address. This seems more human than info@brandname.com. So, buy a domain to create a customized email address for your brand’s outreach campaigns. You can even consider looking at influencer outreach examples for inspiration on personalizing emails.

10. Be Clear and Concise

Outline your proposal or request succinctly, emphasizing the benefits. Doing this makes it easier for the influencer to scan through and get the main point of your entire message. Let’s look at this concise influencer outreach email template you can tweak for your brand:

Greetings and brief introduction: Hi [Influencer’s Name], I’m [Your Name].

Mention any standard connection or context, if applicable. For instance, you saw and liked a recent social media post or blog.

Give a genuine compliment.

Clearly state the reason for the email.

Benefits. Highlight what the influencer stands to gain by collaborating with you.

Then, you can add a call to action, telling the influencer to respond to your email if they’re interested.

I will close the email by expressing my gratitude for their time and consideration.

That’s all: no fluff or clutter.

A clutter-free email also leaves a positive impression. Shorter emails are also more persuasive and respect the receiver’s time.

11. Showcase Your Value

Focus your outreach email on what the influencer stands to gain from entering into a business relationship with you. This doesn’t have to be money, and you would have already figured out what you can offer them in the research phase of the outreach process.

Benefits like increased engagement, exposure to a new audience, or access to exclusive products or content are good considerations. But whatever you’re offering, ensure it’s something meaningful to the influencer.

Your email should show that the potential partnership will be a win-win collaboration. If you’re running a referral campaign to help you get more leads, be sure to mention this in your email.

Also, indicate what value your brand or product generally offers users. That is, your unique selling point. There’s a good chance that the influencer will be more interested in promoting a brand that offers something highly relevant and valuable to its customer base.

12. Speak Their Language

Each influencer has a unique tone and style. To resonate with them, adapt your email’s tone and language to match theirs. If they use humor in their content, infuse your email with humor. If they maintain a professional tone, keep your email formal and start a sentence correctly. This alignment creates a sense of compatibility and increases the likelihood of a positive response and successful collaboration.

You can also take the long road,, which may have lasting benefits. This involves engaging with your potential influencer on social media before you send an outreach email. It’s all about nurturing a relationship with them, getting to know them, and eventually building trust. Along the way, you’ll also be able to discern the best way to relate to that particular influencer, making your email more likely to appeal to them.

Speaking of trust, you should also ensure your email is sent from a secure and credible domain. An email address registered with your brand name would look more plausible than a random one.

For instance, if your brand name is Firmshoes. An email address like jess@firmshoes looks good and even more professional-looking. Remember, the goal is to connect with the influencer in a way that reveals you as a trustworthy and remarkable brand that they’d love to work with. So, every detail counts.

Where to Find Influencers for Outreach

1. Megaphone: The New Way To Find Influencers

A sophisticated engagement network,

A private engagement pod service (coming soon),

Diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon).

2. Hashtags: The Old School Influencer Search Method

You need to be aware of current trends and boosted content. The best way to do this is to manually search trending hashtags relevant to your brand, see which influencers are using them, and reach out to them via an Instagram direct message. However, before you reach out to them, research them and see if their aesthetic aligns with your brand and if they share the same niche. Don’t forget to check their follower numbers and engagement rates, which you can do through an Instagram engagement calculator. Reaching out to someone with little to no engagement rate is no use!

If you are looking for hashtags, you’re already on social media, but it goes deeper than that. Look out for your brand mentions, and use social media trackers or listening tools to help you find influencers already talking about your industry or niche.

4. Google: The Search Engine That Never Sleeps

You can utilize Google in a multitude of ways to find influencers. Google Search Alerts, for example, is software that allows you to set alerts for keywords relating to your brand. This lets you find people talking about your brand, industry, niche, and everything.

5. Bloggers: The Unsung Heroes of Influencer Marketing

Bloggers tend to promote their content on social media, so usually, they have a substantial, engaged following behind them anyway. The manual approach would be searching for keywords related to your brand or products along with “blog” and searching for the top blogs. In addition to reaching out to these bloggers, you can also go through their following to see if they have connections with any other influencers you can contact. Many platforms can help you find influencers for your brand while removing much of the heavy lifting. Some examples include Voila Norbert, Mailshake, and Respona.

6. YouTube: A Goldmine of Video Influencers

Depending on your niche, YouTube can also be useful for finding influencers. YouTube is a place where influencers can do longer reviews of products like ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos, which show off different products, ads, and more. It’s worth digging deeper into YouTube and using keywords in the search bar to find influencers who produce content surrounding your brand’s niche.

Find the middle ground of influencers with a decent number of subscribers but not so much that it would cost you to sell a kidney to fund the partnership. Most YouTubers also have successful social media pages in their belt, which means they have a wider audience reach.

7. Your Website: Attract Influencers to You

Your website must be accessible to influencers and have resources available if they wish to contact you. Adding a link to an influencer landing page should show how you want to collaborate with potential influencers and leave some contact information. This is a great way to save you the effort of reaching out to influencers and allowing them to come to you.

8. LinkedIn: The Professional Network for Influencer Outreach

This may seem like a bit of a long shot, but it is worth covering all of the bases. With tools that allow you to search by industry and position, finding relevant influencers suddenly seems less daunting. Try searching for keywords like ‘blogger’ or ‘content creator.’ Additionally, you can narrow it down further by selecting the relevant industry. LinkedIn adds that sense of professionalism that Instagram may lack, instantly boosting your company profile. Don’t forget to make it easy to discover your brand from your LinkedIn page!

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Go Viral Today with Our Viral on Demand Platform

Megaphone connects brands and creators through influencer outreach. The platform’s sophisticated engagement network helps you find influencers in your niche that suit your goals. Use our complex matching algorithm to get paired with the most suitable and valuable creator for your needs, whether that’s increasing online impressions, followers, or leads.

Key Features of Megaphone

Megaphone’s key features help you grow your online presence without paying for ads. They include:

A sophisticated engagement network: Our platform helps you find and connect with creators in your niche to amplify your digital footprint and social proof.

Private engagement pod service: This feature allows you to establish a private group with select creators to boost your online presence.

Diverse creator partnerships: Megaphone caters to sponsored posts, X-spaces, and newsletter ads.

Who Can Benefit from Megaphone?

Megaphone helps startup founders, marketers, emerging creators, and ghostwriting agencies seeking to amplify their digital footprint and social proof.