Eric Siu and Neil Patel break down how to work with big influencers (250k+ followers) cheaply through quid-pro-quo deals like audience swaps or guest posts. They note big influencers often deliver poor ROI because their audiences don't match your product, so micro-influencers with niche followings convert better at scale.
Today, we are going to talk about how to collaborate with big influencers for cheap. But first, Neil, let's define, what do we mean by big influencers?
Big influencers are people with well over 250,000 to 500,000+ followers.
Got it. So I would say my opinion, probably 1,000,000+ or so, but we have differing opinions here. But what I would say to start collaborating with them in the very beginning, What can you offer them where it's a quid pro quo, meaning an equal exchange? And so if Neil's got a million followers on Instagram, but let's say I have a million followers on YouTube, but I only have 50,000 on Instagram, there might be something there where we can collaborate and say, hey Neil, you're way bigger on Instagram, but I'm way bigger on YouTube. Let's do something. Or maybe Neil, I have an email list of 100,000 people and I know I'm a lot smaller on Instagram, but can we do a collab that way? That's one way to do it where if you have something of equal exchange, you can try that. Or what has worked for me before I pass it over to Neil, I did a collaboration with Chris Do on Instagram and whenever I do a guest carousel for him, so I do, it's basically like a guest post on Instagram and he will do it because my post is high quality and my designers do it and it's relevant to his audience. And so he'll put the post up and I'll gain like anywhere from 600 to 1,000 followers or so. That's another way to do it.
The easiest way to do it is give them equity in whatever you're doing. Or give them a revenue share. And Eric also went over quite a few good ideas, but what I would actually recommend is don't partner with big influencers, especially at the beginning. They don't generate the ROI that you're expecting. They don't drive anywhere near the amount of sales or leads that you're expecting because their audience is very broad, in most cases not related to your business identically. Just because a Kardashian is into fashion, having them promote some dress or something doesn't mean it's going to fly off the shelves. If it's their own product or service, sure, it's going to do much better. What I would recommend doing is go the opposite direction and find micro influencers. If you still want the big influencers, use all the methods we talked about. But if you want smaller influencers and higher conversions and something that is ROI positive, go get micro influencers. For example, if you have fashion products, go find accounts with 50, 100, 75, 20,000 followers that are super active in fashion. If you're female fashion for ages 20 to 40, go find accounts that focus on fashion for 20 to 40-year-olds that are target female and pay them to post. That's where you're going to do the best. The big influencers, they tend not to do as well because they have a very broad following. The micro influencers, they have a very niche following, hence the conversions are better. You won't get enough sales that you want per micro-influencer. But if you go after 100, 200, 1,000 of them, I know that sounds like a lot. It really does add up and it works well.
Yeah. What I would say is on the equity side, I actually think it could get pretty expensive. I think Shaq, like they gave him like 2% of something or of Papa John's pizza or 1%, which is huge now. They're publicly traded. What I would say is you can, to Neil's point on micro-influencers, you can use a tool like Mighty Scout. Mightyscout.com, and you can basically create different influencer campaigns. You can go to a VA and have them do the research for you. Go find influencers in your space. You can use a tool like SparkToro, which is Rand Fishkin, one of the co-founders of Moz. His tool actually helps you find influencers. And then from there, I'll find influencers that are related to that because Twitter will show, oh, um, this person is also followed by, or people that are similar to. And yeah, I just, you just go down the rabbit hole there. Maybe you commit Maybe a half day to doing that. Or again, you can go hire out some help to do it. But to me, a micro influencer is probably someone that's up to 500,000 followers or so. You start to go beyond that, it starts to get a little big. Neil, you want to close it out?
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