How to Find Influencers

Okay, everybody. It's me, Tom Augenthaler, and I wanted to get this video shot for you guys last week, but it's kind of a crazy week and I was really kind of crunched for time. So anyway, what I wanted to go through today is some tips and tricks to help you guys find influencers for whatever it is that you're doing. So with that said, let me— I'm gonna operate this particular video a little bit more like a webinar, and just to give it a little more structure, and hopefully that'll help you guys even more. So I'm gonna share screen here. Okay. Sharing the screen. All right, so how to find influencers, um, by me, Tom Augenthaler. Uh, I am— my brand is The Influence Marketer. You can find me online at theinfluencemarketer.com website there, blog, a whole bunch of valuable resources, uh, that you can use, uh, to your advantage. Encourage you to do so. Um, so let's dive in. So Just a little background. Influencers are the number one thing, number one shift that enabled me to sell products for my clients, making them millions of dollars and using no advertising. That's not to say that advertising is bad or you shouldn't be doing advertising, but really when you think about it, you should be doing multiple marketing strategies at once if you can. Because you're trying to get as much traffic and attention as possible, drive it through to your offer, your product or service, whatever it is that you've got, you've got going. And influencers are one way to do that. So as by way of example, I juiced sales of a laptop product that was sitting on store shelves for over 6 months when I was still at HP, and we sold thousands of units as a result of the influencer campaign that I put together with some other people. And we boosted sales by 84% of the product inside of 45 days. And this equates to millions of dollars of sales. So it wasn't done through PR, wasn't done through advertising, wasn't done through other traditional marketing efforts. It was done solely through an influencer marketing campaign which I spearheaded. So if you're in the B2B space, I want you to know that this could be done with B2B products and services as well. Not to the same way that the laptop product was done, but you got to think in terms of a longer sales cycle for B2B because it naturally is a longer marketing sales cycle. So, but influencers can play a key component within that and to help move your customer along to making the decision that you want them to make. In one case, we did have an interesting scenario where we were running an influencer event for a high-tech client, and it was for a B2B product, and the product was worth more than $100K. And because of a blog post and a few tweets that one of the influencers made during the event, We ended up helping to sell that product. So that is not the norm, however, but it does indicate that if you've got influencers that are in front of the right audience that you want to meet, that you want to cater to, sell to, market to, well, it's very powerful stuff because that particular customer happened to be in the market to buy this kind of particular product, and because of the event and because of the blog post and some tweets that the influencer made, the sale was made. So my point to you guys is that Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs are doing this every day, and it's all across the board from every kind of industry you can imagine. So again, by leveraging the power of online influencers, this is called influencer marketing. And that's what we're talking about here today. That's why you're all part of the Influencer Marketing for Badasses group, because, uh, trying to— I'm trying to convey to you guys some of the ways that you can use influencers to benefit your own personal company, your brand, products, your clients, whatever it is that you're doing. So let's just talk a little bit more about where this is all going, uh, because I think you'll be pretty interested in this. I've been working with one of the influencer marketing firms out there called Clear. We've been doing some sort of co-marketing things together. Anyway, they shared with me some of the research that they've recently done around Instagram, and I think you guys will kind of find it interesting. In 2016, you'll notice that the blue bars here, this is the number of ad posts, hashtag ad posts that were appearing on Instagram. And look at the red ones. This is— the red ones represent 2017. So it's just skyrocketing. And I'm telling you, it's just going to continue 2018, even into 2019. The trend is probably just going to continue. So if you're not getting in on this, well, you really should be considering it because it is a fantastic way of getting in front of your target customers and getting your message through to them directly. So that you can be very effective in selling products and services. So who is this for? This is for anyone selling affiliate products, health supplements, which I'm going to use that as an example today, fitness information products, tech products. I've done a lot of tech products, gadgets. This is good for apps, clothing, fashion, beauty, cosmetics, or you want to build awareness, or you just want to build awareness around your brand and your products, you're not really ready to go out with a full-blown campaign yet, but you want to build up awareness around your stuff, influencers are a great way to do that. It's— this is for online marketers. This is for social media agencies. If you're a social media agency, even a small 2-person, 3-person, 1-person shop, you can add influencer marketing to the mix. And provide another service to your, to your customers. It's for freelancers, consultants, like I mentioned entrepreneurs before, small business owners, and of course big, big companies, big enterprises are doing this as well. So, and that trend is growing too. Many more of them are piling on. I'm going to go into that in a second. Let's take a look at the industry categories which are jumping on to influencer marketing. So this again by Clear, this research is by Clear. You'd see that fashion and accessories is the number one industry for influencer partnerships at present. Then comes beauty, food beverage, automotive. Some of the influencers, some of the auto— some of the influencers in our Badasses group, Judy Stanford, Andrew Edwards, Paul Strauss of The Awesomer, These influencers get invited to go check out automotive events all the time and test drive product. Consumer electronics, of course, is a big one. Travel, entertainment, retail, tech, and fitness and wellness. So that one, again, plays into the example that I'll walk through with you today. So influencer marketing, it's good for lead generation, right? How would you like to have lead generation system doesn't rely on advertising and target your ideal customer better? As long as you're doing the job of targeting your ideal customer, that consumer that you really want to sell to, influencer marketing can, can really, really help you out. And I'm assuming you guys all know me. If you don't, That's why I'm going to talk about me just briefly here. But I just want to tell you a little bit about what I've done and what I'm up to now so you can get what I'm all about. My name is Tom Augenthaler, and I'm a father of a 14-year-old son. Got a little family here, happy family of 3. I'm a writer for Social Media Examiner. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a consultant. I'm also a martial artist of sorts. As you can see, my family here. My family is my why. That's, that's what gets me up every morning, guys. That and trying to help other people out like you. This is, this is my why— my family and helping other people out. Some of my other interests include like doing some outdoorsy stuff. Here you can see me with my buddy Jeff. We went on this sort of survival course out in Utah a few years back and It was a week long and they taught us how to like live on pretty much nothing. So it was pretty— it was really kind of exciting. And one of the best parts about it was I just unplugged from the internet connectivity for a full 7 days, and it was really, really refreshing. And over here, this is, this is me at one of the influencer events that I helped organize a few years back. John Abeto, he's part of our Badasses group. John is, uh, the influencer here in the center, and, uh, he covers technology, B2B, B2C, and he also does some, some healthcare stuff too. So that's about me. But, um, you know, really I want to get into it. I want to show you guys, I want to talk to you guys more about, um, influencers and how you can find them. Okay, now some of the ways that, uh, I use to find influencers, I, I'm a guy of habits. And the habits that I've developed over time seem to work well for me, so I kind of stick with them. They're a little more on the manual side. I mean, I know that there's a lot of platforms and tools out there today, and many of them are pretty darn good. They— and I'm going to walk through one of them. But, you know, in a lot of ways, I like to do things sort of just the way I've done them because it works. And I'm not always looking for a massive number of influencers to reach out to. So maybe it's just a dozen, maybe it's 20. You know, 5 even. And you could do that manually. You don't really need— you don't really need to like have like all these fancy, you know, fancy tools to be able to do that. And a lot of the tools are expensive. Let's face it. I mean, they charge you a lot of money, some of them. So let me pull this down here so I can see what the heck is going on. Okay, so first way is Google. Okay, health influencer health. I've got a client right now that I'm building a sales funnel for, online sales funnel, and he's got a high blood pressure supplement. And I am helping him build the sales funnel, and I'm going to help him with traffic, getting traffic to the sales funnel. So aside from doing Facebook ads and stuff, one of the ways that we're going to do that is through influencers. Okay, so I've been slowly building him a list. past couple of weeks, just sort of going through it every day, just looking for a few more influencers, a couple more influencers to see who might be appropriate. So as you can see here, I just put in influencer health. Boom, pulls up this list. And you can take your time going through some of this stuff. But let me just pull up a couple of these links here that, that I've pulled up. This one here at Influence Co. Influence Co is a one of those platform tools that is now available, and they're mainly on the Instagram side of things. And but you can see here, it just pulls up a quick list of some influencers in the, in the Instagram space. So, you know, if you just scroll down here through, now you're going to see some of these people are really just not appropriate. Some of them are You know, it's just about their lifestyle, whatever they're doing, and they're really not going to want to talk about high blood pressure. And then you've got other ones that, you know, they're into fashion and stuff and health and wellness, lifestyle, travel, food blogger. I don't know. So I'd have to spend some time going through some of these people. But my point is, is that just by a quick Google search, bam, you can find some some influencers pretty quickly. So that's one thing you can do, and I do it all the time. If I— I've got another tab here open. I've already been searching health, healthy heart lifestyle blogs. So what you do, what it pulls up is lists of different blogs that different publications have identified as being decent to look at. So I have been going through some of these. And then what I do is when I find some that I like, I simply drop them into my list. I've got a list on Google Drive here and I've got health influencers, you can see, and I've got a list of different bloggers that I've kind of been putting together. And then I've got down here, I've got some topical websites. These are really pretty much clickbait websites, but I might reach out to some of these to see if I can get some content posted on them. That might be for a fee, but that's okay. You know, it's just another way to drive traffic to the sales funnel. And then, then there's these review sites down here. Now these are also sort of clickbait sites, but again, there might be some opportunities here because they, they, you know, they look for opportunities to get more content on their products to review, and this might be a good one. Now one of the One of the tactics I might adopt with this client is to actually set up our own review site and then kind of populate with content that we want and then we direct towards the sales funnel. That's what some of the competitors have done in my research. So that's just another thing that we're looking at. Okay, so Google, great place to start. You can find tons of blogs on there. You're gonna have to go through them and you're gonna have to figure out which ones are really good for you. But one of the ways to do that, at least from an SEO standpoint, is to use a tool called SEMrush. Okay, and SEMrush is really an SEO tool, like I said there. But one of the blogs that I've pulled up here is Fab Over 50, because a lot of people with high blood pressure are in their 40s and then on up in terms of age. So any blog that deals with healthy lifestyle, choices, whatever, for middle-aged people is something that's going to apply. And here you can see Fab Over 50, SEMrush. This is just the free version, by the way. There's a paid version for like $100 a month, which goes pretty in-depth. But for me, this tells me enough. It tells me the organic keywords. It tells me the regions of the world where this blog is driving, is getting traffic from. It's got over 5,000 backlinks, so I know that it's got a lot of SEO juice to it. I can see the organic versus paid traffic trends here. The organic looks good. It also gives me top organic keywords that the blog is using. It gives me some main organic competitors. I might even check some of these out to see what they look like. So as you can see here, it tells me where some of the backlinks are coming from. So this gives me a lot of information on the blog. It tells me where the traffic's coming from and what kind of quality traffic it is. So this is all good stuff. Now what it doesn't tell you is the qualitative stuff. You're gonna just have to look at the blog and you're gonna see whether it's, it's really decent. So this is for, this is for blogs. This is long-form content. And because I'm dealing with a high blood pressure product, I'm going to need probably more long-form type content, video and written, over just Instagram. Although I might look at a few Instagram influencers and try it out to see whether that helps drive traffic. Instagram generally is not a platform statistically where people in their 40s on up are visiting. It's more of a— it trends, it skews towards a younger demographic. All right, so that's another— that's a tool that I use to evaluate blogs and websites that I'm looking at. Okay, so this is the blog. This is the Fab 50 Over 50 thing. Another platform you can use is Twitter itself. Okay? You can just simply plug in here, like I've been doing, heart health, heart disease, blood pressure. And then as you do that, it'll pull up all of these different influencers if you want to look at them. And see, it gives you top, latest, people, photos, videos. So I'll hit people and then I'll start going through this and take a look to see whether any of these folks look like they're potential candidates. Now, as you guys probably know, if you've been following me at all, I'm not the biggest fan of Twitter, and I'll kind of show you why. Yeah, when I go back here for a second, and Twitter is a really gamed platform in that there are a lot of fake accounts on it and there are a lot of fake followers on it. And in terms of the fake followers, I just wanted to point this out to you because if you look at this, top 10 home remedies, okay, on the surface this looks like it might be pretty good. It says that it says You know, over 3,500 followers. You know, let's take a look. Okay. Click on it, pull it up. Da da da da. Okay. I could see right now, just at the very beginning, fake followers. This is a fake follower. This is probably a fake follower. This is certainly a fake follower. See, with no profile picture, that those are all fakes. So I can already see that there's a lot of fake followers. Now if I, if I go into one of those quick tools that I think I've shown you before, like that you can, you can search up on Twitter. I mean, you can evaluate Twitter accounts on and you can get a general idea as to how many, how many fake followers I have. I just, by looking at this, I can tell that there's a lot of fakes. So this is probably not going to be an account that I'm really going to spend any time with because, you know, it's just populated with fake stuff. So keep that in mind when you're looking at Twitter, although Twitter is good for searching up some influencers. Like I said before, you search up, put in the hashtag for the search term that you're looking for, and it can pull up all sorts of good stuff. There's one other tool that I want to run through with you guys real quickly. And that is BuzzSumo. Again, you're gonna have to do a little bit of little work on with this, but it's a little manual, but it does do the trick if you're just willing to take a few minutes and look through some of the, uh, some of the choices it brings up for you. Let's see if it ever comes up. Here we go. Okay, I'm gonna log in. I have an account with BuzzSumo. I use it quite a bit every week. I'm at least on here at least 3, 4 times a week looking at stuff, whether it's I'm looking at content or whether I'm looking for influencers. It's a pretty handy tool. Okay, so you'll see up here there's content research, there's influencers, and there's monitoring. So if I just plug in here what I'm looking for, let's say heart health And I search it up, it's going to bring up the content first. That's fine. Okay. So I can see it's bringing up this content and it shows me how many shares it's gotten and stuff, which is good to know. But in this case, I'm looking for the influencers here. Searching for influencers. Come on. I think because I'm running Zoom, the whole thing's a little bit slower on my Wi-Fi. Okay, so it's got some companies on here. I can, I can, I can get rid of some of this. I can get rid of the companies. I can get rid of journalists if I want to. Just apply the filter here. Get rid of the companies because I'm really not going to be able to do anything with the companies. I'm looking for individual. All right, there's Karen Lang, Susan Dawkes. I mean, I have to take a look at some of this. I mean, these people don't seem like they have any, any blogs. They might just be on Twitter. Uh, the nice thing is though, for anybody that does have a blog, um, it gives you the page authority and the domain authority of the blog. So it gives me some, uh, some basic stats. Now I might take a look at Aaron Norton here, you know, so again, BuzzSumo is another way to find influencers. And the last way I wanted to show you guys, let's see, let's pull it up here. Go to Scrunch. This is a handy little tool that I've used before, and I find it to be pretty good, especially for Instagrammers. If I'm looking for Instagram bloggers or Instagram accounts that might be good to hit up, let's see, log in. They've— now Scrunch has a free version, which is what I use, and then they have a paid version. I don't bother with that. I don't need all their scraped statistics. Most of these platforms just scrape the statistics, so they're really not They're really not that great. Some of the platforms do put in their own algorithm and stuff, and they've got some good stuff. But you can see here, it pulls up influencers on these topics. All right, health and fitness is probably what I'm going to go for first for my blood pressure client. Again, okay, so it gives me a whole bunch of different— it gives me a list of people It tells me there how many followers they have. Most of this is all on Instagram. You can see by the little diagram there, Instagram. It's got engagement rate, what they consider to be high. I'd still look at those pretty carefully. Don't trust these, these platforms very much. And then estimated cost per post. This stuff is like, these are just estimates. So I would not take any of this too seriously here. Although anybody with a lot of millions of followers is probably going to be able to charge quite a bit. But I'm going to be looking at people with 100,000 followers on up. And if I want to back it down a little bit to the micro level, I'll go down as low as 25,000 followers because at 25,000 followers, even up to 50,000 followers, you're going to see a higher engagement rate than you will at 100,000. So you can do a nice little mix there. And those people at 25, 50, they're very affordable. So, you know, for $25, $50, I might be able to get a shout out. Uh, I might be able to get something into their bio for 24 or 48 hours, something like that. But, um, so Scrunch is a decent tool to look at. It's especially good if you're doing affiliate products because you can find influencers really, really quickly on Instagram, and then you can, you can compile your list and then start reaching out to them. I would not recommend using Scrunch to reach out to your influencers, I would reach out to them myself, whether it's through direct message or whether it's through email. So anyway, to wrap this up. All right, here's the slide. Okay. So where you can find me. If you guys need any help or anything, hit me up. My website is theinfluencemarketer.com, like I said earlier. The Facebook group is Influencer Marketing for Badasses. Join up, it's free, and we go through all sorts of stuff in there. I plan on doing more of these videos so I can teach you guys the tools and tricks and tips and things like that that I use to help me with my business. But if you want even more help, I'm available for one-on-one consulting, and that could be just for a phone call for an hour, or it could be you know, a multi-week project where I, uh, help consult with you on a, on a, on a project that you're working on, a company you want to launch, a product you want to launch, doesn't matter. It's almost like, uh, it's almost like being a fractional CMO. So anything with digital marketing, funnel hacking, I can help you with, but especially influencer marketing. And then I've got the online course, which is a premium course, um, the Influence Academy. You can find that on my website. Influencemarketer.com. Please take the masterclass, and it's packed with value, and it goes through the 7 steps to making your competition irrelevant using online influencers. And you'll learn a whole bunch of stuff there about the things you should focus on to make that work for you. But anyway, if you're interested in the course, go ahead and take the masterclass. It's on my website. Like I said, if you want consulting, I'm available, or just join the Facebook group. It's free. Anyway, guys, uh, hope that helps you out. If you got any questions, drop them into the discussion, and I will see you on the inside.