How to Reach Out to Influencers: 5 Steps, 4 Templates & More

Influencer marketing is a powerful way to promote your brand.

Especially if you’re a lifestyle brand, you need to add it into your marketing strategy.

Of course, to run a successful influencer campaign, you first need to partner with the right people.

Which means that you need to do influencer outreach.

In this guide, I’m going to share with you a 5-step process of how to reach out to influencers.

The right influencers for your business.

This guide can be the starting point of your influencer marketing strategy.

Let’s get into it.

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What is Influencer Outreach?

Before you begin knocking on influencers’ inboxes, it’s first important to understand what influencer outreach is.

Influencers have gained popularity through the rise of social media channels and they’re defined as someone with an influence over a large audience and has the ability to promote a product or brand.

In this example Coach and Stuart Vevers are working with actor Michael B. Jordan to promote #CoachSS20.

Influencer outreach is the process of reaching out to those individuals to “develop credibility and raise awareness for your brand or product”.

This is a powerful alternative to traditional advertising or promotional tactics, as discussed by Digital Marketing Institute.

Although social channels have been around for the better part of 40 years, influencers really started trending in 2017, with a big spike going into 2018.

Influencers have continued to grow since, expanding from older social media platforms, like Facebook and Youtube, to newer apps such as TikTok.

Social Media influencers have established an audience that trusts their opinions, so by taking advantage of that relationship, their audience may be more inclined to buy your products or services.

There are many different types of influencers so it’s important to find Instagram influencers who’ll be able to advocate for your product or service to the appropriate target audience.

Although Addison Rae has over 24 million followers on Instagram, unless your target audience is young females it won’t benefit you to connect with her.

For SaaS professionals, we suggest looking at influencers such as Brad Feld, managing director at the Foundry Group or Aaron Levie, and American entrepreneur and founder of the cloud company Box.

With over 500 connections and 59,076 followers on LinkedIn, Aaron would be a great influencer to reach out to if you want to connect with a very wide audience that’s interested in SaaS solutions, trends, and news.

The key here is to make sure your target audience matches the followers or connections of the content creator you want to reach out to.

Author’s Note: The follower count of the influencers you’re trying to reach out to is, of course, important. However, there are other factors you should consider when reaching out to influencers. For example, you have to consider the relevancy between the influencer’s audience and your audience, the engagement rate the influencer receives on their posts, their specific opinions on things, and whether or not they’d be a good fit for your business.

Influencer outreach can be a tremendous addition to your company, but it’s also important to realize why it can add value to your business.

Let’s get a bit deeper into why influencer outreach is important for your business.

Why is Influencer Outreach Important?

Now that you understand a bit more about influencer marketing, let’s take a closer look at the specific benefits of working with the right influencers.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being opened.

If you’re a new brand, you may be struggling to build your audience and therefore have limited reach.

By connecting with influencers through influencer outreach, you can reach a larger audience and hopefully build up your own at the same time.

Newer or smaller brands typically don’t have a large marketing budget so this is a smart way to reach new people without having to pay lots of money.

A recent study shows that influencers are charging the following:

• Facebook influencer pricing: $25 per 1000 followers
• Instagram Influencer pricing: $10 per 1000 followers

The study doesn’t mention the pricing for LinkedIn influencers but you can follow the one cent per follower rule, i.e. the $100 per 100,000 follower rule, as a nice place to start.

Author’s Note: This isn’t to say that influencer outreach is cheap, but it is generally less expensive than traditional forms of marketing.

Connecting with the right influencers or bloggers can amplify your brand awareness, allow for precise targeting, and enhance the credibility and trust for your own brand through the relationships they have already established.

It can also increase your overall audience engagement through giveaways, polls, etc.

By integrating influencer marketing into your overall advertising strategy, you can boost the other forms of digital marketing you’re using as well.

Adidas is a great example of this. They worked with influencers like Iga Wysocka and Selena Gomez to introduce their #MyNeoShoot contest.

Through the campaign, they were able to get over 12,000 contest entries, the followers on their Instagram account increased by 41,000 users, and sales increased by 24.2% while their competition struggled.

The increase in brand awareness should also lead more people to your website and, depending on how your content marketing is shared, this could provide a higher number of high-quality backlinks.

Both of these things can improve your search engine rankings.

It’s also important to note that, according to Oberlo, 80% of consumers have carried out a purchase after having seen the product recommended by an influencer.

 That statistic alone is enough to see the importance of influencer outreach!

People are also blocking traditional advertisements so it’s important not to waste money on devices using ad blockers and focus on channels that people trust.

Now, let’s take a look at the step-by-step process for how to make your social influencer marketing campaign a success and, ultimately, grab the influencer’s attention.

Step #1: Make a List of Influencers – the Right Influencers

The first step of the process is to build your list of influencers, but where do you begin?

Start with these steps:

• Know your audience — research them, understand them, and see who speaks to them in a way that drives a response
• Talk to your team — they are already reaching out to so many people and these relationships could be potential influencers
• Look at who your audience follows — ask them who they look to for advice. See who they are following on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. What posts are they sharing or engaging with?
• Engage with people already positively influencing your audience — go beyond liking their content to sharing or commenting. This will create a genuine human connection and give you a better sense of the content they like to recommend.
• Don’t reach out to everyone — this’ll be a waste of your time. Focus on the people most closely related to your target audience. It’s not enough to connect with influencers; you have to connect with the right ones.

Once you’ve considered the above, it’s now time to look at the details of how to find the right influencers for you to reach out to.

First of all, you need to make a list of prospects you’d like to engage with.

To understand this better, let’s use an example.

You are a SEO software company and you’re trying to find SEO experts to connect with and form a connection.  

To find these people, you can conduct a simple Google search using the following search operator:

Author’s Note: We’re using this search operator because we want to find expert roundups from SEO experts who share their opinion on a certain topic. You can research for potential prospects using other search operators as well.

Here’s what you’re going to see when you click search – no need for any social listening tools:

Author’s Note: Results may vary depending on your location, browser preferences, and overall activity online.

It’s important to look at the different types of articles that are appearing.

The ones that have a higher number of experts are a good resource to pull from and will make things easier on you.

Let’s take a look at one of the top results that was generated from our search.

This is a great resource to get started with creating your list.

They provide you with the two most important pieces of information to get started:

1. The individual’s name
2. The company they work for with a link to the website

Here’s one of the prospects in our list:

All you need to do is create a CSV file so it’s easy to keep track of your list and their contact information.

We recommend the following columns:

• First name
• Last name
• Referring URL (the URL of the post you pulled the information from)
• Website URL (the URL of their website)
• LinkedIn profile (optional)

Here’s what your csv file will look like:

Now that you have a solid foundation of Instagram influencers and influencers from other popular social media channels,  what should you do?

Start crafting your pitch.

This is what we’re going to do next.

Step #2: Craft Your Pitch

Your next step is to craft a pitch that gets the influencer’s attention and expresses your reasons for contacting them in an engaging manner.

Your pitch should not ask the social media influencer what they can do for your brand.

Instead, figure out how your brand can help the influencer.

First, decide what action you would like them to take — do you want them to write about your product, attend your event, or share your post in social media?

No matter what your end goal is, you need to clearly explain the benefits in terms of traffic, influence, or cash as quickly as possible.

You’re asking influencers to take their time to perform these actions so you don’t want to waste their time with a lengthy pitch.

Next, you need to provide specifics.

You may think it’s better to be broad in your pitch so you aren’t sounding demanding or too specific, but you don’t want to create more work for the influencer so it’s better to outline exactly how you would like them to participate.

Lastly, include a deadline to create a sense of urgency.

Influencers should be used to working within a timeframe for their own marketing strategy so this shouldn’t be new for them.

You don’t want to have an open-ended deadline or allow them two weeks or more to think about it because it’s likely they’ll forget about it and move on to something else.

You can use the following two outreach templates to get started.

Influencer Outreach Email Template 1

Ideal for: Brands who want to reach to popular names and industry leaders.

How to personalize: Do your research and mention an excerpt of something the prospect has said online, e.g. in an interview.

Influencer Outreach Template 2

Ideal for: Brands who want to reach out to micro or even nano influencers who are just getting started.

How to personalize: Mention one of their recent posts promoting a brand that’s relevant to yours.

Before reaching out to the influencers in your list, you need to do one more thing:

Connect with them on social media.

Influencer Outreach Email Template 3:

Ideal for: eCommerce businesses, lifestyle brands, and SaaS companies that want to get real customer feedback on their products, by asking for reviews by people who are influential.

How to personalize: Mention other reviews that your prospect has done in the past, especially for businesses that are relevant to yours.

Success rate estimation: Medium/High

Influencer Outreach Email Template 4:

Ideal for: Businesses looking to get in touch with people who often publish reviews (such as TikTok influencers

How to personalize: Mention other reviews that your prospect has done in the past, especially for businesses that are relevant to yours.

Success rate estimation: Medium/High

Step #3: Connect With Relevant Influencers on Social Media

You have a perfectly crafted pitch that you’re excited to put into practice. The next step is sometimes overlooked, but it’s an important part of the process.

Before you reach out to anyone to try and sell your pitch, it’s always good to connect on social media marketing channels or relevant outlets.

This way, when they receive your email, they can see that you’re already following their updates and can put a face to the outreach.

The majority of people do not respond to cold emails. In fact, Backlinko has found that only 8.5% of outreach emails receive a response.

You already have your list of influencers, so now you can easily go through that list, find the influencers on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, and start connecting with them in a real way.

Connecting with influencers before you reach out shows that you are really interested in forming a relationship rather than just cold emailing people.

Author’s Note: We’ll use LinkedIn as our example for how to connect with influencers, but you can apply these same tactics to any social media platform. All you need to do is find the influencer’s social media profile and reach out to them.

Start with a simple connection request or follow on LinkedIn.

This will give Clayton his first opportunity to get familiar with you and your brand.

By following him, you’ll also see his posts in your newsfeed, giving you the opportunity to connect with him further.

Once you’re connected and following the influencers of your choice, look for ways to engage with them further.

What kind of content are they posting? Can you add any insights or did it spark some follow up questions?

Simply using the reaction emojis is a good way to start, but if you can leave a comment or share the content to your own followers, that will create a more lasting impression.

By commenting, you’re opening up a two-way conversation and by sharing their content, you show the influencer that you find value in what they’re sharing.

Author’s Note: Similar to LinkedIn, you can comment or share any of your prospect’s Tweets or any other social media channel they’re active on and publish user generated content on.

By using one or more of these techniques, you allow the influencer to become familiar with you in an informal way so they’ll be more receptive to pitch when you start actually start implementing your influencer outreach strategy.

Now that you know how to connect and interact with your prospects before reaching out to them, it’s time to send your personalized email and start initiating some conversations.

Step #4: Send Your Influencer Outreach Email

To do our influencer email outreach , we’re going to use Respona.

What we’re going to do first is start a new campaign.

From there, Respona offers a variety of pre-made campaign temlplates for different outreach purposes.

But, since we have already put together a list with potential influencers to collaborate with, let’s start an advanced, non-templated campaign.

The first step of any campaign with Respona is to create your emailm sequence.

The toool gives you two options:

1. Use one of Respona’s ready-to-use templates (one for each campaign type)
2. Create your own template

In our example, we’re going to create a new email sequence.

Here’s what  our email will look like:

Something important here is the variables we have in our email.

For example, one variable is the prospect’s first name.

These are the exact fields we mapped earlier.

You can insert a new variable by clicking on “Insert Variable” and choosing the variable that you want to insert.

If you want to learn more about how campaign automation works in Respona, make sure to watch the following video:

In addition to simple variables like “first_name”, we’ve also added an AI icebreaker. It will “read” our prospects’ articles and come up with unique personalizations for every opportunity in your influencer outreach campaign on auto-pilot.

Before moving on to the next step, let’s also add an unsubscribe button and a follow-up 5 business days later.

The next step is called simply “Opportunities”.

This is where you find influencers to reach out to, or, in our case, import our list of prospects.

If you already have email addresses of your target influencers, use the “contacts” import mode.

We don’t have them yet, so we’ll use the websites import mode and use Respona’s email finder to help us out with contact information.

After selecting your file to upload, click “Continue” and assign your .CSV file fields to Respona variables.

This menu might look intimidating at first – but don’t worry, it’s actually really simple.

If your .CSV fields are named intuitively: “URL” for article links, “email” for email addresses, and so on, Respona will pick them up automatically.

However, if you’d like to use custom variables with data from outside Respona, you’ll have to select them and assign them to the corresponding columns here.

Once done, click “Continue” once again.

Here, you’ll have access to two additional functions.

The first one is Respona’s real-time email finder and verifier.

If you use a campaign template, it’ll automatically set the automation to find the most relevant people for your campaign.

So, content managers for link building campaigns, journalists for news outreach, etc.

Click “Import” and Respona will start 3 processes at once:

1. Import your sheet of potential influencer partners
2. Look for their contact information
3. Personalize your outreach emails with AI

Contact emails will start appearing near to your target websites as soon as they’re fpimd

Keep in mind that if you choose to find contact information for more than one prospects, you’ll spend more credits and Respona will require more time researching the right contact information for your prospects.

In our example, we have 30 opportunities without contact information and have asked Respona to find contact information for 2 persons from inside the company.

30 opportunities x 5 credits = 150 estimated credits

It also costs 10 credits per email personalized with AI.

In other words, the more opportunities you wish to assign contact information to, the more credits you’re going to need.

Always keep that in mind when running automated campaigns.

Keep in mind that the number of prospects that have successfully been assigned with contact information heavily depends on the criteria you’ve chosen.

This means that you have to be sure as to what kind of automation you want to run, as this will help Respona find the best contact information for you.

Once you’re done, you can click “Step 3”.

In the last step of the process, you need to make any final changes to your email and make sure that everything is as it should be before launching the campaign.

When you’ve reviewed everything, you can launch your campaign by clicking on the button “Launch Campaign”.

What’s next?

Managing your inbox and starting building relationships.

Learn more about automating your campaigns with Respona:

Step #5: Start Building Relationships

So far, we’ve discussed the process of identifying and reaching out to influencers.

Influencer marketing may not be as popular as other marketing channels and activities, e.g. email marketing, but the interest around it continues to grow as the time passes.

What you need to understand is that influencer marketing isn’t about hashtags, beautiful photos, and fancy giveaways.

It’s primarily about building relationships with people and helping each other grow.

As I hope it is evident by now, influencer outreach is an integral part of this process.

Simply put, if your outreach process isn’t effective, you won’t be able to build these relationships and start using them to grow your business.

Using a tool like Respona, you’re able to find the people who might be interested in a collaboration with you and start working with them. So long as they aren’t in Facebook jail or have some other restriction on their social media accounts, you’re likely to have a mutually beneficial relationship.

Our new, updated influencer research feature helps you find multiple influencers easily and without having to spend hours vetting them; similar to what tools like BuzzSumo do.

Be sure to give it a try!

What I want you to take from this section is this:

Influencer marketing is all about building relationships.

Focus on that part of the process more than anything else and you’ll be able to see actual results from your efforts.

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Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

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Wrapping Up

I hope that this guide has helped you understand the steps to reaching out to influencers for your business.

Keep in mind that many times, top influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers may not be as interested in working with smaller brands, but there are many micro-influencers you can reach out to and partner with.

These folks may not have the same reach as top influencers, but they can still help you reach your target audience.

Also, they’ll be more cost effective than popular influencers.

Now, I’d like to hear from you:

Have you ever reached out to influencers? If yes, what were the means that you’ve used? Was it through an outreach message on Instagram or LinkedIn, or through an influencer outreach email?

Let me know by leaving a brief comment below.