So your business is considering starting an affiliate marketing program. Not only is it a great way to generate passive income for your business, but affiliate marketing programs also bring valuable partnerships, organic traffic, and brand awareness. Reaching out to smaller, beginner influencers is a smart way to start. Here’s how the little accounts could help, and where to find them.
There are many reasons why you might want to start with smaller influencers for your affiliate program. For one, the larger affiliates might not look to partner with you until you have substantial brand awareness or the budget to pay for an upfront signing fee.
Beyond that, small influencers, also called micro influencers, often have greater trust with their audience. Because they’re smaller influencers, viewers tend to see them as more authentic and trustworthy.
Lastly, small influencers won’t be as bombarded with brand deals, partnership requests, and other business inquiries. You’ll have more time and space to build a lasting relationship, get their feedback on your products, and they’ll be more hands-on with helping you shape your program.
The easiest way to seek out beginner influencers is to look at your existing customer pool. Start an easy email campaign with a call out for influencers to partner with, and mention what compensation and benefits look like.
Chances are, at least a few dozen purchasers in your CRM have a few thousand followers. Plus, they don’t need to be “bought in” if they already know and love your products.
Your online store might be broadly online, but if you have a strong presence in a specific local community, lean into it.
Customers love to support cool local brands, and some smaller influencers in your area likely enjoy collaborating with local businesses. Try searching up commonly used local hashtags on social media to see if they’re open to partnering.
Newer influencers are trying to build their following, just as your brand is trying to scale revenue. Search for influencers on social media within your niche with product-specific hashtags. From there, it might take a bit of scrolling, but you should be able to find newer influencers doing product reviews, hauls, or try-ons.
Reach out to them about partnering, and mention that while they post about your products, you’ll also post about them as a partner. They get compensation and exposure, and you get a new affiliate for your program.
Influencers actively seeing affiliate partnerships likely already know that there are communities to join and explore. Try LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram communities, and make a post, following the guidelines, that you’re looking for micro influencers for your affiliate program.
This is a fast track to finding interested influencers already open to partnerships, and getting people signed on will be quicker this way than when you’re doing cold outreach.
Influencers (and regular buyers!) love to follow brands they admire on social media. So post on your feed and in your stories with a call to action for micro influencers. Better yet, encourage your followers to tag a friend who might be interested in being an affiliate as well.
This method allows you to bypass some of the education piece about your brand, as the people following you likely already know what you’re about.
So you’ve done some outreach, and the right influencers have floated your way. Now what? Onboarding may look different for every brand, but as a general rule of thumb, here’s what you should do:
Before you do any outreach to influencers, make sure you have the right software to support your affiliate marketing program.
At Simple Affiliate, we provide marketing teams of all sizes a comprehensive dashboard, KPI trackers, automated payouts and tax forms, and a tool that keeps things, well, simple. We support programs of any size and have hundreds of glowing reviews. Book a demo with us today, and we can show you how simple it is.
