How to Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy for your Brand | Peg Fitzpatrick | Skillshare
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How to Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy for your Brand

teacher avatar Peg Fitzpatrick, Social media strategist and author

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro to How to Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy

      0:57

    • 2.

      What is Influencer Marketing?

      2:58

    • 3.

      How to Find Influencers

      4:18

    • 4.

      What are Your Goals?

      5:00

    • 5.

      How to You Want to Work with Influencers?

      2:07

    • 6.

      How to Measure Social Success

      1:44

    • 7.

      Influencer Research on BuzzSumo

      3:11

    • 8.

      FTC Guidelines - Very Important

      5:35

    • 9.

      How to Pitch to Influencers

      3:19

    • 10.

      Discovery Call

      3:39

    • 11.

      Make an Offer

      2:19

    • 12.

      Formal Agreement

      2:55

    • 13.

      Organize your Project with a Trello Board

      3:39

    • 14.

      Course Wrap Up

      1:23

    • 15.

      Course Project

      0:50

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About This Class

Wondering how to grow your brand and build awareness for your next big event or project launch? Working with an influencer could be the answer for you. If you’ve been hearing how amazing Influencer Marketing is but haven’t figured out how to use it - this course is for you! Join this course that covers the basics of Influencer Marketing and you'll learn the following:

Influencer Marketing Overview:
- How to find influencers and set a strategy

- What are your goals for your influencer campaigns?

- Using influencers to build your company’s brand

- Crafting a good email and making an offer

- FTC guidelines and what needs to be disclosed

- How to measure the success of the social campaigns

You'll learn tons and get valuable downloads in this course for businesses and brands looking to connect with influencers for social media marketing campaigns.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Peg Fitzpatrick

Social media strategist and author

Teacher


Peg Fitzpatrick is the author of The Art of Small Business Social Media: A Blueprint for Marketing Success and co-author of The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users with Guy Kawasaki, the legendary former chief evangelist for Apple and one of the pioneers of business blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Tumbling, and much, much more. Guy teamed up with Peg, believing she "is the best social-media person he's ever met."



Ms. Fitzpatrick is known for her brand management, social media marketing strategy, and innovation in social media marketing. She is the Director of Marketing and Social Media Manager for Kreussler Inc., where she covers online brand management as well as traditional marketing.

She has spearheaded successful social-media campaigns ... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Intro to How to Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy: Hi. I'm Peg Fitzpatrick, co-author of the Art of Social Media. I have created a brand new course on Skillshare called How to Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy for your Brand. If you've been wondering if you could use influencer marketing for your brand, what is an influencer marketing, how you can grow your brand on social media, I'm going to cover all these things in this class. It's conveniently setup so you can take it part of the time. You could do the whole class in one sitting or you could break it down into little pieces. I've created some super easy-to-use downloads. I'm going to show you some great organizational tools and teach you how to pitch to influencers so you can make great connections and really grow your brand with the influencer marketing. I can't wait to see you in the class. 2. What is Influencer Marketing?: What is influencer marketing, you might be asking? For the purpose of this class, we're going to define influencer marketing: as you being a brand, blogger, small business, who wants to connect with an influencer to connect with their social media audience and/or blog. It could be both of them. Influencers have spent a lot of time building up their social media platforms. Maybe it's an Instagram account, maybe it's Facebook group, there's all different kinds of ways that people could build their social influence, or they could have a big social platform which includes Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, their blog. There's all different kinds of ways to look at things. We're going to talk about those things but for the purposes of this, we're going to look at you, connecting with these influencers to build your social media presence and gain awareness for your brand. Marketing is not sales. That's something that we should be upfront right away. When you work with influencers, it may lead to more sales, but this is marketing and social media. It's not going to necessarily be a click and buy sale for you. It could be, depending on the type of program that you create, but I just want to be clear, sales and marketing are two different things. Going back to influencer marketing, you're going to look for people who have big social media followings based on the demographics that are right for your brand. You're going to find someone who has an audience that looks perfect for your brand and the kind of things that you're selling and this is the perfect way to connect with them, but you have to reach the right people. Do they have to have millions of followers? That's a great question that a lot of people think you should only find people with millions and millions of followers but that's not necessarily true. Influencers that called micro-influencers with under a hundred thousand followers can actually have a much more engaged audience. If you look for people with 10,000-30,000 followers, maybe 50,000, there's different parameters that you can set for it, but they don't have to be millions, and they don't actually have to even be 10,000. You could find somebody with a really fantastic smaller audience of a thousand or five thousand. There's really the right person for you. They have a great personality, they've a great engagement on their social media accounts. These things really count a lot more than having millions of followers. There's been studies that have shown that the engagement is higher for people that have lower followers than maybe Kim Kardashian or somebody with millions of followers. This is the type of influencer marketing we're going to be working on, with you connecting with influencers to build a program that works for your brand. The next thing we're going to cover is how to find influencers that match your brand. Are you're ready to get started? 3. How to Find Influencers: Now we're going to talk about how you can find influencers to match your brand. You'll need to have the demographics for your product or your goals that you want to reach. It's important to know these things about your own brand. So that would include, the age of people that would be your customers, where they live, their income, all of those things. You can find these things in your Google Analytics or your Facebook page, or even your own research. If you're a brick and mortar location, you know who your customers are because you see them face-to-face. So what I've created is an influencer matrix. It's going to be a download that you'll find in your class is a spreadsheet and you can fill this out to find people who you think might be a good fit for your brand, because it's going to take a little bit of research to find just the right person. So the first thing you want to do is figure out who your demographics are and who you want to reach. Then you're going to find the influencer that matches what you need. So based on your research, on your own brand and who you want to reach, you're going to do some Google search and some searches on Twitter. Facebook is a little bit harder to search. Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest are great places to search for people using the keywords. So it could be like if you're local, you would be searching for local things. If you're a specific type of brand, you would be using hashtags that go with that. You can actually go into Twitter and search where people who talk about what you want too, the market that you want to get into. Using hashtags or just keywords, you can search for these people and then you're going to take this information and put it into your influencer matrix to create a list of people that you might want to work with. You might want to set a number for yourself, like maybe find 20 people and then you're going to cut that down to a smaller group based on all the things that you're going to find in there. You're going to list their name, their blog, and put the links to their social media accounts, everything in there. When you're doing your initial research, you can put all the links to refer back to later because you think you'll remember where they are, but you definitely wont. Then you're going to get to the end of this and a really important thing is, this is where you can really start looking at their content and think, does their social media content look like it would be interesting to people who follow you? Do people engage with their posts and do they engage with their followers? Do people that follow them, are they really interested and what they're talking about that super important? You also want to make sure that it looks like all their followers are real followers. That they haven't purchased followers or taken any shortcuts to try to make it look like they have a great social media presence and you can get ideas from things like, do they have a ton of followers, but no one's engaging? Twitter, do they have 75,000 followers, but they only have a 100 tweets. That's not possible. It takes a long time to build social media following. So if they haven't posted very many things and they have a huge following, and they're not following many people, it's possible that those are not real followers. So click on the people that are following them and look what kinds of people those are. Are they real accounts? So they have real bios? Are they sharing content? Are they active, engaged people, because these are the people that will be looking at the content that the influencers create? So keep in mind all these things when you're looking at the social media accounts for the influencers and then fill this out for, 10 or 20 people to get a really good idea of how these people work on social media, what kind of content they create and if it seems like this is a good fit for your brand. So you're going to want to download this little Google Doc to keep in your own information and look up information on these people. I'm going to quickly hop over to my computer and show you what it looks like and I'll just maybe do one for you to give you a little help and then we'll dive into the next section. Next we're going to talk about what your goals are for your influencer marketing and how you're going to reach them. 4. What are Your Goals?: Now that you've started looking for some influencers, let's talk about what your goals are going to be for your social media campaigns. When you create your influencer marketing program, you're going to want to have some things in mind, because while we'd love to be able to do every single thing that we could, you really need to focus on one or two goals as with all of social media or marketing in general, you have to have a specific goal for it to be successful. If you tried to do all of the things, you're going to end up not doing a very good job at any of them. Here's a few ways that you can work with influencers to build your social media. Number one, you could build your brand awareness. This would be maybe you don't necessarily have a product that's new out right now, but you want more people to follow you on social media, you want them to learn about your brand, know who you are and keep it in the back of their mind. So when they're making it a future decision to buy, they know who you are and what you do. That would be building your brand awareness. Another way that you could work with social media influencers is amplifying your own social media. you can work together with an influencer on a campaign and they could share your social media campaigns to their audiences. They would do their own intros, they would share it very organically to their audience, which is one of the really big benefits because people who have built these big audiences have people that are listening to them that really want to know what they're talking about, what they think it's interesting, they're taste makers. These taste makers are actually setting the standards for other things, whether it's what social media tools they're using, what tech tools they're using, what phones that are using, what apps they're using, what clothes they're wearing, what makeup they're wearing, the list goes on and on. But there's taste makers and all of these separate niches. Finding the right taste makers that match your product, they will be introducing your brand to them and people will be super interested in it. Another way that you can work with a social media influencer is a social media takeover. They will come on your social media accounts maybe for a day, maybe for a weekend depending on what's going on and they will do the social media. So they would say, "Hi, my name's Peg Fitzpatrick and I am here today on the insert your brand accounts today and I'm going to share how I use this for my social media or how I use this new hair products to make my hair like this amazing and shiny." I don't know what your brand is, so I'm just going to add a couple things in there to give you some ideas. But basically, what happens is the influencers come onto your social media channels, it builds really great buzz for your brand, they announce it on their social media accounts saying, "Hey, I'm going to be in this brand's Instagram stories today or I'm going to do a Snapchat take over here." It's a great way to build your own social media campaigns with the buzz and get that cool factor of having that really awesome influencer come in to talk about your brand to your audience. So that's another way that you can work with influencer. You can also work on blogs. People said blogs weren't going to be around, but they are around and people love them. One thing that you could do is you can have them guess ride on your blog to talk about things to your direct audience or you can have them write content on your blog. So it can go either way. You can write out there's they can write on yours, you could do a combination of both, but it's really great to get those back-links and have the long-term traffic that you get from a blog post and that gets tied in with social media sharing that people do when they published blog content. So think about what way would benefit your brand the most. Do you want them to do an Instagram takeover? Blog content? You could also do a combination of all of these different things, but try to hone it down to one main goal that you want this social media campaign to really hit. Do you want to build more brand awareness? Do you want build your social accounts or are you looking at amplifying your own social media? It can end up being a combination of all of these things together, but hitting your one main goal is really important. So which one of these is most important to you? Take some notes and think about this a little bit, like, what do you want to happen? Do you want more people to know about your company? Do you want your social media accounts to grow? Do you want some great content for your social media? Come up with your one tight goal, the other things like I said, might all tie in with this and create a really great package, but come up with your main goal and all of these other things will boost it. Next, we're going to talk about how you can work with influencers in different types of ways. Are you ready? 5. How to You Want to Work with Influencers?: So how do you want to work with the social media influencers? Let's look at a couple of different ways that you can partner with people.Number 1, you could have people work with you on a product launch. This is a really common way that people like to work with influencers. If you have something new coming out, it's great to get that number's boost and work with somebody else outside of your company, who can get the word out there and have your product reach their audience. You could also have them create really cool campaigns that you share on your social media. It could be shared on theirs as well. Usually it's probably a combination of both, but it's great to work with people to infuse some new vibes into your current social media campaigns. This is why of course, you're choosing people who really align closely with your brand and finding the people whose content will really sing when it hits your social media audiences. You can work with influencers at events. Say you have a big show coming up or you have a convention or something where you'd like to have somebody come and maybe cover it on social media. Somebody who's good in front of the camera, somebody who's comfortable live tweeting and getting the message out there, it can really help your event reach way more people. If you have a hashtag and an influencer or two behind your social media efforts. It can create some great buzz, it can trend by different social media platforms. It's a great way to work with influencers. So think about one way that you want to get started, because you wouldn't be able to do all of these things at once. So when you're looking at your influencer program, think, "How can I connect with people best? Do I have a product that's coming out? Do I have a new white paper?" It could be a whole bunch of different things, but just hone in at how you want to work with these people and then that will help you make your campaign super targeted and reach the right people. Next, we're going to talk about how you can measure the social success of your campaigns. 6. How to Measure Social Success: Now, I bet you're wondering, "How am I going to tell if this is actually working?" That's what we're going to talk about, how to measure your success when you're working on social media with influencers. There's a couple different ways that you can measure things. Of course, it's going to depend on what platforms you're working on. If you're working on a blog and social media, but you've got to look at things like impressions, reach, amplification. You're going to see how many times things were tweeted, retweeted, how many times people favorited things. There's all these different matrix that you can measure that will let you know how the social media is working. I've created a Social Success Sheet for you that you can download in Google to fill out when you're starting your social media campaign that will have all the information that you're going to measure so you can track things really carefully because it's really hard to go back a lot later to find things. What I usually like to do when I'm working with a brand is create this ahead of time, which I'm giving you guys as a sheet so you can do it. I do it ahead of time and I put the links in there immediately, instead of trying to find them a day later, a week later. It's just really hard to find things later. You want to stay super organized. When you're working with an influencer, you could actually give them a sheet that you guys can work on together, which we'll talk about that a little bit later, but this is for your internal tracking so you guys can have a lot of success and not wonder if it was working or not. The next thing we're going to talk about is tools that you can use to measure your success. I'm going to jump over the computer and screen-share with you guys a little bit so you can see what tools I recommend. 7. Influencer Research on BuzzSumo: Place to find and research influencers is in BuzzSumo. If you look up here, they have content research. So you can find information they have monitoring, but also right here, influencers. So if you're looking for specific people, you can filter it by bloggers, influencers, companies, journalists, regular people, active influencers. These are people who've tweeted in the last three months and you can ignore broadcasters who just seem to push out the content but not really respond to people. So let's just pretend that we are a local we're just pretend we're in New York City, which is going to give us a lot of results. But we'll say we're in New York City and we're looking for a food blogger, and then you can hit search. Then it pulls up a bunch of people who have food blogger backgrounds. We'll just look at this first person. I don't actually know any of these people and I'm just doing this as an example to show you what it looks like, so you see the person's name, GirlGoneTravel. It has links that she shared. You can save your influencers in here, the higher the page authority the better. She has 53, this person has 84. His page authorities even higher, his domain authority is 80. So that tie, he has 144,000 followers on Twitter, two percent retweets,26 percent ratio of return, and then average Tweets is 1.8. You can see that you can find a lot of information in here that you don't necessarily see on Twitter. It gives you background information. This is a great place to look at people, you can click to see what kind of information they share. These are the links that she shared. You can analyze the links. Just takes a second, and it tells where she's getting stuff from. These are the main places that she shares content from. There's a lot of information in here, so that's just for New York City. Obviously, if we change the city we get something different. If you do bloggers, influencers, companies, journalists, there's all different ways depending on your program to find information and you can also export this. So say that you're interested in a couple of these people. You can hit Export and make a little spreadsheet. It downloads it, and then you can click on that and open it up. There's a lot of information that you can get on here that to do a little research for people, I highly recommend if you're going to build a great program, you might want to do the pro version, which is what I have where I get all this extra great information. I hope that you get some good ideas from this on what to look for, and build your program. 8. FTC Guidelines - Very Important: A really important thing that we need to cover is the FTC guidelines. They are crucial to the success of your program because you as a brand are responsible for making sure that everything is on the up and up. So what you need to do is to work with people who are familiar with this, and if they're not, we're going to talk a little bit later about how to put that into agreement with them. But for now, what I want you to know is that the FTC has rules for when you work with influences and you're paying them and giving them information that they are disclosing it. That it is totally clear that this native advertising is then working with you. So they need to disclose it by saying, I'm a brand ambassador with X. People try to skirt it a little bit by saying that they partnered with and that's maybe okay and maybe not depending on where they put it in, how they word it. So I'm going to actually hop over to the computer and show you guys some examples in a little bit. But one thing I want to make really clear is if people don't want to disclose they're definitely not people that you want to work with because ethically, it's just not okay. I've told you guys how many campaigns that I've worked on. I always disclosed everything. I get more engagement because of that, not less. Sometimes people worry or brands worried that maybe things are going to do as well if it's sponsored content, but that's not true. If you work with the right person, it's always going to fit with their brand, and they're excited to work with you, they should be excited to say that they're working with your brand. It helps their brand grow and it helps your brand grow. So I'm going to put links to the FTC guidelines. You guys can review them. If you're a very large brand and you have attorneys working for your company, they probably already wrote guidelines for you, but I'll give you some information that you can research to learn what the guidelines are. But the general basis of it is that whenever you work for someone and you're paying them, they need to disclose it to their audience so people know that it's paid. They know that this video that they're creating is being paid for by use. It's super clear, it should never be a gray area. The Kardashians actually had some issues because people were really watching everything they did and, saying, hey, is this paid or not paid? You should never have to wonder, is this a commercial or is this just somebody saying, hey, I really like this thing. Sometimes I just really like things and I talk about it and I actually will I call it negative disclosing. I'll say, I wasn't paid to talk about this, but I just really love this blog. So the people that you work with, these tastemakers and influencers are going to have that type of communication with the people that follow them. So as a brand, you need to make sure that they are disclosing. One of the things that you can check when you're looking at influencers is on past campaigns, you can have them give examples, say, "Hey, I'd love to see some other campaigns that you've worked with," and they should have on their disclosures. If they don't, that's a red flag. Maybe they didn't know, maybe they weren't aware and you don't need to make a big issue out of that. But what you can do if you choose to work with this person is in your agreement, have in there, that they will disclose on everything that you are working with them, that this paid, the language has to be super clear. One example that came out a few years ago was that Lord & Taylor gave a whole bunch of bloggers this dress and asked people to post. I believe most of it was on Instagram, but Instagram on their blog, and none of them disclosed, and the FTC came down and fined Lord and Taylor for that, not the individual influencers, but Lord & Taylor had a huge legal fall out from it. So they are watching and people do know that fashion bloggers and beauty bloggers get products, get clothes, get shoes, they are expecting people to say that this was sent to me from whomever. It's totally on the up and up. It's the legal and ethical way to do things. So make sure when you set up your influence, your program, that you set it up for success by letting people know that you work with, that you're going to expect them to disclose. This is some suggested language. McDonald's one time did a really cool thing when they launched their all-day breakfast, which was huge. I wasn't working with them as a brand ambassador, but I tweeted their campaign because it was super cute. So I was working on this particular campaign, but they sent me some really cute product. They sent me a gift card and a really cute like McDonald's all-day breakfast t-shirt, and they included this little card that said that, we'd love if you'd share this on your social media, please disclose that this was a gift from McDonald's, which is super smart. So if you're ever going to send product out to people, maybe you're not necessarily going to pay them to be part of your brand ambassador program, but if you're sending them things and close a little card that says we'd love if you'd share this, please disclose that this was sent to you from our company. Keeps you guys on the up and up. It makes everything better and you never have to worry about legal issues which who wants that? Nobody wants that. So you definitely want to stay on the up and up legal edge of your program which you're going to be able to because you're going to read through the guidelines that I give you. Now I'm going to give you a few examples of how people have disclosed different ways that they have worked with companies that maybe will give you some ideas for your program. 9. How to Pitch to Influencers: You have decided who you want to work with, but are they going to want to work with you and is your budget going to fit with what their goals are? Let's look at those important things as we dive into this next section. The good, the bad and the ugly. How to pitch to influencers. You have to do this the right way. It is so important. Using the outline of what you would like to do. You want to send them a personal email that says, ''Hi, I'm so and so and I worked with this brand. I love what you do on Instagram and we would be thrilled to work with you. Do you have time to book a quick 15 minute discovery call so we can talk about our goals and how maybe you could be a good fit for our brand?'' People will recognize that you have something important to say. You don't need to make it super long because if it is way too long, that's not going to be interesting. You want to have something to talk about on your discovery call, which we will cover next. But your email doesn't need to be long. It can be short. You can have a link to your product, you can have a link to your blog. You really don't want to make it overly flowery, but you could definitely compliment people because people do love, especially online content creators, love to know that people like what they do., so be sincere and be honest. People love how can you do any better than that? Being sincere and honest is always the way to go, but it's worth to state, because I get a lot of email pictures that are very bad. They are cut and paste that went to a whole bunch of people. Sometimes they have wrong name on it. Sometimes they have someone else's blog on there so I knew that they sent that to a whole bunch of people. It doesn't connect with anyone. If you try to shortcut that, what was the point of doing all this other work that you have done up until this point; you've made your list, you've honed it down to just a few people so you want to really personally connect with them. If you don't have your email address, you can do a few things. You can actually Google search for people's email address. You would be surprised at how many will come out. You can send them a direct message on Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn. If you do that on Instagram or Twitter, I would definitely Tweet them and say, ''Hey, I just sent you a direct message,'' or you can send them a Tweet saying, ''Hey, I would love to send you direct methods. Can you please follow us?'' People will usually see that and connect. Instagram direct messages are another great way to connect. Influencers may get a ton of direct passages, so when you want to connect with someone on Instagram, you definitely want to comment on their last blog, on their last Instagram post and say, ''Hey, I loved this pose. Can you check your DMs? I just sent you something interesting or I'd love to connect with you. I sent you a DM.'' Just to give people a heads up, make sure you mentioned them on Twitter or in their comments, so they get a notification for that to let them know that they may have a message. But email may be people's preferred method. If they are a business account on Instagram, you can click in their bio and it goes right to their email. Did you know that? Mine has that, so if people are a business account on Instagram, you can actually get their email. You don't get their email, but you can click in it and it sends one to them. That is a super easy way to do it. Next up we are going to talk about what you are going to talk about on your discovery call and how you can make it work to your advantage. 10. Discovery Call: Guess what? It's time to finally talk to this awesome person that you found. It's time for your discovery call. What you're going to do now that you've gotten an email back from them, they're interested in talking to you, is you're going to have a 15-minute Discovery call.This is not an opportunity to pick someone's brain for free. That is very annoying of you, if you want to work with an influencer, you want to respect their time and their expertise, you contacted them about a program. This is what you're going to share in your discovery column. You're going to send them an e-mail and even send an invite to a calendar, so you guys have the day and time at the same worked out the calendar invite is so important get that worked out the day and time. If there's difference in time zones, it's only going to be 15 minutes, so create a little outline. You want to tell them who you are, what your company does, what you're looking for, and then ask them about themselves. Say, what brands if you worked in the past, what kind of campaigns do you like to do? Are you great with video? Are you're big at Instagram. What are your favorite ways to work with brands? You can ask them, if it seems like it's a good fit, your next step from this discovery call would actually be to find out how much is this going to cost because they may have a specific cost or you may have a set budget. If you have a set budget, you can tell them right in this discovery call, if you feel like you're connecting, "Hey, this is what I'm looking for. I have a budget of this amount of money; does this align with what you usually work with brands for?" Or you can say, "I'm going to thank you so much for your time. I'm going to follow up by e-mail to let you know what we're looking at and see what your budget is to see if it will fit." Then they're going to review what it is you're looking for and you want to be very clear what you're looking for and get the dollar amount on the table. I will say this, "Influencers are not going to want to work for free." Guess what? Nobody works for free. You don't work for free. They are not going to work for free either. Thinking that you're going to connect with people and get them to volunteer their time to help your company be successful; when you think about that statement, it really make sense why influencers, they're not going to say yes, this is what they do for their money. This is their living. They work with brands, maybe they do other things as well, but you are a company, or a business, or a product, you are looking to connect with somebody. Of course, it's work for them to create content, to work on social media, to do all these other things. So it's not going to be a free process. You are going to send them an outline after this discovery call and say: "This is what we're looking at, this is our budget." Or you can say, "This is what we're looking at. How much would you charge for a couple of tweets, applaud, pose, and an Instagram takeover." You can do it two ways: One, you can say what your budget is, does this work with you? Or you can try to connect with them. Just tell them what the tasks are and what their budget is. It's usually negotiable on both sides. So if you really have no idea because it's really big influencer, you may not want to throw a dollar amount because if it's too small, they might just be insulted. You never know. You could certainly send it out in the first way which we just do lists all the things that you're looking for and say, we know you're really busy, if you could give me an estimate for what you would charge for this so we can, work on this project together. Tied up that way and then we will work into the next section, which is making your actual offer. 11. Make an Offer: Time to make an offer. You've talked to your influencer, you know what your campaign's going to be, so it's time to follow up from your discovery call. You're going to send them an email and you are going to say, "Thank you so much for your time. It was great speaking with you. I'd love to get an estimate on the following services." You can list what you'd like done and say, "Please let me know what your prices would be for this," or you can say what your budget is. But you do want to put this in an official email, or you can just, if this isn't going to work out for this campaign, you can send them an email saying, "Thank you so much for your time. I don't think this is a great fit for us right now, but maybe we can work together in the future." Just say thank you. They did take the time to have a call with you. It is a process to see who fits with who? Who do you fit with? This might be a first thing where you might want to work with them as small project and then work with on a bigger project later to see how they follow up at things? How's their communication? Do you work together well? Did their audience respond well to the content about your brand? There's nothing wrong with working on a smaller project first and building it up to a bigger one. You're going to create your email. This of course is going to be a personal email. Email them and say thank you. If it's a really big influencer, you could send them a gift. You could send them some flowers or you could send them maybe some of your product with a note saying, "Thank you so much for your time." You definitely want to follow up in a day or two just to let them know where it is in the process, if you're still thinking about it, if you know you want to work with them. You should already have an idea before you have your discovery call on how you want to work with them. You're working the process along, your super organized by now, right? We got this. Make them an offer and see what they come back with. Do they come back with a dollar amount that's higher? Do they say yes right away? Then we're going to go to the next step after that. If they are way out of your budget range, you can say, "Thanks for your time, we don't have that high of a budget right now, maybe we can contact you in the future to work together." Or if they fit exactly where you guys can afford it, you're going to go to the next step which is signing a formal agreement, which you're both going to sign. We're going to talk about that next. 12. Formal Agreement: All right. We are ready to make a formal offer. Yes. This is going to be an actual document that you are going to sign and the influencer is going to sign. What you want to have in this is you want to list everything that's going to be covered, so everything is super clear. You're going to say the brand, who will cover these expenses. Is your travel involved? If this is an event, whose booking the travel? Who's paying for the travel? Is everything covered by the brand? Is it one big dollar amount and the influencer is responsible for their own travel? These things all need to be super clear, so everybody can agree to something that's super tight. You want this agreement to have in there. Your FTC guideline policy, so you want to have in your agreement. Not only what social media and blogging the influencer's going to do for you, but also how they're going to disclose it to their audience. Just say as an ambassador for our brand, we suggest using this language in all of your social media or on your blog. It's fine for you to reword it, but our disclosure needs to be clear and made on all social media posts to follow the FTC guidelines. There, you're covering your behind and it's very important. You want to make sure that you list all the things that the influencer will cover. Whether it's blogging, social media posts, how many Tweets, how many Instagram posts, all those things need to be laid out. You want to have the dates for the project. You want to have, if it says a onetime launch you want to say, on May 30th, the influencer will create a Facebook Live that will be 30 minutes long covering these points. This information will be sent to the influencer from the brand. The brand will share it on their social media. The influencer will share it. All these things, just lay them all out. Also if you're paying someone, you of course need tax documentation, so you may want to get a W2 from them. You want to make sure everything is clear, the dollar amount, what's being done, who's responsible for what, the dates, and then they're going to sign it, the representative from your company is going to sign it, and then you're going to be all set and how is this going to be paid or you're going to send the check? Are you going to send to PayPal? There's whole bunch of different ways to pay people and usually people have their preferred way. If you're sending a check, they would probably want to receive that before or you could pay half in advance, half when the job is done. You want to work all these details out so it works for both sides, but make sure that you cover all of those things and next, I am going to show you how to organize your project so when you go from your offer into a Trello Board, I'm going to show you how to use. It's going to make it super easy to stay organized. 13. Organize your Project with a Trello Board: I'm going to show you a board that I created in Trello for a project that I did with Mercedes. Guy Kawasaki is a brand ambassador for Mercedes and he was at the L. A Auto Show. I created this board to manage all the assets that I needed to manage. Now, you could do this if you're the influencer or the brand working together. That's the goal with this is to be able to work together to save and share all your assets. This is a Trello board and all these different columns are called lists. We have one for Mercedes brand ambassador, Instagram post hashtags, [inaudible] graphics, published social media posts and then photos. You can add more lists depending on what you'd like to add to your board. What I like to do is keep every single thing that I need. If I create graphics, I'll put a link to the Canvas graphic if I have one or I'll actually just upload the different images into Trello, so I have all the pieces. This particular project had a storyboard which I kept in here. This was all the things that were going to happen. I could look for them, grab them, put them together. This is a PDF that an agency created. This is what they wanted to happen at the show, so these are all the different pieces. They have a graphic, the description, and this is exactly what you can create for your program, Facebook post description, announce for a new product, etc. That's just an example of how I keep the pieces together. This particular project used a box, I usually use Dropbox for my projects, but you can add attachments in here. You can add the link and you can save it. You can add the Dropbox link, Google Drive, any different kinds of links for anywhere on the internet, you can put in here and save it. It's really great for keeping all your pieces together, which is important and also, there's a due date on there. You can add all the different members of your project. Add labels for certain things you could do by social channel, who's going to provide the assets for that project piece, a checklist right here, this is just one that I have, it's for a blog post, but you could change that to anything that you want. You can add items to your checklist and you can actually have conversations on here about your project. You can put a due date on here. Say things had to be all done by a certain date so they could be approved, you can put them in here and then as you complete your project, you can hit the Move button and move that to publish social media posts or any of the other lists. You can see this is a great way to keep all your pieces organized. This is an example where I loaded the actual graphics up and I can download this. This was a Facebook post that I saved. It was ready to go. Then all I have to do is download that and then I can either schedule it or upload it right to Facebook. You can see it tells you the size of the graphics. Here's the post where I wrote all the information now. Here's the all-important FTC disclosure. I'm a Mercedes brand ambassador. You want to make sure that everything that you can work on ahead of time, you can put all the information in here and then you can have it there to use later. If you want to copy this, you'll have your campaign at a later date, you can just go ahead and use your Trello board again and copy it and then just take out all the assets so you can reuse it. 14. Course Wrap Up: Now you are through the whole project, we're pretending this. You're through the project, what comes next? We want to take your social success sheet, and go back and complete that. So you can see how successful was this. Where do you need to tweak it that you pick the right person to work with. Did you pick the right platforms? Did it do what you wanted to do it for your brand. Make the most of this, and make sure that you are socially sharing, or sharing information on your blog. Really get the most out of your program. Of course, the next thing we're going to do is your own class project, where you're going to find some influencers to connect with. You're going to take your social success sheet, you're going to complete it for 10 different influencers that you may want to work with. You're going to fill it all the information, and then you can share that in your class project. Maybe you don't want to share your exact information, but I would love to know, did you look at the right things? Is there something else that you found worked fast for your project? Let me know. I can't wait to see how successful your projects are and how influencer marketing helps build your brand. Thank you for taking this class and if you made it all the way to the end, I would really appreciate it, if you could rate my class and go and say how much you liked it, so more people can find it. Thank you so much. 15. Course Project: Now you're ready for your class project. You are going to find some ambassadors to work with your brand, so I gave you guys an influencer matrix, you can use that Google Doc and you can go through and find 10 people, analyze them, look at all their different social media. I think you're really going to find some people that are interesting to you and if you think would be a great fit for your brand, please comeback and read information in the class project. Let me know how this worked for you. I'm super excited for you guys to grow your brand, build your brand awareness and start working with influencer marketing and with strategy for a total success. Thank you so much. I'm Pegasus Patrick and I appreciate you taking my class. Good luck with your program.