Deep Dive Wednesdays

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IBRAHIM ON INFLUENCERS

• Primarily, there are 2 ways to acquire influencers for your brand:

  1. Inbound

  2. Outbound

Inbound

• When an influencer reaches out to you on Instagram—asking to promote your brand for a barter, commission, flat fee, or a combination of these, it’s essentially nothing but an inbound enquiry (they’re reaching out to you)

• They could be coming to your website and filling out an application to become an ambassador for your brand, most likely willing to work on a barter + commission basis, but this usually happens if you’re a brand that sells products they find extremely enticing, or you could be a recognized brand, etc.

• You can promote your application page in your social media bio, stories, etc.

• An influencer that you already work with could potentially refer another influencer to promote your brand too, and it’s one of the best ways to go about it. It’s like getting a customer to speak to other customers to buy from you, and there’s nothing more powerful than that!

Outbound

• This is essentially where most people see little to no success

• Outbound is where you try reaching out to influencers, and it’s something I see most people getting it done manually—it’s exhausting because of 100 different things that you need to actively keep tracking and then follow up with these influencers

• Even after an influencer does reply to your Instagram DM, there are several steps involved later such as discussing the commercials and deliverables, collecting their addresses & email address, sending them packages, tracking the package, following up with the influencer, etc., and within no time, before you know it, it gets chaotic

• I used to do these things via Google sheets until last January, and that’s when I found SARAL

Alright, let’s start with how the dashboard looks once we log into SARAL:

Typically, here are the steps that needs to be followed to acquire an influencer via SARAL:

1. Inbound

   a. Setup SARAL’s application form and embed it on your website to receive inbound applications

2. Outbound

   a. Discovery of influencers

   b. Adding influencers to the lists

   c. Creating an outreach email campaign

   d. Discussing commercials and deliverables inside relationships

   e. Shipping products

   f. Tracking

   g. Activation emails

Outbound features:

1. Discovery of influencers

   • You get to search for influencers sorted by 3 platforms—Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok

• Next, you get to search based on 3 different intents

  • My customers talk about..

  • My customers also buy..

  • My customers follow the account..

    

• Now, it’s time to search! For this example, you can see I’ve selected Instagram > My customers talk about > caregiving

  

• You can further filter them with these options:

  • Number of followers

  • Location

  • Engagement rate

  • Email (Exists or not)

  • Gender

  • Age

  • Last post (last month, last 2 months, etc.)

  • Authenticity (Best, high, decent)

  • Search in bio keyword

  • Average reel views

  • Hide brands (so you can only see creators and not brand pages)

  

• You can see basic details such as what’s a decent fee to pay them, engagement rate, etc., but if you wish to see this in depth for a specific influencer, especially if it’s someone you wish to work with long term, then you have the option to use something called as Ratnas (think of it like diamonds), which is essentially something that you’d need to pay a little extra for, and buy how much ever you need, and then use the Ratnas to fetch in depth details on specific influencers

  2. Adding influencers to the lists

  • Once you’re done filtering out, it’s now time to add different influencers to different lists

    

  • One of my most favourite features inside SARAL is the ability to add an influencer using SARAL’s chrome extension. For example, I just went to my profile on Instagram, clicked the chrome extension, and this is what I see:

  

  3. Creating an outreach email campaign

  • You’ve filtered the influencers and have added them to the lists—now it’s time to reach out to them

  • You can create different campaigns to reach out to different audience or based on different criterias/segments

  • For instance, since I like sending out personalized emails, I like to create different campaigns for different audience such as Moms, Caregivers, etc. and further create different campaigns based on platforms or if it’s a holiday specific campaign such as BFCM. You can play around with it!

  

  • To start with, SARAL’s team will provide these email templates as well, if you’re looking to test it out ASAP, and then you could eventually tweak those emails to increase the response and acceptance rate

  4. Discussing commercials and deliverables

  • You can see the responses of the influencers, reply, manage—all within the relationships feature

    

  • You can reply via your ESPs (eg: GMAIL) as well

  • This is where you discuss the terms of the relationship with the influencers, commercials, deliverables, etc.

  • I usually prefer doing product seeding to nano influencers (barter system), and then if their stories/posts perform well, I get them to join our influencer affiliate program, but you can pitch them to work with you on affiliate basis in the beginning too

  5. Shipping

  • You’ve onboarded your first influencer at this point—congrats!

  • You need to now collect their residential address and email address (to send delivery notifications)

  • One really good thing about SARAL is, it preloads the address and email address for a lot of influencers that were previously added into SARAL, so most of the times, you wouldn’t even need to enter these details

  • If you’re sending out products to an influencer for the second time, their addresses will always be saved, so you could send them with a click of a button—all within SARAL itself, so you don’t have to go to Shopify or your 3PL software to manually send out these products, which is a hugeee time saver!

    
    

  6. Tracking

  • Every time an influencer posts about you and tags your brand, SARAL pulls it in, so you can keep track of who is posting and who isn’t

  • You can play, pause, or download these content within the app

  • Stories stay for more than 24 hours

  • If you’re downloading content, please do make sure you have the consent from the creator, and you can request for the rights within the app too!

  • This feature is currently in Beta

    
    

  7. Activation emails

  • Okay, so you’ve been tracking who has been posting and who’s not, and there’ll always be influencers that agree to post but don’t end up posting on time, and this usually requires a small nudge from your side

  • This is where you need to send automated activation emails to influencers that haven’t shared the creative within the prescribed timeline (or whatever the terms would be for deliverables)

  • SARAL will help you with this too

    • Just go to Email Drips > Activation

    • You can customise these emails based on different criterias

    
    

Please note: This is a process, and SARAL is just a tool to get you from point A to point B. It takes a bit of time to get used to it and build a process that works, but at the bottom of it, the fundamentals remain the same. Whether you acquire someone via IG, SARAL, or any other tool, you’ve gotta incentivise these influencers to make it worthwhile for them (depending on what stage they’re at) because they’ve invested time in building their audience, and now they’ve gotta create content and post about it, which again, takes time!

Alright folks, hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.

Disclaimer: I personally find SARAL a game-changer, and I’ve known the Founder (Yash) for a while now through his exceptional Slack support. So I reached out to him a couple of weeks back mentioning SARAL is something that I want to talk about in one of these deep dives and if he’d be willing to sponsor us, and he said okay (yayy, lol). He didn’t mention about any discounts, but may be tell him that you’re a DTC Daily reader, and he might throw in something extra in there :)

🗣 Running a B2B and want to reach 33,441 DTC Brands? Start here…