If you have an online business, YouTube influencers can help you generate more sales (or leads), allowing you to maximize the ROI of your marketing campaigns.
By associating your brand with the right influencers in your industry, you’ll gain access to a highly engaged community that may very well include your future customers!
Start with a High Converting Landing Page
The very first step in having a successful influencer campaign for your online store is making sure your landing page is optimized for conversions (or leads). You will accomplish this by first and foremost having a product people want to buy. You’ll also want to have great imagery/videos, great enticing sales copy, and awesome User Experience.
You can achieve this by ensuring your website is responsive so that it looks great on all devices, especially mobile. Call to actions must be clear and intuitive, they must stand out from everything else on the page. Your design must be clean and your website fast, and easy to navigate.
There are many other things at play here that I’m not covering such as the importance of customer reviews. Existing landing page data can also tell you if you’re ready to convert the right audience.
If you have a service page, make sure you have a simple contact form or lead-gen form. Keeping things clear and simple will likely improve your conversions. Alternatively, you may consider a landing page builder like Unbounce.
Find Your Ideal YouTube Micro Influencer
There are four tiers of social media influencers but focusing on Micro influencers is a great starting point. They have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.
You can find YouTube influencers by using the platform’s search feature. Simply enter information about your product or service, optionally followed by “review” or anything else that you are looking for and filter the results by most recent.
At this point you will want to review any potential YouTuber who you think would make a great promoter of your product or services. Examining their follower engagement levels and looking at past promotional videos they have created will allow you to get a good idea of what you can expect.
You can also Google “top YouTube influencers in your niche” and you are likely to come across some of the more popular channels.
Reach Out And Make Your Pitch
This is where things start getting a little more difficult. Influencers can be very busy and/or picky individuals based on a number of things, such as their follower size and availability. They may also already be working with other brands and be in high demand, potentially making you less attractive.
To improve your chances of acquiring your ideal influencer, you need to make sure you are respectful and don’t try to be cheap. If they provide a fee, you may be better off either taking it or politely declining it and telling them you look forward to working with them soon.
Trying to low-ball them may not help your influencer feel more comfortable working with you, especially when you are about to set your first deal with them. As you keep working with them, you may also consider other initiatives besides cash and free products, such as affiliate programs and discount codes. This might allow you to offer a lower upfront fee moving forward.
Track, Measure, Change and Improve
Once you launch your campaign, it is imperative that you can accurately measure success (or failure). Whether you got a lot of traffic and conversions, traffic but no conversions, or neither of the two.
Make sure you can track all conversions and custom goals by having set up Google Analytics. It will be very difficult to really make the most of your campaign if you can’t analyze its results.
To accurately measure data, it is ideal that you ask your new collaborator to post a link to your website in the video description that goes straight to your optimized landing page.
You may also consider setting UTM parameters so that you can measure success for each individual influencer. Since these links can get long pretty fast, you may also consider using a URL shortener. You can also see a overall increase of YouTube traffic in your Social Media channel of your Google Analytics.
Once your new partner has published their video and you’ve gotten some data, study it and plan your next move. You might decide you want to work with the same influencer in the coming months. You may also explore new potential collaborations with those that may serve multiple platforms, like YouTube and Instagram.
Note that YouTube videos are very valuable as you will likely continue seeing benefits over time. Sometimes videos may also take longer to generate good results so it’s a good idea to give them some time.
Conclusion
Using the power of YouTube influencers can really have a positive impact on your business. Not only are high authority leaders vouching for you, you are also likely to get a ROI not long after.
If you follow these steps correctly and take your time to make it work, you are one step closer to having a successful influencer campaign and building long-lasting relationships with leaders in your industry.
