Influencer marketing has become one of the best ways to create awareness and build an online brand by leveraging industry and opinion leaders with a huge pool of followers. In fact, the influencer marketing industry is growing faster than traditional digital display ads, Forbes reported in 2017.

This applies to crowdfunding influencers, too. If you want to convince people to believe in your ideas and convert them into potential supporters for your crowdfunding campaign, having someone with a large following talk about your big idea or product could be a game-changer.

The best influencers have built up trust with their followers, who are effectively a captive audience. Establishing a partnership with a well-established influence to talk about your idea or product in their social networks can help you run a successful crowdfunding campaign.

This article will help you understand what influencer marketing is, its advantages, and the factors you should consider integrating it into your crowdfunding campaign.

What is Influencer Marketing?

An influencer is an individual with a large amount of followers on social media who is considered to be an expert in their niche. Therefore, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that leverages endorsements and mentions from an influencer to create or improve brand recognition in an influencer's social network.

This type of marketing works because social media influencers have established trust with their fans, and when they mention or recommend a brand’s product, idea, or project, their opinion serves as a form of social proof point for a crowdfunding idea among potential backers.

Pros of Using Influencer Marketing for Your Crowdfunding Campaigns

The best influencers for crowdfunding campaigns have a large pool of followers, and they can easily help you foster faster recognition for your crowdfunding campaigns by discussing your project online. Here are five benefits of establishing a win-win partnership with the right crowdfunding influencers.

1.Reach your target audience quickly

When you work with the relevant influencers in your niche, your campaign idea is placed in front of the right social network with users who are already interested in your project.

The influencer has the audience already built for you on their social channels, so you don't have to waste time and money on testing or finding your audience.

2. Boost your brand awareness

Influencer marketing is a great social strategy to meet future customers and tell them about your product. When you share your campaign goals, objectives, and the product you plan to create through an influencer’s network, their followers will begin to know about who you are, your brand, the story behind the product you want to create, the problems you want to solve and the kind of solutions you want to provide. Best of all, they will learn about these things through a trusted influencer, giving your project credibility from the get-go.

3. Build Trust quickly

The best influencers to work with on crowdfunding projects are individuals who have already built trusted relationships with their followers. Their fans follow them because they believe in, trust and, most of all, like what they tell them. Their content and recommendations are highly and widely respected.

Getting such an individual to talk about your crowdfunding campaign, product ideas and the solution you want to bring forth is a quick way to build trust.

If they share your content and you share theirs, your campaign's idea will quickly gain credibility and attention in front of an actively engaged audience that would be almost impossible to get if you were to do it alone.

4. Provide value to the right audience

Influencers are always in tune with the needs of their followers. An influencer will share your brand’s product or message if they believe that you’re providing a solution to a problem that the followers in their networks are likely to be facing.

5. Enrich your campaign strategy

The best crowdfunding campaigns have a lot of content ideas that work on social networks. When you run out of ideas, you can simply share their quality content on their networks, or your social channels to fill gaps in your content schedule during your crowdfunding campaign. If you’re going to reach out to an influencer to be a part of your campaign, it’s best to contact them about four-six weeks before it will run to give them ample time to fit it into their own content calendar.

6. Establish winning partnerships

Working with influencers during your crowdfunding campaign can make the beginning of a healthy long-term relationship. After you have created your project and begun your business, you can continue to work for the long haul and promote your products through their networks for a long time.

5 Factors to Take Into Account When Choosing Influencers for Your Crowdfunding

There are several factors that you need to consider when choosing an influencer to work with and boost your crowdfunding campaign efforts. They include:

Your product niche: The first thing you need to consider is the niche market that your product will cater to. This will guide you in finding the right influencers whose followers resonate with your target audience. So, make sure that you find individuals on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and other social channels who are influential in your niche
Authenticity: Not all influencers with a following are genuine. Some may have bought their way to the top and will bring little to no value to your campaign. Genuine influencers provide valuable opinions and information to contribute to their community of followers and stay engaged with their audiences regularly.
Followers: Crowdfunding influencer marketing is a game of numbers, and you want to find and work with influencers with as many followers as possible so that you can extend the reach of your campaign quickly. Working with genuine influencers with followers in the thousands or millions will be an advantage.
Engagement: How engaged is the influencer with their community of followers? Do they react to their opinions or content? You can easily know an influencer's rate of engagement by looking at the shares, reply ratio, average retweets, and comments in their posts. An engagement rate of 30% and above shows that there is excellent reaction and discussions to the influencer's content.
Location: It helps to learn a thing or two about where your influencer is from, their culture, and the language they speak. This will help you gauge how receptive their followers will be to your ideas and the pricing requirements they might encounter if international shipping is a factor.

Platforms to Reach Out to Influencers

Following the explosion of influencer marketing over the last few years, software firms have come on board to offer solutions that make the process of working with influencers simple and more straightforward.

This has led to a rise in influencer marketing platforms. These platforms are designed to help brands, agencies and individuals manage their influencer marketing campaigns.

Here are some influencer marketing platforms that you can use to reach out to influencers for your crowdfunding campaigns.

Upfluence

This is a self-serve influencer marketing platform that has affordable pricing for both small and medium-sized businesses. It features a database of 500 million items of content across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and blogs.

You can search the database to find information on influencers who have previously worked with crowdfunding campaigns that match your specific search criteria or niche. There is enough information on the database on each influencer to help you find influencers most suitable for your needs.

Also, this influencer management platform offers task management tools to create lists of your suitable influencers, manage each influencer relationship for a particular campaign, track their performance and collaborate on content.

2. AspireIQ

Formerly known as Revfluence, AspirelQ is a self-serve platform that works with YouTube and Instagram and has a database of over 150,000 influencers.

Influencers have to pass a manual review that vets the relevance or suitability of their posted content before they are entered into the searchable database where they can see marketing proposals from businesses.

You can use their simple search engine to find the best influencers for your needs with the Tinder-like "Quickmatch" that matches up brands and influencers based on the type of campaigns they’ve done in the past.

It also offers a set of campaign management tools to help you keep track of different aspects of any upcoming crowdfunding marketing campaigns.

3. #paid

#paid is a transparent influencer marketing platform that allows you to find qualified influencers, work on copy, chat and analyze your data — all in real time.

The #paid platform takes the guesswork out of vetting, as your campaign brief, scope of work, goals and the type of influencers you want to work with are shared directly with the influencers.

Interested participants will then be able to apply by showing their interest in your project through “hand raise,” which is a message describing why they are a good fit for your campaign and their proposed campaign strategy.

4. Tagger

This influencer marketing platform tracks over 9 billion indexed, analyzed and searchable social conversations, and has a strong emphasis on data to help you find and select suitable creators.

You can find influencers on this platform through invitation or making your offer available to everyone. Also, the platform has dozens of filters to help you refine your search results based on your search criteria.

With Tagger, you can manage your selected influencer and their content submission with ease, and analyze their performance on all posts to determine your ROI through a detailed dashboard that has many ways to organize your influencer marketing efforts.

5. SocialBakers

Started in 2009 under the name Candytech, this platform has morphed into an influencer marketing platform that mines and analyzes data on Facebook APIs on your engaged audience.

It platform has a pool of more than 30 million influencers on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. It relies on a powerful AI engine to recommend the most relevant freelancers that will appeal to your audience.

You can also search for influencers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn to find information on each influencers' frequently used hashtags, follower count, engagement and gallery of recent content.

Making Your Crowdfunding Campaign Successful with Influencers

Influencer marketing is a powerful way to get celebrities, taste makers and thought leaders to spread word of mouth about your crowdfunding campaign.

Working with the right crowdfunding influencers in your niche whose followers resonate with your campaign ideas can help you build trust quickly, access a large pool of potential backers, and boost your crowdfunding efforts.

Don't forget that fulfillment forms an integral part of your campaign, and Easyship can help you send your backer rewards anywhere in the world. We also have a wealth of crowdfunding expertise and can help you plan your fulfillment goals upfront so that fulfillment costs won't eat into your raised funds.

Sign up for a free Easyship account today to get started on your crowdfunding journey!

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