The digital marketing landscape is getting more competitive by the day. More businesses are trying to win customers online. With offline events and other promotional methods no longer effective in the current pandemic, that number continues to grow. There are more social media platforms to utilize, digital marketing channels that you can use to reach customers and even more tools to optimize everything.

Still, the competitive landscape means you have to be very meticulous in planning your digital marketing strategy. You cannot just rely on ads or use content marketing to win customers. You have to significantly increase the top of your funnel. That means tapping into influencers and using their reach to gain exposure on social media. Influencer marketing is also a great way to expand your audience base.

As with other paid marketing channels, you have to think about the ROI of using influencer marketing. Not all influencers have audience groups that match your market segment. Many of them even buy followers and inflate their numbers. How can you, as a business owner, make sure that you are investing in the right influencer? This next influencer marketing tactic will help you understand your influencers better and boost your ROI at the same time.

Researching Influencers

There are many ways you can learn more about an influencer, but the secret tactic we are going to discuss here is web scraping. There is a lot you can do with web scraping when you are researching influencers for your business.

Before you start, however, you need to prepare a few things. Not all social media platforms allow open web scraping, so it is a good idea to use a residential proxy server. A good residential proxy provider like the one found here lets you gather information using residential IP addresses.

Why is a residential proxy important? Because social media platforms track users by their IP addresses. Using a corporate IP address to gather information could result in your account – or the IP address – being shadow-banned; this is definitely not good for business.

With the residential proxy server set up, you can start scraping social media platforms for content that matches your brand and the products or services you offer. If you are selling T-shirts to young customers, for instance, you can search hashtags like #hypebeast to identify accounts that users in your market segment interact with the most.

The next question is why you need to find influencers using this method, and the answer is organic reach. By identifying accounts that the majority of your market segment interacts with regularly, you will end up not with celebrities or professional influencers, but with nano- or micro-influencers who can really engage the audience.

Nano and Micro Influencers

That brings us to the next point, which is identifying influencers based on their reach. Nano influencers are those with fewer than 10,000 followers, while micro influencers are social media users with 10,000 to 50,000 followers. Some agencies define nano and micro influencers differently, but you can use these numbers as benchmarks.

Nano and micro influencers tend to have higher average engagement rates than big influencers and celebrities. They can have engagement rates of 4% to 10%, depending on their content category and how new they are on social media. A 10% engagement rate coming from an account with 50,000 followers means 5,000 users engage with every post on the account.

Engagement is more valuable than impressions or reach because it shows action. Users who respond to influencers’ content are more likely to engage with the brand directly. They are also easier to convert into paying customers, resulting in a higher return with every dollar you spend on influencer marketing. Once the influencers show your products, especially with a nice influencer box design specifically designed for them, the audience will try to achieve the same experience. Remember, an influencer package puts the spotlight on your brand and your customers.

That brings us to the third part of this tactic.

Building Relationships

You can use web scraping to automate relationship building. Social media tools can automate comments or likes based on certain triggers. You can feed data from web scraping to the social media management tool, and then comment on the influencers’ accounts every time certain keywords are mentioned.

Make comments appear personalized by creating different responses to different triggers. Since web scraping lets you collect a large amount of data, this is something that you can do easily. It will not be long before influencers start noticing your business account. You may not have to approach them first; some influencers will approach you about collaboration if they like your products and services.

It all starts with choosing the right residential proxy and doing your own influencer research. By identifying the influencers that suit your business the most, you can increase your ROI from the beginning. Your business is also more likely to work with influencers closer, and you can gain more benefits from the digital marketing campaigns that you run with them.