The stratospheric rise of social media marketing has made working with influencers all over the world a necessity for top brands. Although it’s crucial for brands that want to stay competitive, there’s a silver lining. Social media’s popularity has made it easier for companies of all sizes to work with influencers who are not local on marketing campaigns. If you’re about to launch a social media marketing campaign, it’s important to explore the best ways to use influencer location.
Why You Should Work with Local and Non-local Influencers
Influencer and follower locations are key considerations for brands as they develop their marketing campaigns. Brands typically work with influencers who are not local to their area when they want to expand their markets domestically and/or internationally.
Or a brand based in one city might work with celebrity influencers based in entertainment industry hubs like New York or Los Angeles. It’s not all about big city influencers, though. There are plenty of top influencers in towns of all sizes who have large, loyal audiences and/or who reach important niche markets.
Say you run a small business, like an independently owned pizza shop that can only caters to a local market. In that case, it makes sense to only work with local influencers. Otherwise, it’s usually pretty important for brands to work with local and non-local influencers to cover all your bases.
Influencers’ authenticity is important to their followers. Influencers who are not local have a genuine connection to their home market, and followers recognize that in their content. Brands working with influencers to target those markets can gain the trust of their followers through the influencer’s authenticity.
What Are the Benefits of Working with Non-local Influencers?
Influencers who are not local to your country are well versed in language and cultural differences that can affect buying decisions. They know best how to create content that appeals to their specific market and that won’t offend your potential customers. On the other hand, some influencers, often celebrities with global appeal, have vast international social media audiences, regardless of where they’re based.
Non-local influencers also know the platforms that are most popular with their audiences. A number of countries have their own social media platforms that reach more people than the most popular platforms in the U.S. For example, some of the top social networking platforms in China include Qzone, Sina Weibo and Tik Tok.
Some social media channels that are enormously popular in the U.S. don’t have the same level of success in other countries. In Germany, for instance, in addition to popular U.S. platforms like What’sApp, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, consumers also use the German site Xing. It’s a professional social networking site that’s more popular in Germany, Switzerland and Austria than LinkedIn is. And Twitter, which has more than 50 million users in Japan, has yet to really catch on in Germany. It might come as a surprise to learn that, like most other U.S.-based big social media channels, most Twitter users don’t live in the U.S.
Even within the U.S. there can be regional differences, like the topics followers are more interested in and differences in voice and approach. Followers in some countries can be less likely to give up personal information than in others. Working with non-local influencers who know the quirks of their markets can save your brand from making mistakes that damage consumer trust.
How Do You Find Non-local Influencers to Work With?
Brands and marketers have a lot of options when it comes to finding non-local influencers to work with. Influencers often send proposals to brands they want to partner with, and they should be carefully evaluated. To take a more active approach, brands can use influencer-marketing tools that make the search easier.
Some influencer marketing tools let you search influencers by location, whether domestic or international, at no cost. You can also search for non-local influencers using location-specific hashtags and look for geotagged locations on Instagram.
How Can You Start Working With Influencers Who Aren’t Local?
After you’ve established your goals and mission statement for an influencer campaign, you’re ready to begin. The first step to working with influencers who are not local to your area is to research them.
Look for relevant influencers whose followers’ interests and needs reflect your target market. It’s possible to do so using a number of different social media marketing tools that will help you find influencers by industry, location and audience demographics.
Do the Legwork First
Before you make contact with influencers though, it’s important to thoroughly vet them. That means making sure their images, content and audiences are the right matches for your brand. Review their post history so you know they’ll act in a way that’s compatible with your brand image.
Check for fake followers so you won’t end up paying to reach an audience that doesn’t actually exist. Warning signs include influencers who have big clusters of follower in unlikely countries and followers who have very basic profiles. Also look out for followers who engage on a very superficial level and make extremely general positive comments.
Consider Your Best Customers
The next step is to reach out to the influencers you’d like to partner with. You can use social media listening tools to see who is making positive comments about your brand and where they’re located. You can warm things up by engaging with them on their social media accounts. Make positive comments on their posts that are specific about what you like and send them messages expressing how much you value their content.
One option is to reach out to some of your best customers who are active on social media in your target markets. Customers who are already enthusiastic about your brand and have followings in their local communities can be ideal influencers.
Look at Influencer Marketing Agencies and Marketplaces
If you don’t want to go it alone in your search, you’re in luck. There are companies and platforms that specialize in bringing influencers and brands together and can also help with your campaign as a whole. You can work with influencer marketing agencies and influencer marketplaces to find the right influencers for your campaigns. These agencies often already have relationships with influencers in your target markets and/or influencers who have large followings in those markets.
Not only can influencer-marketing agencies help you find influencers who are not local, they can also tell you the languages they speak. They can also provide demographic information about influencers’ audiences and assist with elements of the campaign like content, management and analytics. That includes assessing the types of content that have performed well for influencers who are not local and boosting content across social media channels.
When you work with an influencer marketplace, you can post proposals for campaign partnerships and get responses from influencers who are interested. Influencer marketplaces also make it possible for brands to negotiate for posts from influencers they find on the marketplace.
