A marketing roadmap to turn top customers into brand influencers

Working with influencers gives you access to authenticity that can’t be scripted—whether it’s a testimonial from a mom who used your baby food throughout her kids’ childhoods, a first-time homeowner who clinched the deal with help from your real estate firm, or a driver grateful for a lifetime of car repair service. These customers don’t need a huge digital following to become evangelists for your brand; they simply need passion for your products or services and a community to speak to.

Julianne Fraser, founder of digital marketing agency Dialogue NYC, has spent her career strategizing ways to strengthen influencer relationships over time. Working with brands as large as Shiseido and Olipop to small start-ups, she encourages businesses of all sizes to leverage their influencer community as a focus group—and remember that influencer marketing is a two-way street: You’re both helping each other grow your respective brands and audiences.

“A two-way approach to campaigns not only brings the content creator to the drawing board, but also forms a really strong feedback loop,” Julianne said. “You can think about influencers not only as a megaphone for your brand, but also as an extension of your team who are really invested in the development of your company. That’s where the magic starts to happen in terms of reaping the benefits of influencers and differentiating yourself from your competitors.”

Below, Julianne answers some of your biggest questions about influencer marketing, starting from the basics (what kinds of creators should I work with and how do they fit into my existing marketing strategy?) to the next level (how do I develop deeper relationships with content creators to make my campaign stand out?).

What is influencer marketing?

[Business owners may have] expectations that an influencer is an individual who has tens of thousands of followers on a certain platform. But the way we think about influence and influences can be so wide sweeping—it’s not just an individual’s reach and online community.

There [are strategies for working with] offline influence individuals who have great cache and impact within their niche communities. There are also many ways to leverage and empower your top customers as influencers for the brand.

What kind of influencers should I work with?

To define influencers for many brands just getting started, we consider: What type, tier, and category of influencer will really have the most impact for a brand? We approach those relationships differently and strategically.

Choose your influencer type: 3 major types of influencers

This is the first really important way to distinguish between the types of influencers because the way that you are pitching an opportunity to a traditional digital influencer is going to be drastically different than a tastemaker or an expert.

• Traditional digital influencer: This is someone whose full-time job is managing their social channels. They have developed a really highly engaged community, they’re experts in content creation, and they’ll be highly motivated to partner in content creation or paid collaborations.
• Tastemaker: This is someone who has amassed a following as a result of their passion or their interest. They might be an entrepreneur, an athlete, or an activist. Their full-time job is not managing their social channels, but they have a highly engaged and attentive community.
• Expert: This might be a doctor, a nutritionist, a stylist, [or someone with professional credentials]. They’ve found ways to express and share their expertise across platforms, from YouTube to Patreon or maybe Substack. And again, this isn’t their full-time job.

Choose your influencer tier: 4 tiers of audience size

The four tiers—macro, mid-tier, micro, and nano influencers—are standard across all brands, but defining the follower count in each of those categories is different for every brand. Large brands like [our client] Sakara Life are able to engage individuals with millions of followers in exchange for just their meal programs, while other brands that are just getting started are working with nano creators with under 10,000 followers.

Defining those buckets for each brand is different, but it’s important to distinguish between those four tiers. For example, when you’re approaching a macro or mid-tier influencer, they likely will have an agent and might be looking for longer term deals, so that’s important to keep in mind.

Identify several influencer categories

Defining which [influencer] categories are relevant to your brand is important so that you’re diversifying your message and working with a wide variety of creators who are speaking to different target consumers across the board.

For example, a client of ours might be in the culinary space, but we don’t recommend they only work with culinary or foodie creators as their category. [Their other] categories might involve parenting, mom, influencers, culinary influencers, health, wellness, fashion, lifestyle, and travel.

How does influencer marketing fit in with my existing marketing strategy?

We like to define it as like the cherry on top of your marketing strategy. It should accelerate your brand marketing, your performance marketing, your creative—all these various facets of your program. In order to reap the benefits of influencer marketing, you really do have to have all of those pieces in place.

Oftentimes the first thing an influencer will do is go to your Instagram account or your TikTok account and make sure they’re brand-aligned with your voice and aesthetic. So [it’s important to establish] that strong, organic social strategy, with sticky content and campaigns that have your customers coming back.

Influencers should also weave into [your online advertising]. Some of the best-performing ad creative for our clients is user-generated content (UGC) with real and raw testimonials from creators. That might be social advertising, SEO strategies, or display ads—whatever makes most sense for your brand.

How do I develop deeper relationships with content creators?

This is very fundamental and very obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many brands don’t do this: Introduce them to your product or service. Do they like the product? Is it authentic? You cannot fake [that enthusiasm]. That’s the biggest issue in our industry right now—there’s so much noise and so many creators talking about products that they really have never tried.

It’s really important to start those relationships by gifting the product, developing a feedback loop, and getting a response about the product from the content creators. And then find ways to constantly reengage and nurture over time.

This is what we define as our influencer relationship roadmap, developing [further] steps of engaging with creators:

Step 1: Engage an influencer: Someone receives the product, they post, they share, and they do exactly as we requested, whether it’s through a paid or gifted collaboration.

Step 2: Nurture evangelists for your brand: These are creators who are coming back to you saying, ‘I’m obsessed with this product. I’ve woven it into my life. I’ve shared it with so many of my friends.’ We want to find ways to nurture that relationship above and beyond. That might be introducing them to the founder of the brand, inviting them to a retail event, or featuring them in a blog and sharing their story.

Step 3: Collaborate with brand ambassadors: These are individuals who’ve used the product for a year or two and could make for great product collaboration. They might host an event with their community because they have such a highly engaged audience, or they’ll get first access to new product launches and will provide amazing feedback because they’ve used the product for so long.

How can I make my influencer campaigns stand out?

Lately, a cookie-cutter approach to influencer marketing has led to a huge surge of inauthentic, cringe-worthy ads. And it’s leading to a lot of customer distrust and a lot of customer fatigue. Scrolling through social media, you start to skip over these types of partnerships that you know are not real and that are paid for. It’s now more important than ever to lean into our creativity as marketers and business owners to craft narratives that break through that noise.

For example, Little Spoon is a baby food brand that we’ve worked with for seven years. Year one, we laid the foundation and the soil, and we’ve continuously nurtured those plants. Now seven years later, they’re reaping the rewards and the incredible return on investment (ROI) from influencer marketing because you can’t buy that level of authenticity of a mother who has used Little Spoon products with two or three of her children. It’s just the most powerful testimony, and again, it’s because we were thinking of ways to nurture and strengthen those relationships over time.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity. These lessons come from an episode of Behind the Review, Yelp & Entrepreneur Media’s weekly podcast. Listen below to hear from Julianne, or visit the show homepage to learn about the show and find more episodes.