According to Aspire, influencer marketing spend in the U.S. will reach $4.6 billion in 2023. Five years ago, the market was half this size.
One of the biggest challenges with influencer outreach is actually reaching them, without getting ignored. Standing out in a sea of cold emails requires a personal and tailored approach but that isn’t always scalable – that is unless you have AI.
Find out how to leverage AI for a tailored outreach approach that speeds up the process.
Using AI to Craft Your Outreach Messages
One of the most important steps in reaching out to influencers is drafting the message – a task many marketers find tedious and time-consuming.
Luckily, this is where AI can come in to help you craft personalized messages in a scalable way.
Start by creating your prompt formula. The best way I’ve found to do that is by including the following elements:
- Your hook – This should be a reference to content the influencer has recently produced or a project they’ve recently been involved in. You can also go the personal route by congratulating them on something they’ve recently shared, like a content creator anniversary.
- Your give – What value do you bring to this creator? This is the space to lay out the similarities between your brand and theirs.
- Your take – What is your ask? Are you interested in a sponsorship for an upcoming campaign? In some outreach messages, you may not need to include this at all if you’re simply interested in making the connection.
- Your CTA – What would you like to happen next? Is it hopping on a call? A Zoom meeting? Whatever it is, write it in your prompt.
Put all that together, and you’ll have a formula that looks like this:
“Write a short and friendly outreach message that includes the following details: A reference to their most recent video on beauty trends, a short description of our brand LabX and how it intersects with the influencer’s values around sustainability, our desire to collaborate in the future, and an ask to hop on a call this week.”
You can get pretty creative with your prompts. In the following prompt, I wrote all the points I wanted the email to include, and even asked AI to connect the sandal shop I was promoting with the productivity channel I was reaching out to.
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Once you narrow down the right prompt formula, you’ll be able to quickly plug in relevant information for your outreach message.
Once that’s done, all there’s left is to wait for a response.
Pre-draft your follow-ups.
I know this is supposed to be a futuristic AI-powered guide, but for effective follow-up emails, you don’t need anything fancy.
It’s simple: Draft your follow-up message using a tool like ChatGPT. Your prompt can look something like this: “Write a follow-up email to this email: [Insert here]”
Once the draft is ready, create your follow-up email and leave it ready to go in your inbox.
You can also pre-schedule your follow-up email for a specific date. However, you may need to cancel it if your recipient responds before that time.
Bonus: Use AI to learn about your influencer and engage with their content.
Depending on the industry you’re in, there may be hundreds of influencers to choose from. How do you narrow down this list of potential partners?
You can use AI to better understand the influencers in your space, specifically by using prompts to summarize their content.
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To take it one step further, say you find an influencer you’re interested in connecting with, you can craft a comment using AI.
When you think of influencer outreach, you often think about emails and messages. But engaging with their content is a great way to get their attention and build rapport.
And with AI, commenting is a whole lot easier. Here are some steps I followed to comment on an influencer’s YouTube video:
- Use AI to summarize the content of the video.
- Prompt AI to craft a thoughtful comment based on a key point made in the video.
- Edit and tweak.
- Leave the comment.
There are several ways to incorporate AI in the influencer outreach process. Following these steps will help you make a stronger impression and increase your response rate.
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