Maximizing Influencer Marketing Results with Atomic Habits Principles

"Habits are the compound interest of improvement" - James Clear

After all, we also know this from the 1% rule — 1% daily improvements compound to 37 times better annually.

Making progress each day is made easier by the philosophy of "atomic habits." An atomic habit is a little habit that is part of a larger system but is very easy to do.

In his book "Atomic Habits,” James Clear talks about principles and formulas for building these atomic habits. To make habits a part of your routine he suggested that you identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. The habit stacking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

So is it possible to bring that same philosophy of habit-building into the way you execute influencer marketing? — This thought led us to identify 4 ways influencer marketing can be streamlined, made enjoyable, and consequently bring you consistent results. By breaking down the process into atomic habits, you can develop the routines and processes necessary for success with influencers.

Atomic Habits of Influencer Marketing

Let's look at 4 main habits you need to adopt to make your influencer marketing success undeniable.

Creator outreach made easy with the two-minute rule

The key to building better habits lies in making the process as smooth and effortless as possible. This is where the Two-Minute Rule comes in.

As James Clear says, "A new habit should take less than two minutes to do."

By reducing the friction associated with starting good habits and increasing it for bad ones, you'll find it easier to stick to your goals and form new habits with ease. The steps that follow can be difficult, but the first two minutes should be easy.

A way to use the Two-Minute Rule in influencer marketing is to automate as much of the influencer outreach process as possible. This way, you can make the task of starting a new outreach effort as simple and frictionless as possible, allowing you to focus on the important work of building relationships with influencers.

Friction in outreach is finding out if the creator would be worth talking to based on their engagement rate if you can afford to collaborate with them, etc.

Instead of doing the math in a spreadsheet, you can use SARAL's Chrome extension. Simply open their profile, click the chrome extension, and in three seconds flat, you'll have all the information you need to decide if they're worth reaching out to.

Say goodbye to procrastination and hello to efficient influencer outreach. With SARAL, finding a great influencer to work with will take you less than two minutes.

This vastly simplifies the challenge of finding and saving good influencers to work with.

Tackling toughest tasks: conversations & negotiations

Atomic Habits give an effective framework for changing your behavior. Essentially, it asks you to consider four questions whenever you want to make a change:

• How can I make it obvious?
• How can I make it attractive?
• How can I make it easy?
• How can I make it satisfying?

When it comes to influencer marketing, one of the biggest hurdles is managing all the email threads. It's easy to forget details, miss typos, or simply lose track of what's been said. And we all know that consistent communication is key to building and maintaining relationships with influencers.

Automate Email Outreach with SARAL

Once you have your influencers saved in a list, you can send hundreds of emails at once and personalize every single one of them with their username, first name, and last name and even add custom lines, so it looks and feels personal — without all the manual work!

If they don't reply, the system will automatically follow up with them as well.

With SARAL, you can say goodbye to scattered notes and typos and hello to a more consistent and organized approach to influencer marketing.

Organize conversations in SARAL

Once you start getting responses, your inbox will be full of influencers wanting to work with you.

You could set up filters in your Gmail for this, but even that can get messy in just a couple of months of consistent outreach. You want your efforts to compound and give you better results, not for them to give you too much to handle.

With SARAL, you can manage all your emails in one place without having to open your email inbox for it.

Shipping products on Fridays

Let's use an atomic habit formula to ensure that you don't miss shipping products to creators and do it in a nice orderly fashion —

Every Friday, after I check my emails and Slack, I will send out free products/gifts to creators who have said yes this week.

By sending the products on Friday, you can ensure that your creators receive the product typically by Wednesday or Thursday when they are most likely to be working and not on holiday. This also allows them ample time to create content over the weekend.

If you have already promised the creator that you will ship the product to them, this habit ensures you don't forget it. By consistently following through on your promises, you'll be seen as a reliable and dependable partner. This keeps your creators happy and builds a stronger relationship with them.

Having this habit in place will also give you peace of mind and allow you to enjoy the weekend without worrying about missing an important task.

You can take advantage of the bulk ship feature in SARAL and ship a lot of products at once without having to create orders on your store for influencers manually.

Building relationships, one message at a time

Building relationships with influencers is crucial to the success of your influencer marketing strategy, and it goes beyond just using them as a tool to drive sales.

When you focus solely on sales and forget the human aspect, your influencer campaigns can come across as inauthentic and fail to connect with your target audience.

But when influencers feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to promote your brand authentically. This is because they have a personal connection with your brand and are invested in seeing it succeed.

Think of your influencer relationships like any other professional relationships you have. You want to build trust, show genuine interest, and offer value. Whether it's commenting on their posts, resharing their content, or just sending a quick "hello" every once in a while, taking the time to foster these relationships will pay off in the long run.

You can create Tasks inside SARAL to remind you to stay in touch with influencers!

By creating a personal connection, you can work together to create campaigns that not only drive sales but also resonate with your target audience on an emotional level. So, ditch the impersonal sales approach and start building real, meaningful relationships with your influencers today.

Here are some atomic habits you can implement to succeed at influencer marketing

1. After I finish my morning coffee, I will spend 15 minutes commenting on recent posts of my creators.
2. After I send out monthly invoices, I will allocate a portion of the budget to send gifts to our top-performing influencer partners and assign it to my team or schedule the next step for myself.
3. After I complete my weekly task review, I will spend 30 minutes reaching out to new influencers and establishing a relationship with them.
4. After I finish lunch, I will spend 10 minutes resharing one of my influencer's posts on my social media platforms.
5. After I complete my weekly reporting, I will spend 30 minutes brainstorming and planning personalized gifts or perks to offer my influencers.

Stay on top of your progress with weekly and monthly tracking

Keeping track of your habits is a game-changer for several reasons. It provides a visual record of how far you’ve come. Seeing your progress can be incredibly motivating and keep you from breaking the chain. Recording your success feels satisfying and reinforces positive behavior.

In addition, habit tracking holds us accountable. We often have a skewed perception of our actions, but tracking them helps us see the reality of the situation. This way, you're less likely to sugarcoat the truth and more likely to make real progress.

In influencer marketing, to improve and learn from your successes and failures, tracking your progress is important.

You can track the number of creators you reached out to, the ROI you had, or relationships you built in a simple Excel sheet, but that's adding friction to the process. And we want something automated.

That's where SARAL's dashboard comes into the picture. It shows you tangible results influencers are driving for your brand.

Here's the habit-building framework you can use — ' After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].

It can be — After I finish lunch and open the laptop again, I will first look at the SARAL dashboard to track the progress of my influencer marketing strategy.

Here are some more ideas:

• Before I wrap up on Friday, I will spend 2 minutes checking the impact of influencer marketing on my sales numbers.
• Before I end for the day, I will quickly look at the SARAL dashboard to see if any new replies have come in that need my immediate attention
• After I complete my monthly budget review, I will spend an hour analyzing the results of my influencer marketing efforts from the past month.

Summary

Remember, the key to forming new habits is to make them small and manageable, so don't feel overwhelmed by the number of habits you need to form. Start with one or two and gradually add more as they become routine.

For now, I’ll leave you with a compilation of all the Atomic Habits I shared in this article — so you know what to focus on:

• Make your creator outreach process as smooth and effortless as possible. If you are not using SARAL's Chrome extension, think about how you can automate at least some part of the process.
• Send hundreds of emails at once and personalize every single one of them with their username, first name, and last name or custom lines so it looks and feels personal. This will help you scale your marketing faster.
• Consistent communication is key to building and maintaining relationships with influencers. Create a reminder to stay in touch with influencers. You can use your calendar app or reminder app, or if you want to streamline your marketing process, use SARAL's built-in reminder feature.
• To create a habit of consistently reaching out, you can follow this rule - After I complete my weekly task review, I will spend 30 minutes reaching out to new influencers and establishing a relationship with them. or pick one that suits you from the list above.
• Set a cadence for when and how you will track the progress & impact of influencer marketing on your business — check the revenue generated via creators, creators turned, new ones contacted, etc.  Pick a rule from the ones mentioned above to build a habit of doing it regularly.

Another easy and small habit you can build to improve your influencer marketing campaigns is to learn a new thing every week.

That's why you should sign up for our No BS Influencer Letter, a newsletter that gives you tips, strategies, and the knowledge you need to make influencer marketing profitable.

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