If you have a hair extensions or wig business, you may have thought about working with social media influencers to promote your brand. Businesses promoting their products through social media stars is called – Influencer Marketing.
Beauty brands love influencer marketing because influencers on Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok and Facebook usually have many loyal followers. Social media influencers may not be celebrities like Cardi B or Beyonce, but they have a niche page that directly speaks to followers. Statistics have shown that consumers feel more relatable to smaller, niche influencers than famous celebrities and are more likely to trust their favorite influencer’s product recommendations.
What’s even better is that if you find influencers whose niche is hair and beauty, they can create beautiful looks with your hair bundles or wigs. This can help hair brands reach more potential customers.
So how do hair business owners, and wig makers approach influencers to collaborate? In this article, we will break down the details on how to plan and execute a successful influencer campaign for your hair weave business.
Make sure your hair business has a solid branding
Many small business owners make the mistake of investing too fast into influencer marketing without a solid plan or even a solid brand.
Building a brand that customers love and trust is more important than selling a product. It is also the quickest way to leave an impression for your potential customers. If your hair business doesn’t have a LOGO yet but you want to spend hundreds of dollars for a post from a “famous influencer”, you will most likely end up not making any sales and hurt your business cash flow.
You have to access your business first before working with an influencer. This way you can calculate how much you can splurge on a sponsored post and how likely you can make your investment back.
For example, an influencer charges $500 dollars for a sponsored post and asks for a 300 dollar product for free, that means a sponsored post will cost $800. If you have an average order value of $200 and your profit is $100, then you will need to make 8 sales to make the investment back, so you need to make $1600 in sales to not lose money. If that’s not something your business can achieve at this time, then you might think about spending your money on the business first.
If your hair business is brand new, doesn’t have solid branding, doesn’t have a website and your clients are only a few friends and family, you probably don’t want to “bleed” thousands of dollars for a sponsored post yet.
But if you are already making consistent sales and your business has bomb packaging, LOGO, solid branding, great reviews, and a steady marketing plan, then paying $500 for a popularity boost may not be a bad thing.
Solid branding such as LOGO, packagings is very important to set your hair brand apart from competitors. In some cases, you may need to first your limited budget on better hair packaging design, better product display mannequins, or even a light ring and a good camera phone to take better product photos. When you have small budgets, work with them diligently.
If you need idea to upgrade your hair business packaging. Check our these hair extensions, wig packagings!
-
Soft Satin Hair Bag With LOGO$221.00 – $375.00 - High End Brochure$219.99 – $369.98
- Shopping Bag With Logo$450.00
Find influencers in your niche with high engagement rate
The success of an influencer marketing campaign highly depends on the influencer’s niche. You want to send products to someone whose followers will buy your products.
There are a few ways you can find influencers in your niche.
- Search through popular Instagram hashtags such as #lacefrontwigs, #hairinfluencers, #hairblogger, #hairstyles. Try niche related hashtags to find the right influencers.
- Peep at your competitors and see who they collaborate with.
- Look up popular keywords on Youtube and search keywords like “wig install”, “hair review”, “Best virgin hair”, etc. Youtube is. a great place to find influencers who can provide content to post on all social media platforms.
Besides these options, you can also find influencers through Influencer agencies (a bit expensive, we don’t recommend this but you can try).
When you find an influencer, make sure to check how many comments they receive on their posts and if the people who comment are asking questions related to the posts. This is to determine if the influencer’s followers are females who are your potential hair customers. It prevents you from getting scammed by “fake” influencers who buy likes and comments to make themselves look more “desirable”.
You can make a spreadsheet to keep track of your ideal influencer’s contact information.
Don’t make the mistake thinking that the more followers the better. Sometimes influencers with under 10k followers can produce wonderful content for your brand.
Contact influencers to negotiate the collaboration
Once you find the right influencers, it’s time to contact them.
Usually an influencer will list their email or preferred contact method in their social media bio. On Instagram, they may have an “email button”, or an email in the bio. On Youtube, people usually list their emails on the “about” page.
You can draft a short and sweet email template that quickly expresses your interest to work with the influencer.
Here is a simple outreach email template you can use:
Hello,
Hope you are well.
We discovered your Instagram/Youtube/Tiktok page and would love to inquire how to collaborate with you!
We are a hair company/ I am a hairstylist/ Our brand would like to send you a product xxx.
Can we know how to collaborate with you for sponsored posts on such as such platform? Do you have any requirements?
Our company’s/My business Instagram is @xxxx, website www.yourwebsite.com. I look forward to hearing back.
Regards,
XXX
Your company’s email signature.
This short template is straight to the point, explains who you are, and expresses that you want to work with the person fairly. It’s good to mention that you are offering free product as a benefit. This is because many influecers receive fake collaboration emails that want them to buy things to promote. You have a higher chance of being responded to by mentioning free product.
Here, you should be prepared to have some budget for payment of the posts. Posting in exchange for free product used to work years ago, but nowadays, as influencers become more conscious of their worth, most will require free products and a posting fee.
Once the email is sent, if you don’t hear back for a few days, send them a direct DM on Instagram or Youtube to remind them that an email has been sent.
Be prepared that you might not hear back from some people. That’s totally okay and normal. If you don’t hear back after a while, it would be the best choice to move on to another influencer.
Yay, they replied! Let the negotiation begin!
You finally got a reply, most times it will look like this:
Hello,
Thank you for reaching out. I would love to work with your company and try out your products.
I do have a fee of $200 which includes 1 video post on Instagram, 1 HD photo post, and a Youtube dedicated video. Please let me know if that’s something you can still proceed with the collaboration.
Thanks!
Influencer A
Receiving this message is great because you get to learn about the influencer’s professionalism as well as their rates. From here you can negotiate the rate.
Negotiation email:
Hello Influencer A,
Thank you for your reply. $200 Budget is higher for our budget especially considering we are sending a product worth over $xxx. However, is $100 for 1 Youtube post and 1 photo post okay?
Look forward to hearing back.
Your name
Your company’s email signature.
If the influencer says yes, then you can go ahead and send them the agreement contract (we will link an agreement contract later in this blog).
If you received a “no, my rate is set”, you should consider if the influencer is demanding too much and whether you should move on.
Remember, negotiation is great because you get to know about the influencer and how they work with brands. Some people only want to look good for themselves and do not care if the brand does not have a return on investment. You do not want to work with influencers who are just… cocky!
Always send an influencer contract including all the details of the collaboration
No matter how good a collaboration seems at first, something can ALWAYS go wrong.
Wrong influencer address, missing delivery, wrong PayPal link, tagging the wrong company, influencer-marketing-gone-wrong cases can literally go on and on!
It’s important that you send a detailed influencer contract and include all the information about the collaboration so both parties, you and the influencer, are on the same page before, during, and after the posts.
Asking the influencer to sign a contract also ensures that the influencer will follow your requirements as accurately as possible since now they are legally bound to your agreement.
If the influencer is willing to post with an exchange of free products, you should still send an agreement. Free is not always good because now you have less control of how the campaign goes.
If you don’t know how to draft a contract, check out this -> THE BEST HAIR BUSINESS INFLUENCER COLLABORATION CONTRACT TEMPLATE (FREE)
Content to your should include in your contract
- Your business and the influencer’s accurate address, contact information, social media handles.
- The product you want to promote. The product name.
- The agreed posts (Such as 1 video on Instagram, 1 Youtube Video, etc)
- The posting requirements, such as how the influencer should post, what background, photo quality, etc.
- Posting time frame (This is a general time frame within which the influencer will post after receiving the product)
- Payment method and how, when to pay. (Usually, you can pay the influencer through PayPal)
- What caption to include on the post, such as the link to the product, and product detail information, etc.
Sending product
Once the influencer agrees and signs your post contract, it’s time to prepare for PR package!
Remember your packaging is also part of the promotion. It’s not necessary to have a luxury, extravagant custom PR packaging (It’s actually not good to send influencers something better than what you send your customers) but having a package with significant LOGO can help the influencer further imprint your brand into their follower’s mind.
If the influencer is reviewing your product on Youtube, she or he may show your packagings to the audience, which may entice the buyers to purchase even more.
One thing to be careful when sending out your PR package is that you should double-check the influencer’s address to make sure there is no hassle during the delivery. If you use signature confirmed delivery method, some people with PO Box addresses may not be able to receive your package unless they are there to sign for it.
More Tips: Include a personalized slip that describes the collaboration in detail. This again ensures that the influencer remembers everything about the posts.
Be patient and follow up when necessary
Once your product is delivered, it is now a patience game.
You have to remember that creating high quality content for a product requires a LOT of effort and time and people can get busy. In order to get the best content for your brand, the model may shoot their videos over and over again. Editing also takes up a lot of time.
You want to allow a reasonable amount of time such as 2 weeks to 3 weeks for the influencer to finish the content (Most people have jobs or school and only have time to create content over the weekend).
Sometimes, this time can take up to a month or even longer. For hair extensions products, some people may even need to schedule appointments with their hairstylists in order to provide the best content.
So here, even though you have outlined a time frame for the posts to go live, things can happen and you should expect to give the influencer some room for delay if needed.
Some general tips on follow up emails:
- Follow up when your package is delivered. Here we recommend using signature confirmed delivery so you can track the package better. Sometimes a package may be delivered to a roommate or a relative and the influencer may not even know that it had arrived. Follow up is a great way to confirm delivery and to remind them to check for the PR package.
- Follow up when it’s approaching your agreed posting time. Write a short email and simply ask how the progress is. If the content is not yet produced, you can ask for an estimated time for posting.
Payment upon preview of content
Influencer marketing can go wrong especially in the department of paying. What happens if you pay the influencer, and they never post anything?
This can be resolved if you only agree to pay the influencer AFTER they send you a preview of their posts before posting.
Payment after preview rule should be outlined in the agreement ahead of time so the influencer is well aware that they will be paid after they finish the content for your business as you required.
To send payment, you can request for the influencer’s agreed PayPal account or their PayPal link.
What if the influencer “ghost” me or doesn’t post what I asked for?
This is the one down side about influencer marketing.
Many small or even established businesses place their trust onto “entitled influencers” who are turn out to be “scammers”. This has even happened to us multiple times with influencers who have fairly large accounts over 100k followers! Yes, it’s terrible to know that the influencers we love and trust can break contracts and actually be scammers, right?
When a business owner sends expensive products and a fee to an influencer, only to never hear back again. The business owner gets upset thinking that the influencer had disapproved the product and tossed it. But a few days later, the very same influencer is rocking and loving the product, but just not tagging the business.
This unfortunately happens fairly often even if you have a solid contract in place.
If you have been ghosted, you can reach out to the influencer to ask if she or he plans on promoting your product soon. If they reply, you can still give the benefit of the doubt.
If the influencer purposely ignores you and you think that they have stolen money and goods from you by disregarding the agreement, you can contact the influencer for a refund or file a claim in small claims court.
But frankly, most people just take it as a lesson and a business loss then move on.
Have realistic goals!
Nothing works if you don’t have the right expectations. Influencer marketing is not a bullet proof marketing strategy. With the decrease of organic reach on Instagram and Facebook, many find influencer posts to be not profitable.
If you don’t think influencer posts can generate enough sales, maybe you can look for a different value such as high-quality pictures for your website or video reviews for your social media.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is wonderful for your hair business, but it is also risky. Besides influencer marketing, you should make sure your hair brand is a solid brand, with great products and reviews.
You should also think about using multiple strategies with influencer marketing such as using paid Instagram ads to promote the content influencers produce for your business. We find this to be a very useful strategy.
And of course, if you don’t think influencer marketing works for your hair business, promoting your business by yourself is also an option and it works wonders since you would be the influencer yourself!
Interested in starting your own hair weave business? Try our dropshipping membership and start your hair brand with custom packagings and NO inventory! Get started HERE.
NEED FREE HAIR BUSINESS TIPS? JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP FOR HAIR BOSSES AND LEARN MORE!
