Leveraging influencer marketing in PR for startups in 2024

‘Should influencers be part of our PR strategy?’ is a question that many of our B2B startup and scaleup clients ask us.

It’s 2024 so everyone knows that influencers are a fantastic way to maximise coverage, drive engagement on social media and establish brand authenticity. But it’s important to also understand the potential that influencers have to amplify a PR campaign message and enhance what coverage can be achieved.

Here at Words and Pixels, we recommended a blended digital PR approach that syncs together press, influencers and content creation to maximise campaign results. Read on to hear our ultimate guide on how to elevate and increase press coverage by integrating influencer marketing into your PR strategy. 

Understanding the influencer landscape

First things first, you need to understand the influencer landscape across Instagram, X, LinkedIn and TikTok. There are five different categories of content creators based on their audience size.

Macro influencers tend to sit within the celebrity/ambassador world with 300K - 1 million followers, and whilst this will generate mass reach for your brand it is often not achievable for smaller brands to leverage from a budget perspective.

Mid-tier influencers have 50-300K followers, these alongside micro influencers (5-50K following) often yield the highest engagement and ROI for brands.

Nano influencers are the smallest with 1-5K followers and can be a great place to start to test the waters, particularly for startups and scaleups. It’s important to remember that TikTok is all about views versus followers, so simply transfer those metrics to the average views they achieve per video to apply these influencer tiers to this channel. 

User Generated Content and PR

There’s also a new content creation trend to be aware of as a startup or scaleup brand. Lots of brands are seeing stronger results from repurposing influencer content in their own paid social ads versus on the influencers’ social channels. This has led to an increase in User-Generated Content (UGC). UGC creators collaborate with the brand purely to provide engaging, authentic influencer-esque content for the brand to amplify on their own channels and with their own digital ad spend. These content creators aren’t providing any reach for your brand so will create high quality content for low fees, allowing you to use your budget to amplify the content. 

Is influencer marketing right for your brand? 

Whether macro or micro, it’s vital that the talent is aligned with your business, can speak authentically to your target audience and will provide high quality content or reach to amplify your brand. We always ask ourselves these 3 questions to determine if the talent is right for your brand: 

• Would they authentically buy the product or use your service? 
• Does your target audience follow them? 
• Is their content aesthetic in line with your brand visuals?

If yes to all three, then the influencer talent is right for your brand.

Integrating influencers into your PR campaign

Now that you understand the different options within influencer marketing you need to decide how to integrate them within your PR campaign. Here at W+P, we recommend exploring product seeding, events and paid partnerships.

Product seeding is about gifting the chosen talent in the hopes that they will organically promote the product on social media. We recommend that influencers should be integrated into your gifting lists alongside journalists as standard. Do your research and look at what press also have a micro influencer following, they could provide you with a double whammy of content and coverage. 

Having key influencers at your press events alongside journalists is a fantastic way to create social buzz around the activation and encourage press to want to feature the campaign. Take a look at our work with W+P clients GoBoat and Treedom to see the success of integrating this seamlessly. 

Did you know that leveraging the right paid partnerships with mid-tier and macro influencers can generate coverage in its own right with lifestyle media? By syncing up multiple paid partnerships with placement across like minded talent you can create a must-have product that can then be pitched as a solo story. This sort of influencer round-up also looks great on social media, giving your brand added authority as a the chosen brand by such key opinion leaders.

Want more info on influencers and PR? 

Still baffled by the world of influencer marketing? Don’t worry, drop us an email to see how we can seamlessly integrate influencers into your PR strategy this year. 

‍