If done right, influencer marketing is one of the best ways to promote your brand online and raise awareness among your target audience. What are some of the best ways to leverage influencer marketing for the benefit of your business?

1. Find Someone Who Believes in Your Product

Influencer marketing is quickly becoming indistinguishable from advertising, as when you pay a celebrity to endorse your business. The real power of this method is to work with someone who really believes in, and uses your products. Rather than simply looking for influencers with huge followings, take the time to build a connection with someone who can authentically endorse you. – Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting

2. Get Them to Promote Your Website

When influencers promote your offerings, get them to share links to relevant pages on your website. This is not a problem with YouTubers and bloggers, although it may get tricky with influencers on Instagram because they have only one place to add a link. Good thing is they can do away with changing the URL in their bios for every post by promoting links to unique landing pages on your website. – Derek Robinson, Top Notch Dezigns

3. Fuel Your Personal Brand

Building your brand isn’t vain when you’re a true messenger. What seems easy on the outside becomes tedious when you break it down and try to fit the psychology, vision and all moving pieces into one clear picture. However, the reward of a well-established brand is that execution and consistency become natural and simplified. I use influencer marketing to build a personal brand that sells for me. – Sweta Patel, Silicon Valley Startup Marketing

4. Craft a Narrative

While you should never obscure the fact that an influencer is working with your company as a paid promotion, it will make it more believable for their audience if you craft a story around your marketing. Why is this influencer interested in your product or service? How could this product or service relate to their followers? Provide good answers to these questions to better leverage influencers. – Bryce Welker, CPA Exam Guy

5. Guest Blog on Their Site

If the influencer has a blog, one way to leverage the relationship is to guest blog on each other’s sites. Make sure to link relevant articles to your own blog throughout the article. Not only will you get more traffic to your site, but Google will increase the domain authority of your site as well, helping you rank higher in search results. – Syed Balkhi, OptinMonster

6. Help Them Showcase Your Work

For my clothing line, we arranged a photoshoot for our brand ambassador Chris Lee, also known as Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson in the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.” We also supplied him outfits for his appearances. Influencer marketing does not have to be confined in curated posts. Chris was a customer before the partnership and turned into our ambassador because he genuinely had a rapport with us. – Fritz Colcol, Iridium Clothing Co.

7. Check Their Engagement

While influencer marketing can be a powerful tool, you can easily pull zero ROI. Check your influencer’s engagement, likes, comments, etc. Many of them have fake followers and fake bots that like and comment on their posts to drive up the price they demand. Ask around. Ask for proof of click-throughs on links or campaign results. – Scott Levy, Fuel Online

8. Help Your Prospects Become Influencers

Instead of reaching out to influencers, help your prospects become influencers by emailing them for expert roundups or to list their business in top business lists. This allows you to approach them from a position of providing value and opens the door for a future sales conversation. – Ajay Paghdal, OutreachMama

9. Consider Micro-Influencers

Don’t cut out the little guy. Micro-influencers are individuals that relate to an audience following of niche categories and topics. Although their audiences are smaller in size, they are often an intensely engaged group, which translates to lower cost per conversion. Influencers of this nature are more likely to understand and passionately promote your product or service. – Ryan Christiansen, Ntooitive Digital

10. Develop an Affiliate Program

For some of our products, we’ll create affiliate programs through ShareASale. We have found that bloggers and influencers are more likely to link to our products if they can get a percentage of the sale. This has increased our media mentions and traffic to our site, ultimately leading to more sales. – Jared Atchison, WPForms

11. Offer Residual Incentives

Influencers need to know an opportunity is worth their time. Leveraging the right incentives that truly pay off over time is a great bait to lure them in. Consider offering referral incentives that pay off over the lifecycle of the customers they directly bring in. As long as you can track the influencer’s activity with URLs and promo codes, everybody should end up winning. – Logan Lenz, PartsMarket

12. Offer Discounts or Giveaways

Offering discounts on the product or service, or offering it for free would make the influencers familiar with it. If they are satisfied, they are more likely to promote it whenever they write or talk about related topics. Build relationships by asking for feedback and comments, by tracking and sharing the content where they mentioned your brand. It’d encourage them to recommend you more and more. – Liam Martin, TimeDoctor.com, Staff.com