Introduction to Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has grown exponentially over the past few years because of the relatively low cost of entry (compared to traditional marketing), the ability to easily track key metrics, and the amazing results it garners for businesses.
But many organizations are still hesitant to begin working with influencers, unsure if it's right for their brand. If you haven’t started working with influencers yet, but are curious about whether you should, this is the article for you.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a new-age marketing tactic where brands collaborate with influential people, usually online, to promote their products or services.
Every influencer marketing campaign will differ based on your goals, budget, and industry, but it could look like:
providing an influencer with products in exchange for a shoutout on their social media platform
paying an influencer to write a blog post about your service
creating an influencer event to launch a new product
There are influencers in every niche, on every platform, of every size. That’s one of the amazing things about influencer marketing - it really can work for any organization if executed correctly.
Why Should You Invest in Influencer Marketing?
Working with influencers can have many incredible benefits for your business, including:
Content Creation
Most influencers are amazing content creators that can provide you with high quality images and videos for you to share.
Bonus: This content will usually have a human element and will be from the perspective of your ideal customer. It therefore often performs and connects with your audience better.
Credibility
Influencers have built their own trusted communities online. By partnering with them, you are increasing your credibility in the eyes of their audience members.
Reach + Growth
Having influencers share your brand gets you in front of potential new customers.
Get the most out of the partnerships by ensuring you are working with influencers whose audiences align with your own.
Sales
Consider providing your influencers with discount codes that they can share with their audience. This can help drive sales for your business.
How to Execute an Effective Influencer Marketing Campaign
Set your Goals
As with any campaign, the first step is setting your goals. What are you hoping to achieve through working with these influencers?
Set both your overarching goals, such as an increase in brand awareness, as well as your trackable objectives, such as receiving 80,000 impressions over the course of the campaign.
By setting your end goals first you are able to work backwards from there, selecting the appropriate influencers and marketing methods to help you achieve them.
Determine your Budget
The next step is to set your budget. Determine what your goals and objectives are worth to you and your business and how much you are willing to invest in order to achieve them.
Setting your budget will help narrow down which influencers you are able to work with, as many of the larger influencers (10k+ followers) will require a bigger budget. However, there are many micro influencers, with fewer than 10k followers, who are willing to work for product exchanges.
Create a Campaign Plan
As we mentioned above, influencer marketing can take many different forms and how you decide to execute your campaign will depend on your goals, budget, and industry.
This is where you will determine the what, when, why, how, and where of working with influencers.
Will it be a one-off social media campaign to launch a product? Will you form long-term partnerships to continually keep your brand top of mind? Will you host an event?
The opportunities with influencer marketing are endless.
An important but sometimes overlooked detail in a successful influencer partnership is to allow the influencer some creative control. Remember, these people have built audiences and relationships based on their voice. A successful campaign is authentic to both your brand and the influencer’s.
Find the Right Influencers
There are many things to consider when selecting which influencers to work with, and some will vary depending on your goals and budget. But the most important consideration is usually of the audience. Does the influencer have the right audience for your business? Will their audience be interested in your products and services?
Further to that point, you’ll also want to ensure that the influencer’s audience is engaged and truly listens to their recommendations. One way to do this is to check the engagement rate of the influencer on their social media platform.
To figure out engagement rate you take the average engagements from their last ten posts and divide this by their number of followers.
Engagement rates will vary by the size of the influencer. Smaller influencers will typically have higher engagement rates.
You’ll also want to look at the quality of these engagements. Go into their recent posts and look at the comments. Are the comments all from other influencers? That can be a sign that they might be partaking in engagement pods in which a group of influencers will all comment on each other’s posts to boost their engagement rate. This means that their audience is less authentic and less likely to listen to their recommendations.
Again, this will vary depending on your campaign goal. For example, if your goal is to get high-quality content that you can share on your social channels, the influencer’s engagement rate will be less important than the quality of their content.
Here are a few questions you should always ask yourself before working with an influencer:
Does their audience align with your own?
Is their audience engaged?
Does the influencer align with your brand values?
Does their content style match your brand style?
Are they in a similar niche or industry to you?
Build Relationships
Once you’ve found the influencers that fit perfectly with your brand and campaign objectives, you can reach out to them and pitch your idea.
Remember, influencers receive hundreds of messages a week from brands asking them to participate in various campaigns - some real, some fake. It’s important to distinguish yourself from these spam messages by addressing the influencer by name, introducing yourself and your brand, and requesting a meeting to discuss ideas.
We always recommend at least a phone call with the influencers you are working with so that you can begin to build genuine relationships with them. It’s important to remember that the influencers you are working with are people. This is more than just a business transaction and building a relationship with them will go a long way.
Track, Measure, and Improve
The secret to creating successful campaigns? Always track your results and continuously find areas for improvement.
Measure your actual results against the objectives that you set. Did you achieve them? Did you surpass them? Or were you way off?
But don’t stop there. Dig deeper and ask why. What was it that got you to where you are and what can you do to keep improving?
Don’t be afraid to get feedback from your influencers as well. For many of them, this is their full-time gig and they will have great insight into what their audience likes and what successful campaigns have looked like for them in the past.
We love creating influencer marketing campaigns that drive real results for our agency partners. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you achieve your objectives with influencer marketing, contact us!