Influencer marketing, also known as branded content or partnering with creators, is a surefire way to expand your brand‘s presence on social media. You can think of various types of people as influencers. For example, your best customers might be some of the best influencers and advocates for your product/service. However, sometimes you want to expand your reach and promote your brand in front of a whole new audience.
Celebrity endorsements are the original form of influencer marketing. But in today’s digital world, social content creators with niche audiences can often provide more value to brands. These smaller accounts often have very active followers on social media.
Influencer marketing involves working with key figures in your industry to promote your brand to their followers. When done right, influencer marketing can be a huge success and drive your brand to grow exponentially. Here are 8 ways to build an effective influencer strategy in your marketing efforts.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #1: Set Goals
Before starting any new marketing campaign, it’s important to set goals so you know how to measure the success of your campaign. What do you want from an influencer marketing campaign? For example, you might want to increase awareness of a new product or upcoming event, improve website rankings, or increase your following on social media.
The number one goal of brands using influencer marketing is to attract new target customers. This makes sense because an influencer campaign will extend your reach to that person’s followers. Influencers with broad reach rightfully expect to be paid for their work. Free products may work for nano-influencers, but larger influencer campaigns require a budget.
Note that the goal is just to attract new customers, not necessarily to make an immediate sale. After increasing brand awareness and product consideration, driving sales is actually the third most common goal of influencer marketing campaigns.
An effective influencer marketing strategy requires you to use the right tools and the right influencers to talk to the right people. The first step is to define what your audience will be for this particular campaign.
Developing audience personas is a great way to make sure you understand the people you want to reach. Maybe you’re trying to reach more of your current audience — or an entirely new audience. Once decided, create a set of matching influencer personas. This will help you understand the qualities you are looking for in an influencer.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #2: Do Own Research to Identify Ideal Influencer
Now that you know what you want to achieve with your campaign, it’s time to identify your ideal influencer. See what your potential influencers are posting. How often do they share sponsored content?
When considering who you want to work with, the key is trust. Your audience must trust and respect the opinions of the influencers you work with. Without the trust component, any results would be superficial. You’ll be hard-pressed to see tangible business impact from your efforts.
Brands should look for people who are active on social media and have an authentic voice. Influencers should also be relevant to your brand. For example, if you’re a cosmetics company, you might want to target beauty bloggers and not a fitness fanatic.
When you search for influencers, remember not to make the mistake of assuming that everyone with a large following has a strong influence on their followers. See the number of likes and comments on each post to see how engaged that person’s followers are. If they’ve already built up followers with a lot of paid posts, their engagement rate may not last. Find plenty of organic, non-paid content to keep followers interested, enthusiastic, and engaged.
A good engagement rate also means loyal followers, not inflated follower counts backed by bots and fraudulent accounts. You need to find someone who makes content that matches your own look and feel.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #3: Find influencers
After you know your ideal influencers, start creating a list of influencers you’d like to work with during this campaign. You can find relevant influencers manually or with tools.
If you choose to do it manually, you can search for influencers using popular hashtags related to your business. However, sifting through thousands of different profiles can be time-consuming until you find a valuable influencer. To speed up the process, you may want to use tools like Hypeauditor or Taggermedia designed to help brands identify influencers.
Once you’ve got your list, start checking out these influencers’ social media profiles and websites to make sure they match your ideal influencer’s profile. Influencers in need get great deals. When you first approach an influencer, you need to show that you’ve put in the time to understand their work. Make sure you know exactly what their channel is about and who their audience is.
Keep this in mind when considering what to ask influencers to post. Asking for too many posts in a short period of time can make it difficult for influencers to accept your offer, even if it comes with a hefty salary.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #4: Start a Conversation
Find contact email addresses on each influencer’s social media profiles and website. If you can’t find an email address, log into your brand’s social media accounts and message influencers.
Slowly start communicating with new potential partners by organically interacting with their posts. love their content. Comment when appropriate. Try to be appreciate and not salesy. When you’re ready to suggest a partnership, direct messages are a great place to start.
It’s easier to have these conversations via email, so ask the influencer if they have an email address where you can connect with him/her about the opportunity. If you can find an email address, don’t send bulk emails or generic DMs.
It may take longer to write personal information to each influencer. However, it will show that you are serious about a potential partnership. This in turn increases your chances of closing a deal.
One thing to keep in mind along the way: You may not actually want to use the term “influencer” when reaching out to potential partners. Content creators prefer to be called creators — and may view “influencers” as insults that demean their work.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #5: Negotiation
If you’ve caught the attention of the influencer, start discussing the details of the deal. Provide as much information about your brand as possible. How do you want influencers to promote your products? How long will the post be on social media?
Then, ask the influencer what they expect from promoting your product and tell them what you want to achieve with your campaign. Make it clear how the influencer will benefit, beyond salary. Bear it in mind that nothing is set in stone. If you don’t have a large budget for this campaign, you can offer influencers other incentives, such as free products or promotions.
Many of these influencers are mobile workers who rely on this income, so feel free to negotiate with the influencer if you think the deal they suggest is unfair. However, keep in mind that you may not be able to reach an agreement with every influencer. If you have to remove some from the list and move on to the next one, don’t feel like a failure.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #6: Create Content
Once you and the influencer have agreed on the terms of the deal, start creating content for the promotion. Social media influencers struggling to build a following won’t accept deals that make their own personal brand look inconsistent.
Typically, brands send products to influencers, who take photos with the products and send them to brands for approval. The brand will then send out “talking points” for the influencer to touch on in the headline. For example, a brand might ask an influencer to mention a special discount they offer on a product.
If you’re creating content to place on an influencer’s website, typically you’ll be responsible for writing 100% of the content, and the influencer will get final approval. After all, influencers are content creation experts. That’s why they prefer to be called creators. By letting them demonstrate these skills, you’ll get the most value out of their work.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #7: Publicity
Keep in touch with influencers so you know when your content goes live. Of course, it’s a good idea to provide some guidance on what you’re looking for. But don’t expect to manage the entire campaign in stages.
Then, promote the content through your social media pages, newsletters and website. If the influencer ends up getting more views or clicks than usual as a result of your efforts to promote collaboration, she is more likely to collaborate with you again in the future. In fact, you might even get a better deal on your next deal if you’ve already proven that working together is beneficial to both parties.
In addition to popular social media platforms, consumers also turn to blogs as their most trusted source of online information. Therefore, brands turn to influencer bloggers to leverage the trust of their target audience.
There are two types of posts in this category. One is a dedicated post around your product or service. Content focuses on your brand and may also include exclusive discount codes or custom giveaways for purchases. You can also ask bloggers to mention your brand in roundup articles about your product or service. In this case, the blog post will include many businesses, including yours.
Build An Effective Influencer Strategy #8: Track the Success
It is important to track the success of each marketing campaign. Go back to the original goal you set for this campaign. Are you seeing an increase in event registrations? Has your page rank improved due to the partnership? Do you have more social media followers? Answering these questions will help you determine whether the campaign was successful.
When you launch an influencer campaign, it can be easy to focus on vanity metrics like likes and comments. If your influencer has far more followers than you, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer number of likes.
But to measure the effectiveness of an activity, you must understand its value in terms of ROI. Fortunately, there are many ways to measure the success of your campaigns. UTM parameters are a way to track the visitors that influencers send to your website. They can also help measure the level of engagement a campaign gets.
If you’re looking to develop an influencer marketing strategy, you need to be willing to build real relationships with influencers. As with all business relationships, you must consider win-win outcomes. Just as you set goals for your business, so do they.
The KOC Live has been founded in Malaysia in 2021, we have been aiming to help our clients to reach out to their targeted audience within their social media platform and attempted to assist in influencing purchasing decisions of consumers.
We have always tried to ensure our clients in achieving their business goals and are passionate about connecting brands to the right audience and consumers. We understand that currently, businesses are struggling with their business by not being able to reach their target audience, especially now that everything is turning remote. We hope that we can help our clients in bringing the best to the world.
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