It’s likely that you’ve come across influencers if you’ve been keeping up with Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, or even Facebook and Twitter in the past few years. You might have stumbled upon a fitness expert promoting workout getup or a beauty enthusiast violent about a new night cream. Influencers utilize their own expertise and unique perspectives to persuade a particular audience to invest in a product or service.
In today’s landscape, businesses are enlisting the help of everyday influencers who produce genuine content and foster personal connections with their followers. These relationships are more likely to yield a significant return on investment and are becoming an essential part of brands’ digital influencer marketing strategy.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a modern approach to promoting a brand’s goods or services. It involves partnering with respected and well-known individuals on popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. These individuals, known as influencers, have a strong following and expertise in a specific community. As a result, their followers are more willing to trust their recommendations and consider purchasing products from brands they uphold. Building genuine, reciprocal relationships with relevant influencers is crucial for any brand looking to leverage the power of influencer marketing.
Is Influencer marketing right for your brand?
To determine whether influencer marketing is right for your brand, you’ll want to consider a few things:
- Whether it aligns with your target demographic and the platforms they use
- Whether your brand falls under the common types of influencer products or services
- Whether you can afford influencer marketing and how much to budget for it
Besides demographic and platform alignment, you’ll also need to consider whether your brand falls under the common niche categories for influencers. Some popular niches in influencer marketing include:
- Lifestyle
- Fashion
- Beauty
- Celebrities and Entertainment
- Sports
What Is Influencer Marketing Strategy?
Influencer marketing is a new form of social media marketing that relies on a person’s social media endorsement of a company’s products or services. It leverages the reach of an existing influencer marketing platform to achieve the company’s immediate goals.
You see, these influencers often have a big following on social media or they really connect with a specific group of people. When brands team up with influencers, they get to tap into that big audience to meet their marketing goals. But if you’re thinking about bringing an influencer on board for your brand, where do you even begin, right? Figuring out your goals, the kind of influencer you need, and what you want to achieve with an influencer marketing strategy can be a bit of a puzzle.
To begin with, you need to be clear with the basics of influencer marketing.
The fundamental of this kind of marketing depends on mainly 3Rs:
1. Reach: This refers to the influencer’s ability to connect with a substantial and relevant audience. It’s about the size and demographics of their following and how effectively they can get your message in front of the right people.
2. Relevance: Relevance emphasizes the alignment between the influencer’s content, values, and audience with your brand or campaign. It’s crucial that the influencer’s message resonates with your target audience and fits seamlessly with your brand’s image.
3. Relationship: Building a strong and authentic relationship between the influencer and your brand is essential. This involves clear communication, trust, and a mutual understanding of goals and expectations. A genuine partnership with the influencer can lead to more successful collaborations.
How to Build a Solid Influencer Marketing Strategy in 6 Easy Steps
If you haven’t considered using an influencer marketing platform to grow your brand, we hope this article has changed your mind.
But how do you go about building a solid strategy that drives a strong ROI?
1. Set Your Campaign Goals
When crafting a winning strategy, it’s essential to start with clearly defined goals. Without a clear vision of what success looks like, how can you accurately determine what strategies and tactics are effective? Success in influencer marketing can take on different forms for each unique business, but no matter the desired outcome, it’s crucial to establish SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Before diving into a partnership with influencers, it’s vital to consider what you hope to achieve from the collaboration.
Common goals that are used include:
- Reach. If you are looking to raise awareness of your business’ products or services to new audiences, reach may be a great goal. After all, if your influences are targeted, a focus on reach can be a great way to maximize the number of people who become aware of your offering.
- Traffic. Another goal might be to increase the traffic to your website as a result of a collaboration—both direct and as a result of an increase in brand searches on Google.
- Sales and Conversions. At the end of the day, most marketing campaigns have the ultimate goal of making money. Due to the way you can track a campaign, it is possible to run a campaign that has a goal of driving direct sales. Using discount codes can be a great way to motivate quick sales while also allowing performance to be tracked back to an influencer.
Different goals work for different brands, but by defining yours at the start of a campaign, you can build everything else around it.
2. Define Your Campaign’s Target Audience
Influencer marketing is only effective when your business is being promoted to the right audience.
Get your target audience right, and you will be set to benefit massively from a collaboration. Get this wrong, and it can not only be a waste of time and investment but could also be embarrassing.
Influencer marketing is not about reaching a big audience and simply hoping that some of those who see it are interested, far from it.
The pure nature of the tactic and the tools available mean that you can market to very specific niche audiences, but you need to know who this is.
Don’t forget that you can be very specific; you don’t need to, and probably shouldn’t be, trying to target your whole audience with one campaign or collaboration. Instead, focus on segments of those who will be highly engaged.
Keeping goals in mind, identify who it is that you want to target, understand specific demographics.
3. Define Your Campaign Messaging and Brief
Just as you need to know your audience and goals, before you start reaching out to influencers, you need to identify your campaign’s messaging. This can differ significantly depending on the goals and purpose of collaborations.
- Are you looking to raise awareness around the business as a whole to new audiences?
- Promote a new product launch to those who are maybe already familiar with the brand.
- Highlight a new service feature.
- Drive direct purchases around a sale?
Campaign messaging should closely align with goals, but until you have a scope for your campaign, you will struggle to map out a successful strategy.
Focus your efforts on putting together a campaign brief that communicates both your goals and what it is that you want an influencer to collaborate with you on; the clearer this is, the more effective you will be in landing those highly valuable collaborations.
4. Set a Budget
One of the mistakes that is often overlooked is forgetting to establish a budget. Let’s be real, the majority of influencers, yes, even the smaller ones, expect to be compensated for their work. The days of solely relying on free products for collaborations are long gone. To work with top-notch influencers who have a dedicated following, you will need to have a budget in place, in addition to offering products or services as gifts.
In order to determine a suitable budget, it is crucial to consider the breakdown between compensating influencers and covering the costs of products or services. It would not be wise to engage in negotiations with influencers or even reach out to them without having a clear budget in place. Without one, it will be difficult to develop a strategic plan for approaching these collaborations.
To set a budget, you need to have answers to questions like:
- What is the main goal? Reach or return?
- How many influencers do we want to work with?
- Which platforms are our audience active on?
- Is our priority engagement or reach when it comes to audiences?
At this stage, you will probably want to understand roughly what it costs, on average, to work with influencers across each platform.
- Instagram: $10 per 1,000 followers
- Facebook: $25 per 1,000 followers
- Twitter: $2 per 1,000 followers
- YouTube: $20 per 1,000 subscribers
- Snapchat: $10 per 1,000 followers
- Blogs: $60 per 1,000 visitors
Once you have a budget set, you can figure out how to use it most effectively.
5. Find the Right Influencers and Reach Out
Choosing the right type of influencer for your campaign depends on your specific goals. You have the option of collaborating with renowned celebrity influencers or engaging with a community of micro-influencers. Both approaches have their own advantages and there is no definitive right or wrong choice. However, the process of finding and working with influencers differs significantly between the two categories.
To collaborate with a celebrity influencer, you will most likely need to go through their agent. For instance, the Ministry of Talent manages a wide range of influencers. It is rare for them to handle their own collaborations. On the other hand, if your focus is on micro-influencers, you can usually identify and approach them yourself with success.
6. Track Your Campaign’s Performance
As a savvy marketer, there are a variety of options available for keeping a close eye on the success of your influencer campaign strategy. One method is to designate a unique hashtag for each influencer to incorporate in their social media postings. This allows for easy tracking and interaction with campaign-related activity.
Another helpful tool is Prowly’s Media Monitoring feature, which allows you to discover and track mentions from both influencers and their followers across various online platforms. This provides valuable additional insights to enhance your campaign evaluation.
Understanding the Different Types of Influencers
Despite what you might think, an influencer campaign strategy isn’t just an influencer, and you must know what these different types are so that you can put together a successful strategy.
You often hear platform-specific influencers talked about, be that Instagram Influencers, YouTubers, or others. But their platform is, really, just the distribution channel for their content.
To really understand the different types of influencers, we need to look at micro-influencers and celebrity (macro) influencers.
Micro-influencers
In recent times, numerous savvy marketers have come to recognize the immense value in utilizing individuals of the ‘everyday’ variety to promote their offerings. Thus, the demand for micro-influencers has skyrocketed.
Back in 2018, Forbes hailed this group of influential personalities as the driving force of the marketing world.
Unlike celebrities, these are ordinary folks who have amassed a devoted following of like-minded individuals on social media platforms. Generally, they boast between 1,000 and 10,000 actively engaged followers.
What truly sets them apart, however, is the level of engagement within their community. While their numbers may not be as staggering as those of celebrities, their audience is highly targeted and actively engages with their content. Befriending a micro-influencer may not yield as widespread reach as celebrity approval, but it certainly hones in on a specific and pivotal audience. As a bonus, it also comes at a more affordable cost to the brand.
Celebrity (Macro) Influencers
Celebrity (or macro) influencers are those big-name stars with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers.
Working with this type of influencer makes it easier to reach large numbers of individuals and associate your brand with big-name stars. However, it is expensive, making the barrier to entry far higher for many businesses.
Working with celebrities isn’t for every brand, but the most successful strategies will often look to balance both types of influencers for maximum impact.
Nano Influencers
While perhaps not spoken about quite so much, nano influencers also exist, those with less than 1,000 followers but who are in a very small but highly engaged niche.
Wrap up
Influencer marketing is perhaps the fastest-growing channel right now. It opens up a whole host of opportunities for brands looking to drive targeted increases in awareness and place their products and services in front of new audiences.
If you are not using this strategy as a way to drive growth, it should be a serious consideration. After all, if your competitors are using it, there is a chance you will fall behind. And if they are not, you could gain a significant competitive advantage by doing so.
By putting together a solid strategy, you can work with influencers to reach the specific audience you want to get in front of, track progress, and understand what is contributing towards achieving your goals.
