It is not easy to get traffic and engagement when you want to promote your product and services. But using influencer marketing can help you get the sales and actions you seek. When you know how to find influencer and have a good strategy, it can become a very successful campaign.
What is Influencer Marketing?
It is a type of social media marketing where influencers that have a dedicated following promote and endorse products to their audience. The goal is to build trust, increase brand awareness, get engagement, and drive sales to your product and services.
This type of marketing works because influencers built a high amount of trust with their following. So recommendations are a form of social proof to your brand’s potential customers. An influencer can make people feel more connected with your offer and your brand, which helps reach your brand goals.
There are many social media users with a big following to reach a targeted audience in specific niches. The right influencers create original and engaging content. That when you choose fitting influencers aligns with your brand voice and vision.
Type of Influencer Campaigns
To know how well a campaign works, you need to track your outcome when an influencer promotes your offer. The following types of influencer campaigns can help you.
1. Using Discount codes and affiliate marketing
Creating a custom coupon code or link for every influencer makes it easy to track every campaign as well to embed in graphics, videos, podcasts, and blogs.
2. Competitions and giveaways
Depending on your product, you can give away a handful of prices for competition winners or directly to influencers.
Many Social Media stars make unboxing videos and showcase your product. It helps you get your offer in front of their entire audience at a minimal cost for your company.
Big influencers receive many freebies and exclusive products. They make unboxing videos and streams and thank the brands by either reviewing or using them where the audience can see the product in action.
Competitions are an easy way to get more engagement, and with the right strategy also more brand awareness. People love free stuff, which is why many influencers make big giveaways to thank their audience.
This is where you can sponsor products; it doesn´t have to be your own offers but something that the audience is interested in like electronic articles, smartphones, laptops, gaming consoles…
Make sure to set rules that are transparent and easy to understand.
- Tagging friends.
- Liking the post or video
- Following your social media account and the one of the influencer
- Sharing the content.
- Signing up for a newsletter.
- creating original content.
- visiting a specific site
Look into specific guidelines, you need to follow on how and when the winners will be announced and where to contact them. It is important to discuss everything with the influencer before the giveaway starts.
How to find influencer?
There are millions of influencers across different social media platforms which give you enough opportunities for collaborations. But this also means you have to do a good amount of research to find the right influencer for your business.
The following eleven steps can help you connect with fitting influencers for your campaigns:
1. Set Campaign Goals
Many brands make the mistake of not properly testing the influencer campaign and don’t set clear goals to track. This leads that campaigns will generate little to no ROI.
The common reasons to use influencer marketing are to get brand awareness and to increase sales. But these are too broad goals. It is better to think about what your brand’s needs are.
Maybe you want to increase your customer base and expand to a younger audience. Or showcase your new product line to a new user group. Perhaps you want influencers to talk about your brand values and your visions.
With influencers, you get the ability to reach very specific audiences. They can ensure you get a very targeted audience who will be more interested in your products and engage with your content.
A good story can help make a sponsored influencer post lesser sales-driven and feature-oriented. So it doesn´t look like a generic brand post of the product. Promotions that are genuine and fitting have the most impact.
Think about what content you want the influencer to post. Do you want a review video or a beautiful photo or a short ad in a live stream or podcast? There many opportunities to get more sales and brand awareness.
Your message is as important as your goal. While you want influencers to show their creativity and uniqueness, you don´t want them to post something unrelated to your campaign. Make a structure of how your influencer marketing campaign should be and what message should be shared.
To highlight your collaboration and the benefits of the influencer and your brand, you can share or cross-post content on your channels.
2. Consider the three components of influence:
- Relevance: it is important that the influencer shares relevant content to your business and industry. Their audience needs to align with your target market and niche.
- Reach: is the number of followers you potentially can reach of a specific influencer. Are you going for social media stars with a larger following? Or micro-influencer with less than 100.000 followers? It all depends on the budget for the campaign.
- Resonance: Another factor is to look into the level of engagement the influencer has. A huge following can mean nothing when the followers aren´t interested in your offer. Indifference a smaller following can be more powerful when it is for a specific niche area. Niche influencers often have very dedicated and engaged followers.
3. Know their audience
To create a successful campaign, you need to know who you want to reach. So it is important to define your audience for the specific campaign.
Develop an audience persona to understand who you want to reach. Then create a matching influencer persona. This will help you find the qualities that you are looking for in an influencer. Also, include which network you want to focus on. It is better to start with one where your brand is already present or will be expanding into it.
A good idea is to look into these social media demographics to learn which audience uses the preferred network. When you plan an influencer campaign, your industry is also important. For example, for Beauty and Fashion brands Youtube and Instagram are the right places, while the video game industry dominates on Twitch.
4. Trust and engagement
N
owadays, many people will make a purchase decision because of a specific influencer.
So the most important thing is that the audience must trust and respect the opinion of the influencer you work with. Without the trust component, your campaign will most likely fail.
To see if the potential influencer is trusted, look for engagement, which means plenty of views, likes, comments, and shares are good. While also for smaller influencers, the right ratio between likes, views, and comments are useful indicators.
When you see loyal followers with good engagement, it also shows that the followers are real people, not bot and fraud accounts.
Scroll through their feed and click on the post to see how engaged and legit the shared content is.
5. Consistent look, feel, tone, and value.
You need to find someone that has content with a look and feel that complements your brand. The tone, vision, and values must also be aligned with how you want to present your company.
This will help you to not work with an influencer with the wrong audience who isn´t interested in your product.
6. Look out for other sponsorships
Sometimes an influencer already posted about similar brands, products, or services. This can help you get an idea of how the sponsored post might perform.
When an influencer already shares many sponsored content, it may lessen the engagement rate overall. Influencers should have non-paid content to keep followers more enthusiastic, interested, and engaged.
Also, keep in mind not to ask for too many posts in a short time frame because not many influencers will do it, even when you offer a large paycheck.
7. Research
Popular influencers get a lot of offers. So when you approach them, you need to show that you put in the time and researched and learned about what they do.
Get to know what their channels are about and what audience they have. The best way is to approach slowly and interact with their content and show appreciation and not get too salesy.
8. Plan your budget
The larger the following of an influencer, the more they expect to be paid unless they are relatively new without much experience in sponsoring.
While a free product might work with a micro-influencer, a larger influencer campaign requires a budget. So think about the payment structure you want to use for your goals. Sometimes it is a better option to use an affiliate structure or commission instead of a flat fee, which may lower your costs.
The payment terms depend on the followers, experience, and if an agency or a network represents the influencer.
The influencer post can cost between $100 to $1 million per post and vary on the different social media networks. To get a better idea of how much you should pay an influencer, check out this influencer marketing pricing article.
Keep also the budget of research and tracking tools you may use in mind.
9. Message the influencer
If you find the right person, you should either send the influencer a direct message on the social media platform or find their email address in the profile. Don´t send too many or too generic messages.
It takes more time to write a personal message to each influencer, but it shows that your company has a serious interest in working with them. This will increase the chance to strike the deal.
Also, provide enough information about your brand and tell them what your goal is with your campaign. Show the influencer what the benefits beyond the paycheck are.
Remember, influencers are humans that sometimes balance multiple partnerships. That means not all posts are on time, or they make errors in your requested tags or call to action. So take the time and be more hands-on with these relationships to cultivate them. Refine your approach to the experience on what works and what doesn’t for your brand.
10. Discloser of sponsored posts
Remember their certain rules for sponsored posts and partnerships. So make sure to tell the Influencer to disclose your sponsorship. This will help to keep consumers’ trust high and don´t get any problems.
While this discloser depends on your country’s rules, it is a good idea that the influencer put a #sponsored, #ad, or #[brand name] partner in their post when they work with your brand.
So make sure to check out the influencer’s post if they follow the guidelines.
11. Review and improve your strategy
Even if your influencer campaigns are ongoing, you need to measure the progress. To see how your campaign is performing, you can use a brand-specific hashtag like #hostcompPartner. Or use individual tracking links or coupon codes for the campaign, making it easy to track how much traffic and sales the influencer generates.
You can also reach out to the influencer to get detailed reports of the sponsored post.
Not all campaigns are successful, but you can learn from each one. Compare the result to know which partnerships and content are working against other marketing channels to see if it is worth continuing.
Conclusion
While the number of Influencers is growing, the world of influencer marketing also changes more and more over time. With this guide, you learn how to start your influence campaign, but like any other marketing strategy, it is important to be ready for change.
When working with influencers, there are some unique considerations, like looking for follower engagement and that the influencers have a solid reputation and genuine followers.
However, setting up a campaign is the same as most other marketing campaigns: doing enough research, setting a budget, and defining your goals, find your influencers, and doing a campaign review.
When you follow these steps, you can create successful influencer marketing campaigns. But of course, for many brands, the first one might be a failure. If you learn in the process and create additional campaigns, strive to give them the freedom to make great content and build trust, you can archive your sales and brand goals.
With true talents, you can gain an authentic voice that provokes emotions and actions of a new audience.
What influencer strategy do you want to try? Let me know in the comments.
