A successful influencer campaign begins first with understanding your goals, your target audience, and finding the right influencers to help you achieve those goals. Additionally, tracking and measuring results will provide insights on the success of the campaign that will help guide you forward on future campaigns. Influencer marketing has become the center of attention for many brands and businesses across all industries and of all sizes. Just three years ago, a study showed that 86% of marketers planned to utilize influencers in their marketing strategy. Influencer marketing involves working with influencers to help promote a business, brand, or a cause. When we speak of influencer marketing today, we’re not limiting the practice to blog post-campaign executed on blogger websites. Campaigns focused on specific social channels like Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter continue gain traction and do very well for brands. and offer great success for clients.
Not all influencer campaigns requires working with celebrity type of influencers. In fact, in recent years, there has been a strategic shift by many brands and agencies to intentionally include or exclusively work with micro and nano influencers as many have higher engagement rates and are more affordable than macro or celebrity influencers.
This focus on engagement and authenticity will result in brands being able to maximize their return on investment (ROI).
So, what are the best practices when it comes to working hand-in-hand with bloggers and influencers? And how can you really drive sales and build brand loyalty? At a basic level, successful influencer campaigns starts first with identifying the right influencers that create authentic stories and create high-quality content. They will know how to tell their fans and followers what they love about your brand or product. Moreover, they are loyal fans themselves. They want to share their experience with your brand, product, or organization with their fans and audiences in an authentic way that will resonate with their audiences.
Once you’ve found the right influencer, what are the best practices for launching your campaign? Here they are.
Eight Factors to Consider When Launching Your Next Influencer Campaign
- Choose an influencer that already engages with the target audience for your brand. Is that audience moms, millennials, or into health and wellness? Or, is the audience largely a specific multicultural segment?
- Research the influencer or blogger to find out if he or she is already a fan. Also ask, have they tweeted something positive about your brand or product already? Do they love to visit your store or restaurant? This organic connection makes for a great relationship. If you can develop a good partnership with an influencer, you open the door to future collaborations with influencers whose audience is already engaged and tuned with your brand from previous activations. This will help increase your brand’s visibility and likely improve reach and engagement likely your sales.
- Reach out and gauge interest. Open up communication channels by interacting with the blogger through social media or e-mail.
- Define your brand’s marketing goals and what deliverables will help your team achieve those goals. Then, share those goals with the influencer. Feedback from members of The Network Niche Community showed us that influencers love to know what success looks like for you. Moreover, it allows you to better execute the campaign and hopefully work with you again.
- Seek input from the influencer and ask them if your plan makes sense for their audience. Influencers are also interested in making sure their audience will respond to the execution of the plan. Furthermore, allow the blogger to handle the task in an authentic way rather than requiring them to include a sales-focused copy or scripted content. The right balance can be struck when you provide clear instructions and guidelines for each campaign.
- Expanding upon point #6, provide the influencers’ message points. If appropriate, consider suggesting keywords or phrases to include in blog posts.
- Measure the results by tracking impressions, click-throughs, and sales or leads generated by the influencer. Don’t just focus on reach, however. Engagement, such as likes, comments, and reactions, are an important factor when gauging the success of a campaign.
- Create a long-term working relationship with the influencer and their audience rather one-offs. Longer-term campaigns with the same influencer provide brands much better ROI. Therefore, a well-nurtured and fine-tuned relationship is very essential.
Implementing an influencer marketing campaign can be challenging, time-consuming, and can even be frustrating. With these tips, however, you are far more likely to find the process easier and more impactful as part of your overall marketing strategy.
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