In a time where traditional advertising generates more and more distrust mainly among younger generations. Influencer management is important for brands looking to humanize their messages. Communicating and establishing relationships with customers has become a difficult task so why not give this task to influencers? They generate conversations with their audience and the recommendations that they offer feel more authentic than regular advertising to their followers. Do you want to incorporate an influencer campaign in your marketing strategy? What steps should you follow to create your influencer campaign?
Influencer marketing campaign objectives
First of all, establish your objectives. You must have a clear start and endpoint so you don’t have to change your strategy mid campaign. The smaller the number of objectives and the more concrete they are, the more effective your strategy will be. Ideally, an influencer marketing campaign should focus on one or two objectives. Let’s review the most common objectives.
Visibility
Brands that choose visibility try to make a name for themselves on social networks and make an impact on users. These campaigns tend to involve a great number of influencers who are perfectly aligned with the brand or the service. The important metrics for campaigns like this are reach and engagement.
Branding
These campaigns aim to build a brand’s image or associate a certain concept or characteristic with a brand. In doing so, brands become easily recognizable and are associated with a series of attributes and values. When campaigns have branding objectives, they tend to collaborate with influencers with very niche profiles. In such cases, the size of the community is not as important as the influencer’s skills.
Positioning
Brands that wish to position themselves in the market tend to pursue notoriety and seek to be top of mind in their particular sector. They want to be the first company that pops into the consumer’s mind when they think of a certain need. After all, who wants to be just another brand? But how can brands achieve this? By providing consumers with information and explaining the great characteristics of their brand.
Traffic
Brands often seek to generate traffic to their websites in order to improve their visibility and positioning. This is achieved with campaigns launched on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram through competitions and giveaways. These strategies also generate traffic for brands’ social network profiles and increase their follower base using Instagram stories for example allows influencers to add direct links to brand profiles or websites.
These mentions may not necessarily lead to a purchase but the seed will have been planted in the consumer’s mind.
This traffic is measured by the number of clicks on the URL.
Conversion
Conversion is a direct result from increased traffic and is one of the most common campaign objectives.
A conversion might be a new sign up, an app install, some action on your sales funnel or the user action you define even a new customer.
Sales
An example of this is giving influencers a unique tracking link with a discount code to share with their followers. This way, the influencer gets paid to share that code and you increase sales with their followers.
Their followers can share the same code with their own audience.
Brand loyalty
Sometimes, too much time is dedicated to engaging new customers and brands end up neglecting the current ones. So, what can you do?
One option is using brand ambassadors. If you continue to work with a particular influencer, you will retain their followers through time. Another option is creating competitions and encouraging the community to share their experience with the brand and rewarding them for doing so.
In conclusion, never draw up an influencer strategy without previously determining the objectives so that all of your actions are aligned and you have the best chance of yielding favorable results.
If your goals are clear, all that’s left to figure out is how to achieve them. The next step is to define your target audience.
Define your target audience
A target audience consists of consumers that your product or service is designed for. It’s the group of people you are trying to reach with your marketing efforts. You should try to define those profiles very precisely. It’s not just the gender and age. We’re talking about information. Building your target audience consist of knowing their goals, lifestyles, jobs, daily routines, preferences when shopping, habits, desires, and interests, and of course, their age, gender, location, income, and education.
Define your budget
Another step you should define is your budget. How much are you willing to spend on this campaign? Do you want to invest all at once with one big campaign or do you want it to last long term?
Obviously, your budget will be determined by the influencers you choose. Do you want to hire a big name in social media with a great number of followers which will cost you a large amount of your investment or do you prefer to go for a smaller one that may have a smaller but more engaged and loyal audience. and also do you want to invest in ads with your campaign? Do you want the press to know about what you’re doing? You should ask yourself all of these questions to correctly define your budget before diving any deeper.
What you should do next is look for the influencers that fit your brand and your goals. Get in contact with them and discuss the fee and the content they will post. You should talk about the amount of content they will have to create whether it’s a post, a story, a tweet, or something even bigger like a photo shoot or an ad campaign.
Also, define the amount of content you need them to post and how frequently they need to do so
and of course, create a legal contract with everything you agree upon. This way, if anything gets done differently or any problem occurs, you will have the security of proving what you both agreed to do.
Remember to let them be creative and add their personal touch to the promotion because in the end, they’re the ones that know their audience best and know what works for them and what doesn’t.
They should also define the limits of what they feel comfortable with. So, don’t try to make them do everything you want just because you’re paying them. They have a vision and a style that they work with. So, don’t try to change that. Instead, try to adjust to their style and trust their approach.
The next step is to finally launch your campaign. Of course, there are a lot of metrics that you will have to look into to know how your strategy is going.
Choosing the right influencer
Choosing the right influencer has a huge impact on a campaign’s results and many brands make the mistake of only looking at the number of followers an influencer has instead of considering other important data.
This leads to a much higher possibility that the campaign isn’t going to achieve the desired results. As you may know, a successful campaign is a combination of making the right decisions which includes choosing the right influencers to be advocates of your brand.
So, how can you choose the right influencer? First of all, looking at the data, we all know that data doesn’t lie. So, what data is truly important? Let’s take a look.
The number of followers
Even though it isn’t the most important variable in influencer marketing, it is of course data that needs to be taken into consideration.
When making an investment, it’s important to know the audience you could potentially reach and as you can probably imagine, the bigger, the better.
However, this data alone won’t provide you with much insight or at least it won’t in most cases. It may help you discard certain candidates but influencers with a higher number of followers are not always the best choice.
Sometimes a campaign with micro influencers can yield much better results. Now is when the audience engagement rate becomes important.
The audience engagement rate
The audience engagement rate is the average number of interactions the social media post receives per follower. Knowing this, what good is an influencer with a big following but a low engagement rate.
That’s why you should also take into consideration micro influencers who can convince their audience to get involved, share their opinions and content and talk about the product.
Their type of content
Another important element you should study is the type of content they share. Evaluate the kind of content this influencer is sharing and then determine whether or not it fits in with your brand or product.
Content quality and core values
Content quality and core values are two very important aspects and lastly, before diving into the influencer search, you should have a well-defined target audience in order to know what your audience’s preferred social network is and what demographic and age groups they belong to. As these two concepts will be key in choosing the right influencer.
Influencer acquiring strategies
Now that you know which aspects you should look for in your next influencer you might be wondering how and where you can find them. Let’s dive into some influencer acquiring strategies.
Hashtags
Through hashtags as they reveal current trends and viral content. It’s very easy to do. You just need to search trending hashtags that are related to your brand and see which influencers are using them. Then check out their number of followers, their engagement rate, and if the content is aligned to yours. See? Easy.
Brand mentions
there are some listening tools that alert you when someone is talking about your brand. This way, you can find influencers that are already talking about your brand and see if they can fit your purposes. Also, the Google software Google Search Alerts can be very useful as it allows you to set alerts for specific keywords so that you can easily find people talking about your brand or industry.
Influencer marketing platform
Nowadays, there are a bunch of software specialized in Influencer Marketing. Not only do they allow you to find influencers but they allow you to have total control over your campaigns, analyze them, and even predict results before launching the campaigns.
Let’s see how you can find the right influencer by using an influencer marketing software like influencify. The first thing you’ll have to do is log in to the platform and click on the option Search Influencer. A list of influencers will appear. You can even add more parameters by clicking on the filters button.
For example, let’s say we want an influencer with 10K to 30K followers that uses the# travel addict. As you can see, we obtain very segmented results and have access to their number of followers, their average interactions, and their engagement rate.
You can visit their profile too and by clicking the add to button, you can add the most interesting ones to your influencers list.
Then, all you have to do is contact them and see if you can arrange an agreement with them.
