Influencer marketing has taken the world of digital marketing by storm, and without a successful influencer marketing strategy, you’ll surely find your advertising efforts missing the mark.
If influencer marketing is new to your business, you may wonder where to start and what creates a successful influencer strategy. We’ll cover that in this post and unpack the process step-by-step.
Our influencer marketing specialists are constantly working on campaign improvements and researching trends to keep up with the latest happenings in influencer marketing.
In this article we’ll cover useful topics like:
How to choose an influencer that fits your brand.
What is an influencer marketing strategy?
How to set your campaign goals, budget, and metrics?
Let’s dive in and find out more.
Types of social media influencers
There are 4 types of social media influencers. It’s crucial to your influencer campaign’s success that you understand this, that the kind of influencer you choose meets your brand goals, and that your influencer’s audience aligns with your target customers’ demographic.
Let’s start with the 4 influencer categories, what they are, and what each means.
Mega Influencers: This category has 1 million or more followers and is often famous for actors, models, or other celebrities.
Macro Influencers: This category includes those with between 100 thousand and 1 million followers. These influencers are the thought leaders in their chosen niche.
Micro-Influencers: This category has between 10 thousand and 100 thousand followers; these are usually up-and-coming influencers with a niche engaged audience.
Nano Influencers: This category has fewer than 10 thousand followers; they’re an outstanding category to work with as they have a dedicated and passionate audience.
How do you know which category is right for your influencer campaigns?
Mega influencers are a surefire way to gain massive exposure for your brand. However, they are expensive to work with. As a result of their broad audience reach, they are best suited to large-scale brand awareness. They are most suited to working with large businesses on a global scale.
Macro influencers have a smaller following and tend to have a niche audience with a specific following who share their interests. This makes them well-suited to working with startups and niche industries looking for scalable brand awareness.
Micro-influencers have gained a more tailored following on specific social media platforms. They are the up-and-coming stars of platforms such as Tik Tok and Instagram. As a result of their particular highly engaged audience, they tend to work for high-engagement campaigns.
On average, a micro-influencer will get a 60% higher engagement rate than some macro influencers. They are, of course, also more affordable to work with.
Nano-influencers have particular followers and are best to work with if you want to target a niche audience with a specific interest. They also work well to speak to certain demographics.
They can also spend more time on your brand and work closely with your business to push your influencer marketing campaign message.
Choose an influencer that fits with your brand
You must choose an influencer that fits your brand to ensure your influencer marketing campaigns are successful.
By defining your target audience, you’ll better understand how to choose the correct influencer to achieve your marketing goals.
It’s best to choose an influencer that speaks to your audience and that will create original authentic content that resonates with them.
Who you choose will depend on what you are trying to achieve with your influencer campaigns. Choosing wisely is crucial; you can risk wasting your social media marketing budget if you don’t.
Make sure their followers match your target audience
As mentioned above, it’s essential to make sure that the followers of the influencer that you choose match your target audience. This will ensure the audience will resonate with your product and brand message.
This is the most important part of planning your successful influencer marketing campaign.
The state of the influencer marketing industry
The influencer marketing industry has changed dramatically since 2013 when Instagram was launched, and it was relatively easy to stand out on the platform.
Since then, influencers have actively created careers out of doing just that, influencing audiences.
If you look at the market trends, you’ll note that more than 49% of consumers attest that they rely on the recommendations of influencers to assist them in making choices.
With this marketing strategy growing yearly, it’s no surprise that almost 71% of businesses plan on upping their influencer marketing budgets.
What is an influencer marketing strategy?
An influencer marketing strategy is designed to utilise digital influencers to leverage their followers and target audiences to market your products and brand to.
Using an effective influencer marketing strategy will build trust with your audience, which will now also become your target market.
Using an influencer creates valuable content that resonates with real people. This will grow audience buy-in and boost your brand awareness.
Check out past campaigns and collaborations
Another essential tip to remember when using an influencer is to check out their past campaigns and collaborations.
It’s important to choose an influencer based on their followers and engagement, and the work they have previously done for other brands.
This will give you an idea of the content you can expect from them and how they will handle your brand and campaign ideas.
Create long-term relationships with influencers you work with
Creating long-term relationships with the influencers your work with is a great way to build a foundation of brand trust with your audience.
Most marketers view an influencer marketing campaign as a standalone project that they run once off. This does not have to be the case.
Once you have established a relationship with an influencer and you can see that your target market engages with them and that their efforts have caused an upward trend in your metrics, it’s a great idea to build a long-term relationship and run campaigns for a few months as opposed to a few weeks to allow for the establishment of trust.
Work with dedicated measurement tools
It’s crucial to the success of your campaign that you use and works with dedicated measurement tools. This will allow you to track your campaign success continuously and compare the results to your KPI goals.
If one of your influencers is not performing well, the metrics that come through on tools like google analytics will show you this early enough to make changes or suspend the campaign to salvage your budget.
Include influencers in your other marketing activities
It’s pertinent to include influencers in your other marketing activities. If your audience resonates with them and they are open to working with you on other brand efforts, it’s a great way to build trust with your broader audience.
This does need to be worth it, though and should be done for more than just the sake of using an influencer. If attaching them to other aspects of your brand does not fit your strategy, don’t do it.
Create authentic influencer content
Creating authentic influencer content is the key to getting audiences to buy into your messaging and resonate with the sponsored content.
People like to watch people and see other humans doing things they are interested in, and this is a critical rule to follow when planning your marketing and influencer content creation.
How much does social influencer marketing cost?
Social influencer marketing can be expensive or affordable; this all depends on your campaign goals and the influencer type you choose to work with.
For more niche messaging, you would most likely work with nano and micro-influencers with a smaller, more passionate audience that focuses on a particular interest. This tends to be more cost effective and can gain excellent reach and impact if used correctly.
Mega-influencers are normally celebrities and are typically favoured by large global corporates and luxury brands looking to create widespread brand awareness coupled with a large marketing budget.
Set out your goals from the start
Setting out your goals from the start of your campaign is a key factor to the success of an influencer marketing campaign.
Define your marketing goals and budget
To ensure a successful campaign, you must clearly define your digital marketing strategy, goals, and budget. This allows you to confirm that your campaigns align with your budget and key performance indicators. This allows your campaign to remain consistent.
It would be best if you decide on campaign goals during your campaign planning; here are some examples of goals you can include:
Establish brand awareness.
Grow your brand’s social media presence and follower count.
Create a lead magnet.
Grow your sales.
Increase your SEO score with backlink tactics.
Your budget will depend on what your campaign objectives are, as well as what you can afford to spend. It’ll also depend on which kind of influencer program you choose to use.
Nano-influencers can charge anything from R500 per post up to R5000. Micro-influencers can charge between R5000 to R10 000 per post. Macro-influencers with 100 000 or more followers can charge R18 000 per post. Mega-influencers charge from $10 000 a post, which is roughly R180 000.
Clearly mark sponsored influencer marketing content
It’s crucial to mark your sponsored influencer marketing content with clear tracking links. This will allow you to track your campaign results and measure the success and effectiveness of your influencer marketing plan and efforts.
It also allows you to have proper discussions with your influencers around the success of their efforts and approach, allowing for tweaks to future campaigns to improve their effectiveness.
The 3 R’s of Influence
It’s essential to understand the 3 R’s of influence. These are reach, relevance, and resonance.
Relevance speaks to the significance of the content and influencer shares and if it’s relevant to your industry and will be relevant to your target audience.
Reach is based on the number of potential people you could reach through your influencer’s efforts. This will be largely based on the social media followers of the influencer you work with following.
Thoroughly research your influencer
You need to make sure that you thoroughly research your influencer to make sure that you understand exactly what their interests are, what their audience looks like, and how they will be relevant to your brand. It’s also good to pay attention to the type of content they create and whether it will resonate with your audience.
It’s also best to focus on which platform you’ll be using. If you are starting out with influencer marketing, it’ll be best to stick to one platform, which is usually the platform that your brand is already established on, or one that you want to expand onto.
Remember that fashion and beauty brands do well on YouTube and Instagram, while gaming works well on Twitch.
Consider enlisting the help of an agency
It’s sometimes best to enlist the help of a professional agency that specialises in influencer marketing. This makes achieving your goals much easier and ensures that your influencer campaigns run smoothly and according to budget.
Dig deep into the available analytics
It’s always best to dig deep into the available analytics and research the previous campaign stats that an influencer has achieved. This will ensure that an influencer has an engaged audience and that they achieve a consistent click-through ratio.
Communicate these goals
When interacting with your chosen influencer, you must clearly communicate your campaign goals from the outset so that all parties understand the expectations for a campaign and what the aim and critical performance indicators are.
Qualify influencers and start the outreach process
Once you have settled on a few options, you need to qualify the right influencers and start the outreach process.
To qualify your influencers, please remember that your audience will need to build trust with the influencer you decide to work with.
How do you measure trust?
This is based on lots of authentic content that gets plenty of engagement. This will be shown by many likes, shares, comments, and views. You also want to ensure that these metrics are coming from a segment of the audience you would target with your campaign.
When you start to qualify your potential influencers, it’s best to reach out personally, follow up, and keep following up. It can take a minimum of 6 attempts to reach someone before you receive a response.
Keep these points in mind when qualifying your influencers.
Is the content that an influencer posts relevant to your brand and industry?
Is the engagement ratio credible?
Has your choice of influencer worked with similar products and brands previously?
Does the influencer’s style and personality fit your brand’s style and goals?
Set a budget and management strategy
The next step is to set a budget and a management strategy.
Creating a clear management strategy in dealing with influencers and the campaign results you achieve when collaborating with them is critical to the success of your efforts.
Create a budget and ensure that it aligns realistically with the goals you wish to achieve from your campaign.
You can then monitor your campaign spending against your budget to track your finances and to get an estimate of your return on investment when comparing this to sales generated from the results you achieve.
Restricting the influencer’s creative freedom
It’s not a good idea to restrict the influencer’s creative freedom. You should have clear guidelines, but providing too much information and scripting leads to content that feels stiff, scripted, and inauthentic.
Allow the influencer their freedom to create genuine and engaging content that meets your campaign guidelines.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is a powerful medium to grow brand awareness, establish audience engagement, and increase leads and sales.
You need to remember that your campaigns need to be well thought out. Measurements and campaign adjustments are crucial as is building long-term relationships with your chosen social influencers too.
