Influencer marketing can be one of the most successful tools available to small businesses, provided they follow all necessary steps for making it a success.
Consumers tend to trust influencer content more than celebrities or large brands, making influencer marketing the ideal strategy to reach an engaged audience for your product or service.
1. Find the Right Influencers
Picking the appropriate influencers is key to the success of any campaign. Finding an influencer who complements both your brand narrative and combines popularity with authenticity should be your priority when selecting influencers for collaboration.
Locate influencers that meet your criteria either manually or using an automated tool like Storyclash. Take into consideration demographic factors like age, location and language used in their posts as well as engagement rates to see how active their audience is.
Assessing an influencer’s career, causes they support, and overall outlook will enable you to identify an authentic match for your brand and make its influencer campaigns appear genuine and trustworthy to consumers.
2. Set Your Goals
Setting clear goals with influencers beforehand is essential in making sure the campaign meets with your business’s marketing objectives.
Influencers can help increase brand recognition by creating and disseminating engaging content that resonates with your target audience. You could also use influencers to advance physical goals like driving traffic to your website or store.
As you set your goals, be sure to think through how you will evaluate success. For instance, track how many views, clicks and conversions your influencer campaigns achieve.
Be mindful when reaching out to influencers: stay professional when reaching out. Avoid commenting on their posts or sending private messages that could come across as spammy and impersonal.
3. Create a Campaign
In order to drive results from an influencer campaign, it’s critical that its milestones be clearly set out and that you create an extensive brief that provides influencers with all of the information needed to represent your brand effectively.
Be sure to provide clear deliverables, such as how many posts, stories or videos are expected and by when. Also include details regarding payment structures and terms to set expectations appropriately.
Allowing influencers some creative freedom when producing an authentic campaign will ensure they create content that resonates with their audiences, but still providing a style guide and other resources which enable them to accurately represent your brand such as editorial style tips, key statistics, or talking points from press releases is necessary for an accurate representation.
4. Reach Out to Influencers
Influencers receive many messages from people looking to work with them, so it’s essential that when reaching out, your contact doesn’t feel intrusive or spammy. Sending personalized emails, asking advice from them directly or engaging with their content are great ways to form bonds between two individuals and foster mutually beneficial relationships.
Prior to approaching influencers, it’s vitally important to conduct some thorough research into them. Verify their audience fits perfectly with your business needs and that their content relates to it. Furthermore, look beyond follower count alone and assess the authenticity of their following and how frequently its members engage with them.
5. Track Your Results
Influencer marketing may present some unique considerations, but its core principles remain consistent with any other form of promotion: find suitable influencers, develop your campaign and set your goals.
Keep the goals for your campaign clear to influencers; whether that means increasing followers or driving traffic to an eCommerce website in order to generate sales. Doing this will keep their efforts on track with the desired goal in mind and will give them something tangible to work towards.
Sharing an editorial style guide, talking points or press releases with your influencers is an effective way of helping them write effective copy and plan their content more efficiently. UTM tagging and using branded hashtags to track performance of campaigns as well as share results with influencers is another effective method for tracking their performance and measuring its success; remembering to focus on engagement metrics alongside conversions and revenue when assessing its success is also crucial when analyzing influencer marketing success.