Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to reach a wider audience and increase both brand recognition and awareness on social media. Working with the right influencers can also drive sales, especially after the launch of new products and services. However, for all this to be possible, businesses have to learn to work with influencers. While there is no single approach to making such an arrangement work, there are a few things businesses can do to make influencer marketing work best for them.
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Determine Your Marketing Goals
Before you go ahead with influencer marketing, you need to determine your goals, i.e., what you want to achieve with this arrangement. For most businesses, the goal is to reach new, potential, and target customers. After all, an influencer campaign exposes you, your brand, and its products and services to the right influencer’s audience.
The second goal is increasing brand awareness and ensuring people start considering your products and services as an alternative to the ones they are already using. The third most common goal is to increase sales, but that does not typically happen unless you have achieved the other two goals.
Influencer marketing should fit in with your larger digital and social media marketing strategy, where you also have to create goals you can report, analyze and track.
Know Your Target Audience (the People You are Trying to Influence)
Targeted marketing will always produce better results and return on investments than trying to talk to everybody at the same time. Exceptions that allow businesses to put this thinking aside are if they are testing new strategies, refining their niche and messaging, or trying to gauge interest.
For your influencer marketing strategy to be effective, you need to reach and speak to the right people, using the right tools, where they are, and using the right influencer. An important step here is defining who your audience will be for specific campaigns.
Audience personas can help greatly with this, and you should already have some prepared if you have been doing some marketing. You could also create new personas if you are trying to reach an entirely new type of customer or experimenting with different influencer marketing strategies.
Once you have the personas you would like to reach, create matching influencer personas. Doing so will help you understand the right types of influencers for your campaign.
Understand Influencer Marketing Disclosures
The Federal State Commission in the United States and the Competitions and Markets Authority in the UK have in the past pressed social media platforms to ensure all disclosures are clear and easy to find and understand.
While influencers have to disclose their relationships with the businesses they work with, many influencers do not do this while some do it in a way that makes the disclosure ineffective. To ensure the influencers you are working with do things right, you should include disclosure terms in your contracts.
While the rules will be different in different countries, following the guidelines provided by the bodies above will do. These include ensuring influencers:
- Add verbal and written disclosures to their videos. These disclosures should appear inside the video and not the video description.
- Use the Branded Content tag on Instagram to mark content as sponsored.
- Use #sponsored and #ad on their posts. They have to ensure these hashtags are visible and not just added at the end of a long list of other hashtags.
Understand the Elements of Good Influencing
The three elements of successful influencing are resonance, relevance, and reach. Relevance is how closely related the influencer and target audience is to your products, services, and business. A relevant influencer will share relevant content that does not look out of place on their feed.
Reach is the number of people you could reach on the influencer’s base of followers. This does not necessarily mean disqualifying influencers with smaller followings, but the followings have to be sizable enough to make a difference in your campaign. There should also be a following large enough to align with your core messaging and goals.
Resonance is the level of engagement the influencer can muster. Bigger influencer follower counts are not always better if their engagement levels are very low. This might mean their audience is not interested in and engaging with what they have to say. It could also mean that the influencer does not have a genuine following, with their follower numbers made up of bots and bought accounts.
Niche influencers with smaller followings might provide a high level of engagement because of their engaged and dedicated followers.
Find Your Influencers
At this point, you should have built a solid foundation that will allow you to find the right influencer. For businesses looking for several influencers, it is much more effective to engage an agency to find the right influencers for you. If you choose to work with an influencer agency Los Angeles, for example, they will pick the best influence for your industry who align with the criteria you have set forth.
Working with an influencer agency can save you a lot of time and make it much easier to find ones who fit best with what you are looking for.
If you are just looking for a single influencer, you could opt to do all the research the agency has already done by yourself. This includes going through the various accounts of influencers you would like to engage with, checking out their engagement numbers and other metrics, making a shortlist, and finally approaching different influencers.
Work with the Influencer to Create Effective Content
The content you create should align with your goals and the influencer’s personal brand. No influencer wants inconsistencies in their messaging and types of posts as that could lead to issues with their audience.
Influencers are content creators, and they are very effective at it. This is why they have the large followers they do. Although you are free to provide input, feedback, and suggestions, it would be best to let them work how they work best, only coming in if something is grossly wrong with the messaging and content.
These influencers know and understand their audiences best and leaving them to do what they do however they do it will yield the best results. Avoid state-managing every part of the creation process because you might get the result you want, but an ineffective campaign by not letting the influencer do what resonates best with their audience.
Measuring Results
Once the campaign is online, you might be astonished by the number of comments, views, and likes the content might garner. Although these metrics are useful in some ways, you should not focus on them. The most important numbers are the return on investment and how well the campaign is helping you achieve the goals you set out in the first place.
A common way to measure the number of visitors an influencer sends you is using UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters. These parameters can also be useful for measuring the level of engagement on a specific campaign.
Businesses and marketers assign influencers different links with a UTM code embedded within them. These codes allow you to see the results you are getting and are therefore a great way of measuring your ROI.Businesses can also give influencers unique discount codes that help them track sales coming from different influencers.Lastly, you could request that the influencer sends you regular reports on each piece of content or post they have done for you.
Influencer marketing can be very effective for businesses that know how to pick the right influencers and work with them effectively. Businesses can engage influencers directly or go through agencies that will find the right influencers for their business, products and services, or type of campaign.
