Now that you understand your brand and goals for the company, we can start thinking strategically about marketing!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’d know that influencer marketing is the hot new thing!
If you Google “How to Run a Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign”, you’ll see over 13 million search results pop up!! While all of these guides are incredibly useful, I’m hoping to bring more insight to you, as an influencer and content creator myself.
Before I get into the nitty gritty, there are two types of influencers that have been typically agreed on;
1) the celebrity influencer (say Kim Kardasian, Chrissy Teigen, Rihanna) and,
2) the micro-influencer (@ spiritedpursuit, @lissyroddyy, @alyssainthecity).
These groups of influencers typically have above 50m and between 100k – 1m followers, respectively!!
I will focus on the micro-influencers in this article, since I believe they are not only more interesting but most effective in terms of ROI, since they are more like “normal people”.
Also, this guide will be geared towards the perspective of helping the brand, and not the influencer (maybe the latter will come later!)
For me, there are 6 crucial steps to take:
1) What are your goals?
a. Do you want to increase sales for a product? (for example, I have worked with brands who only want to drive an increase in sales of the new products coming out. Therefore, the influencers can only choose from a certain selection of items and they need to be posted at a certain time, etc.)
b. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Followers? Engagement?
Carefully specifying your goals is the most important step, as it dictates the following decisions.
2) Who is your audience?
a. Consider who your target is for your campaign(s). Note, they might be a more niche audience in comparison to your main target audience, depending on your goals of the influencer campaign.
3) What platforms would be most effective?
a. What platforms is your target audience using? And are they using the same platforms as the key influencers?
b. Typically, influencers will use YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, blogs. Which platform will bring the most value to you? Is it important to have lengthier videos that showcase your brand, i.e. in a YouTube video? Do still photos of shorter video posts work best? Instagram is your best bet.
c. The platforms that you choose will also dictate the influencers that you choose to approach!
4) Which influencers would best suit your campaign? And, how many influencers will you need?
a. When choosing your influencers, the platforms that they use most often or are most popular on, aren’t the only metrics.
b. It is crucial, to determine whether the influencers are in line with the message that your brand is trying to send.
c. Not only this, but what you don’t often hear people talking about when considering the success of the influencers is the authenticity of the influencers.
- If you truly want their followers to buy your products based on their testimonials, you ought to make sure that the influencer is known for giving genuine opinions about the products that they are advertising. If not, their followers will be more inclined to think that they are only advertising the product to get paid and not in the interest of bringing valuable information to them.
d. Where do you find these influencers you might ask?
- Hashtags
- Location tags
- Google search
- Influencer marketplaces
- Brands that are similar to yours. Which influencers are they using?
5) Approach
a. After you’ve chosen your pool of influencers, you need to approach them!
From my experience, if brands offer the following, the influencer is best incentivised:
- Creative freedom
It’s often best to let the micro-influencers decide what they want to post as they know their niche and followers best. But as you know your brand and campaign goals better than them, you also need to let them know your guidelines. It’s a collaboration, after all!
- Compensation
- Alignment with their mission
b. It’s also good in consider a few things:
- Its best to have content that isn’t overtly an ad
- Is there anything that they must include in the content? Is there anything they should avoid mentioning?
- Be clear in required deliverables
# of posts, dates.
Be clear on product details that they should choose from!
The amount of times that I’ve had issues with poor communication on this is ridiculous! It wastes so much time on both sides of the table!!
6) Track
a. After campaign, how successful was it?
- Here, you would use the metrics outlined in the first point to measure this!
- Request that the influencer send you interesting insights from their analytics. This way, you have a more comprehensive view on the impact on the campaign.
