These past few years, influencer marketing has been a hot topic in the marketing world. This method has been one of the extraordinary powerful methods for marketers, why? Most of the consumers are more likely to trust recommendations from their co-users and third parties rather than the brand itself.
The idea of Influencer Marketing is to create a resemblance to the brand, but on the other hand, the influencer should be known and able to attract to reach the audience.
Today, specifically in the social media world, people are entitled to trail their fervor to generate and attach with others so they could attract and build an audience.
From that, it will allow the people to create their own influence and also to influence others, because the truth is, everyone could be influential with regards to something. If you are not yet considered with the good benefits you can gain with Influencer Marketing, you might get interested after you read this:
As you can see, 50% of purchase decisions were influenced by Word-of-mouth, 69% of marketers who have used Influencer Marketing considered the method as an effective marketing channel, 93% of marketers found influencer marketing as an effective channel for brand awareness, and 25% of search results for the 20 largest brands are linked to user-generated content published on social media.
This chart proves the importance of developing a strong influencer marketing for your brand. You can create or build a system of influencers using social media, those who are able to provide a positive and authentic word of mouth that will stand out from your competitors. Confused where to begin? Here are some helpful tips for you!
Step 1: Get Started By Identifying Goals and Desired Results
Determine how you measure the overall success of your program. Define the goals of your program, if you are looking for SEO Benefits, Promoting a new product, wanted to promote your content, promoting a certain event? What do you want to achieve of working with influencers? It’s a relationship and it matters trust, and it’s going to be long term.
List them all down then put at least 2-3 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for each of them. If you are building a campaign, it’s essential to have something that flows along with it, you plant it, you take care of it, and you’ll see how it nurtures. Things you aim and needed should be outlined as it is needed when moving on to the next steps.
Step2: The Right Social Media Channels
Choosing the right social media channel is one of the essential things to run your campaign smooth and successful, of course, the social media platform you are about to choose for your influencer campaign will depend on your goals.
It’s not just about the users and audience inside that social media platform, but the social media channel you will pick will be the point of departure for determining the ROI (Return On Investment) you will and can expect. Still confused which one to choose? Here are some tips:
Interesting videos are better on Facebook, YouTube, and other more platforms while beautiful photos belong to Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and other more platforms more on photos or images. On the other hand, it’s not only the right social media channel for your campaign but also, you may want to identify which are the best methods for that particular platform as each social media platform provides their own advantages and disadvantages.
It is also important that you perform an extensive research on which platform your customers and potential customers spend the most amount of their time. If you are building a campaign, it might be ideal to employ a collaboration of multiple platforms to increase the level of your exposure and test the platforms to find what helps you reach out to your target audience efficiently, afterward, try to optimize the message you are implying until you receive the sweet return!
Get Your Brand The Right Influencers For Your Campaign
Of course, you will want to find which ones the right influencer for the product or service you are going to promote. You may have an instinctive sense of who are those influential people in your industry, it’s always better when we have a guide on how to find influencers.
When identifying for influencers for your campaign, here are some criteria for you to evaluate the individual, and to help you choose which one is the right influencer for your campaign:
The Influencers’ Audience Reach and Size: It’s one of those important (Not the most) factor to consider from an influencer. Now the reason why I said it’s “not the most important” is it is not really important! Some cases proved that it’s more peaceful and connected when you are going to work with a blogger that has a middle-sized audience ranging from 10,000 than those bloggers who have more than 5 million, why? It is because those middle-sized bloggers have the more engaged audience than those bloggers that has more than 5 million, and another note is that, you will be able to communicate more and make a more authentic relationship with them.
Audience Demographics: More benefits you’ll be able to get if you choose the influencer who has an audience that closely aligns with your target market. Most of the influencers has data about who and where are their target audience. Influencer Marketing platforms like SocialBook provides a detailed in-depth audience demographics stats of 3 million influencers in database.
Relevance: This is connected to the previous criteria, you should make sure that the product you are going to promote is relevant to the influencers’ followers, to make your campaign much more effective.
Consistency: A good relationship will develop when you and your influencer has the same taste, but not the same all the time. Just a similar idea, and agrees with you with the ways you wanted to present your brand and product to your target market.
This will make it easier for you to collaborate well with the influencer.
These are some tips for you on identifying the ideal influencer for your campaign. On finding the right influencer for your campaign, you may want to monitor your brand on social media to find the right advocates that fit your criteria. One good hint is to list and see who are those influencers that are already talking about your brand and products.
Reach out to these individuals for you to discuss a deeper partnership. Another tip that will help you is to identify those hashtags that the influencers you look out are using, in this way, you can easily find other more influencers who posts and talks about your brand, your products or your industry.
There are tons of extraordinary tools which can help you find other more untouched influencers you can possibly partner with. SocialBook is one of those great tools out there for identifying your potential influencers, just search for a keyword or a topic then you can use the search result to identify who are those influencers that can amplify your business marketing.
Engage With Influencers
After Identifying your key influencers, the next step is to start building an authentic relationship with them. People show up in an influencer searching tool because they are creating content, it’s either tweets, photos, vlogs or blog posts.
Those content serves as signals and helps you on how to approach them. In this step, you should start it gradually, start engaging with them and their contents through social media like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook and from there, you can reach them by direct outreach campaigns, asking them to create content for your brand or asking influencers to review your products.
It is better to reach out directly than outsourcing your influencer outreach, as an extra factor, you wanted to look more authentic to the influencers you are going to reach so you are going to avoid sending out generic emails as they will look spammy and can discourage those potential influencers from collaborating with you.
It’s agreeable to start sending with an email template but make sure to personalize it to the influencer, always include the reasons why you wanted to work with them and why you think they would be a great help for your campaign.
If you are invisible and still starting from scratch, it might be a challenge on finding influencers, there are some ways to improve your visibility online. If you have already built up your reputation such as advertising, creating content, a lot of chances that you’ll get a yes from them. A piece of advice, identify what does the influencer don’t have and find a way to provide it to them. Surely, you’ll make a great teamwork.
Alluring And Beneficial
Of course, we won’t deny the fact that influencers would ask, “What is in it for me?”, “What would I get in return?” It is important to inform the influencer about the benefits they could get in return about the relationship you are about to build.
Those influencers who are high demand deserves to be paid, of course. They got a lot of skills that they could put down to the table and have implied their ability to affect, improve or make the whole campaign run successfully. Also, it’s not just the value of the influencer, it’s about their audience as well, both of you could benefit with this relationship. If both of you would work out on this together, this will build a long lasting authentic relationship between you, the influencer, and the audience.
Tips?
Affiliate Program: That’s one way of making the relationship more alluring. Affiliate program gives the influencer a prospect to generate more profits by promoting your product or service (It’s a common and effective method by the way). Accompanying it with a captivating offer, it will make the influencer work out hard to develop new and absorbing ways to promote your products and services.
Discount Codes: It’s a bit similar to an affiliate program but this one provides benefits to the influencer’s audience. But since, discount codes will penetrate the social media, tracking its true effects can get a bit challenging, but still, that’s one effective influencer method.
Truth is, money, profits, revenue, earnings, whatever you call this benefit, it is not the only reward that influencers will solicit. But also:
- Create high-quality content for their audience
- Improving their image
- Perks
- Events, Trips, etc.; and of course
- Increasing their reach and grow their audience
If you are a company that looks at influencer marketing as advertising, there are a lot of influencer marketplaces out there that could help you find the right fit for your company. But even if you don’t use a marketplace and you are working with an established influencer, it is important to pay for their time and effort. If you don’t have much money, you can tell the influencer that you don’t have a huge budget, but you wanted to pay them something or a not so big amount of money as a thank you for exerting time and effort to your campaign and business.
Analyzing Your Campaign
When you are going to set an influencer marketing campaign, you want to be steadfast in monitoring your results to identify which areas of your campaigns are successful and which are not and needs improvements.
In this case, flashback or get back to the goals and KPIs you have already expound from the beginning of this process. Analyze if you have made any progress and which areas of your campaign needs improvement. Boom! At that point, you are going to see which is lacking.
Hop into your Analytics and look at your traffics to see if you notice any audience increase from those influencer posts you have run through social media platforms. There’s a lot of platforms out there like SocialBook to measure the progress and effectiveness of your campaigns.
Truth be told, Influencer Marketing is a hot trend right now, especially in business and marketing. Nevertheless, you need to act and perform your research to guarantee your effort aligns with your marketing strategies. Try and track your results and improve which areas need improvement.
Consult with the Marketing Experts
If you still have a lot more questions regarding Influencer Marketing, why not consult with the experts? There’s a lot of consulting agencies online that you could run into, but beware of the fraudulent because they are anywhere. You could also message us or leave a comment including your questions below and we will definitely get back to you to answer your questions, giving some tips and advise.
Social Media is getting bigger, so does Influencer Marketing, it can be challenging to keep up the pop-platforms in this dynamic scenery, same with the effective methods for gaining attention and building a good relationship with your audience online.
With the in-depth and accurate channel analytics of each influencer, SocialBook provides all the necessary knowledge to find the right influencers to work with, and avoid wasting budget on the wrong influencers.