As convenient and efficient as digital advertising is, there’s a lot of distrust towards it among audiences.
The truth of the matter is advertising on its own is often not enough to reach your audience and encourage them to take action. Building trust and establishing yourself as one of the top choices in your niche is vital to your business. There are 2 tactics to achieve this:
A great content marketing strategy
Collaboration with top influencers in your niche.
In this writeup, I’m going to shed some light on the second tactic and show you how to develop an effective influencer marketing strategy:
Step 1: Set your goals and metrics
The best place to begin is with your goals, just like any other marketing strategy. Figure out what exactly you want to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign.
The top objectives that you can achieve with an influencer marketing campaign are:
- Reach a brand new audience and improve brand awareness.
- Build brand awareness and secure the trust of your target audience.
- Generate more leads and sales for your business.
- Boost traffic to your website.
Take your time in considering your overall business goals. This way you can come up with an objective that will help support those goals and help you put together your actual campaign.
For example, if your goal is to establish trust and building reputation, then creating exclusive offer codes for the influencers you work with is not a good idea. You would try a different approach, such as building long-lasting relationships with top influencers and then allowing them to create the campaign themselves.
Although, giving exclusive offers helps you boost all through influencer marketing.
Your goals need to be:
- Specific – They need to be detailed.
- Measurable – Measuring the success of your goal is vital.
- Achievable – Ensuring that you can reach that goal
- Relevant – Having a proper understanding of how these goals will help your business in the long run.
- Time-bound –Setting a deadline for your goals.
As mentioned above, goals need to be measurable and you should ensure that you have the means to measure that goal.
In this case, narrowing down the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help you.
KPIs can be factors such as:
- Website traffic
- Social media engagement metrics
- Sales
- Cost per Click (CPC)
- Click-through Rate (CTR)
- Influencer audience loyalty
- Channel authority
Step 2: Track down the right influencers:
Once you point down your goals, you can move on to the next step – Identify the right social influencers to help you achieve those goals.
Social influencers come in various categories such as:
- Micro-influencers
- Celebrities
- Blogger
- Journalists
Among these, Micro-influencers and celebrities boast the biggest audience size.
But influencers have their own benefits and drawbacks. It’s never about how many followers they have or how famous the influencer is.
The most important thing here is to understand how engaged their audience is and how authentic the influencer’s influence is.
When choosing the right influencers, make sure to check the following two points:
The topics they cover on their channels:
Find out what they usually talk about on their digital channels and whether it’s relevant to your target audience. There are content research/influencer marketing tools that enable you to look up influencers and see the links they’ve shared in the past. This will give you a better idea of their audience’s interests as well.
The nature of their audience:
Find out who follows them and what demographic they belong to. I
The engagement of their audience:
Analyze the relationship between an influencer and the followers. An authentic influencer is one that has a very engaged audience – An audience who shares the content and leaves comments on a regular basis.
Step 3: Connect with the right influencers to build the right campaign
Once you find the right influencers, there are several ways to connect with them:
- Reach out directly via email. In fact, many influencer marketing tools offer powerful outreach features. Ask them if they’d be interested in collaborating with you.
- Follow them online and slowly build a relationship by connecting with them on every one of their digital channels
But once you connect with influencers, you will need to refer back to your objectives.
Consider the following generally desired objectives of such a collaboration:
- More brand awareness:
Have the influencers review your product on their channels, host contests & giveaways on the influencer’s page
- Increased sales:
Exclusive discount codes and special offers are a great way to promote social media. You can do such a promotion via an affiliate marketing program as well.
- Improve trust and enhance reputation:
Turn influencers into your brand ambassadors and send your products/service as gifts to the right people.
The wise thing to do here is to discuss your objectives with the chosen influencers because they know their audience the best. They can come up with the right type of campaigns that will make an impact and get the audience to take action.
Remember, you can let the influencers have creative freedom but don’t leave everything to them. You should give your input. Collaboration is the best way to craft successful influencer marketing campaigns.
But you can’t control everything they do, otherwise, the campaign won’t be authentic to their followers.
Step 4: Track and optimize your campaign:
Don’t think for once that once your campaign goes online, you can’t do anything. You will still be able to monitor it and optimize the campaign along the way.
From the moment it gets launched, you should keep a close eye on the campaign. Look out for what’s working and what isn’t.
You will have the chance to make adjustments and optimize it along the way optimize it for better results:
You should:
*Keep an eye out for mistakes, whether it’s posting the wrong content or grammatical mistakes. Track them and rectify them immediately.
*Identify those social posts that are resonating well with the audience and boost/invest in them to generate even more results.
*Change calls to action(CTAs) as quickly as possible if they don’t work.
Step 5: Measure your Return on investment (ROI):
I detailed the importance of your goals’ measurability before.
Measuring your goals can enable you to demonstrate ROI and understand what worked and what didn’t. You can use that knowledge to build better campaigns in the future.
Use the KPIs that you outlined when you established your goals and measure your campaign’s success with them.
You can take the help of influencer marketing tools because some of them offer influencer marketing campaign analytics.
They can tell you:
Where the clicks/traffic are coming from.
The type of traffic (Paid, organic,etc.)
The campaign that got the audience to click and what encouraged them to click.
I hope this writeup encourages you to try out influencer marketing for your future business endeavors.