How To Build an Efficient Influencer Marketing Strategy
Want to improve the reach of your brand? Consider creating your own influencer marketing strategy with these steps.
Influencer marketing is when a brand promotes products or services by partnering with a social media personality with a dedicated following. This style of marketing has proven itself effective, and is expected to have grown to $16.4 billion through 2022, with more than 75% of marketers having a dedicated influencer marketing budget.
Influencer marketing has an extremely high return on investment (ROI), boosts audience engagement, and offers deeper storytelling opportunities. It’s a highly successful avenue, with over 76% of consumers reporting to have bought a product because someone recommended it to them.
Customers trust user-generated content more than branded content, making influencer marketing an excellent way to increase faith and loyalty among your target customers. What’s more, it can help you reach new audiences, influence purchasing decisions, and drive sales.
This step-by-step guide will help you build an effective influencer marketing strategy whether you’re a startup or well-established organization.
To build an efficient influencer marketing strategy, start with these steps:
- Outline your goals
- Research your target audience
- Understand costs and set a budget
- Make a list of desired influencers
- Reach out to influencers
- Plan the campaign
- Execute the campaign
- Measure your results
1. Outline your goals
Before you start reaching out to social media influencers, you need to define your goals. What are you hoping to achieve through this partnership?
The goals you set for yourself could include some of the following:
- Boosting brand awareness
- Building your brand identity
- Increasing your followers on social media platforms
- Reaching out to a new demographic or territory
- Getting more leads
- Creating a high-quality content bank
- Amplifying your brand’s voice through high-reach individuals
Keep your goals as specific as possible. If your goal is to increase sales, for example, you can define it as “get 1,000 new leads through Instagram influencer collaborations between January and May 2023, with a minimum 20% conversion rate.”
Once you determine your goals, you should identify your key performance indicators (KPIs). These metrics will help you track your campaign’s performance and analyze the results. KPIs will vary according to your goals. For example, if your aim is to increase brand awareness, record website visits or social media followers.
2. Research your target audience
Your target audience depends on your industry. Retailers want to generate more sales, a national not-for-profit organization might want to boost a charity campaign, and a local school may want more parent volunteers.In all of these situations and more, an early step in developing an influencer marketing campaign is to pinpoint your target demographics.
Try to be as detailed as possible when defining your target audience. Suppose you own a shoe brand and want to promote a new line of basketball sneakers. Simply defining your target audience as “athletes” is not enough. This would make your content too broad and weaken your marketing plan.
To get a good definition of your target audience, create relevant content, and identify the right influencers, think about your potential customers, donors, or volunteers. What are their interests? What age group do they belong to? Do they prefer Instagram, LinkedIn, or Snapchat? What level of education do they have? Answering questions like this will help you craft a more effective influencer marketing plan and know which social media platforms to focus on.
3. Understand costs and set a budget
Knowing your budget is essential when creating a successful influencer marketing strategy. The amount organizations spend can vary depending on the size of the company and other needs. The most common influencer budget is $1,000 to $10,000 annually, but the second most common jumps to $100,000 to $500,000 annually.
An influencer’s fee is typically based on their engagement rate and follower count. However, factors like a niche audience, usage rights, campaign length, agency fees, or specific skills can also impact the pricing.
Knowing the average rates influencers charge will help you calculate your budget. According to Izea’s 2022 State of Influencer Earnings report, the average cost for an Instagram post is $1,170. The average cost of a YouTube video is $4,440. TikTok videos cost $3,514 on average while an Instagram story costs $906.
Here are some of the costs associated with an influencer marketing campaign:
- Influencer fees. This is simply the amount of money paid to the influencer for the agreed-upon services, including content creation and endorsements on social media.
- Free products or discounts. If you’re working with micro influencers, you may opt for a barter collaboration and provide them with free goods or services for them to create content about. The price for the content is the production cost of the advertisement as well as any costs associated with what you’ve bartered. You should also factor in the loss of revenue if you offer any discount codes.
- Production costs. Production costs can vary depending on the nature of the campaign. If all the influencer needs to do is take a picture locally on a smartphone to promote your business, they’ll probably cover the costs. However, if you require the influencer to travel to create content, work with a professional videographer, use props, or rent a studio, you may need to pay for the production costs.
- Professional services. This includes the fees paid to an influencer agency or the amount you spend on in-house resources to manage social media marketing activities.
4. Make a list of desired influencers
While drafting your influencer marketing plan, you should spend time researching the blogger landscape to find influencers suited to your requirements and budget.
Check out the influencer categories below, defined by following size:
- Nano influencers. 1000 - 10,000 followers
- Micro influencers. 10,000 - 50,000 followers
- Mid-tier influencers. 50,000 - 500,000 followers
- Macro influencers. 500,000 - 1,000,000 followers
- Mega influencers. 1,000,000+ followers
There are pros and cons to working with each type of influencer. While mega influencers have a larger audience, micro-influencers tend to be more relatable and have higher engagement rates.
Once you’ve identified the category you’re most interested in, it’s time to create a shortlist of content creators for you to choose from.
Consider the following questions to find your influencer:
- Do they create content relevant to your industry or brand?
- Are they considered a thought leader in the field?
- Do they have a credible engagement ratio?
- Has the influencer worked with similar brands in the past?
- Do the influencer’s values, aesthetic, and personality fit your brand tone and messaging?
If the answer to most of these is yes, the influencer you have in mind will likely be a good fit for your content marketing campaign.
Fake influencers pose a major risk to your campaign; it’s critical to ensure that the blogger is legitimate. Working with fraud influencers may give you a low to nil ROI since the content will largely be viewed by bots or fake accounts. Apart from wasting your time, money, and effort, fake influencers can also damage your brand’s reputation if audiences see you’re associated with them.
Here are some ways to spot fake influencers:
- An unusual engagement ratio. Fake influencers tend to have low engagement rates since their follower base consists of bots. On the other hand, an excessively high engagement rate can also be a red flag. This could mean the fraud influencer is buying engagement for each post. Such activity usually results in spammy or irrelevant comments.
- Spikes in the number of followers. A sudden spike in an account’s audience usually indicates that the user has purchased followers. An authentic following tends to grow steadily over time, with minor deviations. Spikes can be the result of a post going viral, but such scenarios are rare, and after a viral post, an influencer’s following should continue to grow after the spike and not drop drastically.
- Poor audience quality. Analyzing the quality of a blogger’s audience is an important step in identifying fake influencers. While every social media handle is susceptible to fake or bot followers, they should not make up the majority of the audience. Scroll through the influencer’s followers and, if most accounts seem inactive or fake, it’s a good idea to stay away.
5. Reach out to influencers
Once you’ve made a list of potential influencers you might want to work with, it’s time to start reaching out. If you wish to connect with micro-influencers, drop them a direct message on their social media handle or send them an email.
Avoid starting your message with a generic, “Hey, XYZ.” Instead, personalize the message, and explain why you feel they are a good fit for your brand. Create a positive foundation for a long-term, mutually beneficial, relationship.
For established bloggers with higher followings, you may need to contact them via the PR influencer marketing agencies that represent them.
6. Plan the campaign
Use research on your audience’s interests and preferences to plan the tonality of your campaign. You don’t want the content to appear too “salesy” or you’ll lose the trust you’re trying to gain in your audience.
Once you’ve brainstormed an idea, create campaign guidelines and share them with your influencer. This outline can contain information like what hashtags and promo codes to use, any color schemes to keep in mind, and the general vibe of your campaign.
You should also think about the types of media your campaign will include. Would you like your influencer to use photo, video, or some other format? If you decide to go with a photo, know if a single photo or multiple photos should be used. Many photos might be preferable when you want to promote different ways to wear a certain product, for example, or different attributes of a particular product.
Choosing video, on the other hand, means you need to think about length. And remember, the first couple seconds of a video need to be interesting if your viewer’s going to continue watching.
If there are things you’d like the influencer to avoid, be sure to mention it to them up front. It’s obviously important to ensure they aren’t highlighting your product’s flaws, but there may be other aspects of your product or service you don’t want advertised. Leave your influencer room to add their own creativity and style to the campaign, however. If you do this, the content will probably be more authentic. Encourage them to put their own stamp on the campaign. For example, if the influencer is known for a specific tag line, ask them to include it.
You’ll want to define content delivery requirements at this stage. Include details in your requirements like how many sponsored posts or stories are expected, the timeline for content to go live, and which platforms should be covered.
You should also clarify the usage rights and exclusivity of the sponsored content to avoid any miscommunication. A thorough influencer agreement can help prevent any such legal issues.
7. Execute the campaign
No matter the size of your influencer outreach campaign, you need to have a plan to manage and execute it smoothly. You can either hire an influencer agency to do the coordination for you, or you can work hands-on. If you decide to do it yourself, you can communicate with the influencer over email, phone, Slack, or even video calls. It’s best to spend some time explaining any final edits or changes if you make them. Effective communication makes the difference.
You should follow up with your influencer on the day or days the campaign is expected to launch. If your campaign templates are clear, you shouldn’t have too much trouble at this stage.
Ask the influencer if they have any final questions or concerns and what time you can expect to see the post live. It might also be worth double checking the template and the post one final time before giving your influencer the green light to send it out into the world.
You can tell the influencer to call you or drop you a note once the campaign is live. At that time, you can quickly double check that it’s exactly what you wanted—and if it is, give your influencer some praise.
Be sure to give the influencer some feedback about their entire process once it’s been completed. Ask them for any feedback for you. This is a great way to improve or to clear up any misunderstandings that may have popped up too.
Get help designing an efficient influencer marketing strategy with Upwork
A well-thought-out and data-driven influencer marketing plan can help you reach your target audience while developing trust and loyalty. You should work with influencers who are aligned with your brand values so they can create content that’s authentic and likely to result in conversions.
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