Influencer marketing has become a key focus point for brands when developing their digital marketing strategies. Influencer marketing is a fantastic way to reach new audiences, increase brand awareness and boost your marketing ROI and bottom line. However, with so many influencers out there it can be an overwhelming task to find the right influencers for your brand. To help you with your influencer marketing strategy, there are specialized influencer and micro influencer agency that will help find your brand’s perfect influencer partnership.
Influencer marketing is a digital marketing strategy that uses individuals with a strong social media presence (influencers) to advertise and promote a brand or product. Brands will form partnerships with these influencers, where the influencer agrees to share the brand’s messaging or product with their audience in return for payment or free samples.
Influencers typically have large and engaged audiences; this allows brands to target their desired and new audiences in a positive and authentic way. There are different types of influencers that brands can use: celebrity influencers and hero, macro, micro and nano influencers. Each of these influencers has different audience numbers and engagement rates. While celebrity influencers typically have the most followers due to their celebrity status, they generally have a lower engagement rate compared to those with a smaller audience. When considering which type of influencer to use, you need to know what your brand’s priority is—engagement or reach?
As with any marketing strategy, you need to know what your end goals are and what you want to accomplish from your influencer campaign. Defining your goals early will help you keep a consistent strategy throughout the campaign and give you an idea of the key metrics you should be tracking to measure your success and ROI.
Some goals to consider include raising brand awareness, building brand identity, building an audience, improving engagement and sales, increasing customer loyalty and lead generation.
Choose your Influencer Marketing Campaign
Once you’ve confirmed your goals, you can then decide which type of influencer marketing campaign will help you achieve them. You can have the influencer share your content and messaging by inspiring them or paying them—or even both.
You can gift influencers free products and services in return for a review or mention, sponsor influencer content, co-create content, run competitions and giveaways, conduct influencer takeovers, provide affiliate discount codes or even create a long-term relationship by having an influencer as a brand ambassador.
Whichever strategy you choose should be determined by your end goals. Your strategy could vary from campaign to campaign and will definitely differ from other brands.
Once you have figured out which type of influencer marketing will work best for your end goals, it is critical you know exactly which audience you want to target. You can create buyer personas, considering demographics and psychographic segmentation, to help you identify the key areas you need to focus on. This will help you decide which social media platforms and niches you need to be present in.
When you know who you’re targeting, you then need to find the influencers who will help you connect with your desired audience. These can be bloggers, thought leaders, industry experts and even customers—there are many more options available than the traditional social media stars.
A great way to find influencers is to use an influencer or micro influencer agency or check out who your competitors are using and find others in the same sphere.
Once your influencer marketing campaign is complete, you need to analyze the key metrics that will help you realize your goal. Using and analyzing key metrics will help you figure out which aspects worked well, where needs to be improved for your next campaign or if there’s a whole new metric you need to measure next time.
