In the world of marketing, influencer marketing has been picking up a lot of steam. Influencer marketing has helped businesses increase brand awareness and even drive sales. With influencer marketing, businesses can still reach their target audience, even if they’re blocking ads. And better yet, they can reach their audience through content they actually opt into, making them more receptive to the brand’s message.
But to get the best results, you should know how to get your influencer marketing strategy right. Before you begin outlining your strategy, make sure you know what you are getting into. To help you out, we’ve listed a few things that will help you launch a successful influencer marketing campaign.
1. Find the right audience
Before you begin looking for social media influencers to collaborate with, you need to determine your target audience. Which age group is more likely to buy your product or services? Which niche does your audience belong to? These are some of the questions that you must have clear answers to.
While defining your target audience, you should focus on locations, demographics, and interest areas. These factors will help you understand your target audience’s profiles. You can also use tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to get a better understanding of your target audience.
Clearly understanding your target audience will help you find the right influencers. If your target audience is mainly millennials who follow fashion, you should look up social media influencers in the fashion niche.
2. What are your metrics?
It is obvious that many brands want to use influencer marketing to promote their businesses. But before you launch your influencer marketing campaign, you need to be more specific about your goals. Clearly defining your goals will help you to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
Do you want to increase your revenue? Or do you want to get more followers and boost engagement on social media?
Whatever your goal is, make sure you understand what exactly you want to achieve from your influencer marketing campaign. Once your goals are set, define the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaign. For each kind of goal, your relevant key performance indicators will be different. If you want to increase brand awareness, you should look at engagement rate, social media followers, reach, engagement and other factors. If your goal is to boost revenue, you should concentrate on metrics like conversion rate and click-through rate.
3. Which social media platforms will you use?
The content that you create with influencers needs to be tailored to suit the social media platform that you are working with. Each platform has its own strengths, and marketing results may vary depending on the channel you choose.
Instagram is all about visual content and aesthetics. So it works really well for businesses that are related to home decor, fashion, and art. On the other hand, YouTube is only about videos. So it is ideal for tutorials and product reviews.
4. Which influencers will you use?
First of all, you should make a list of influencers in your niche. Influencers who are popular in your niche will help you reach your target audience. You should also look at the values and lifestyle that each influencer is promoting. Ideally, you should pick an influencer whose values align with the values of your brand. If you are interested in a particular influencer, you should go through the content they have created in the past. Look at the number of likes and comments on all promotional posts. This way you can get an estimate of the kind of reach you will get by collaborating with them.
5. Track success
Once influencers have shared posts related to your brand, you should keep a tab on the response they’re getting. Keep track of the number of engagements and sales generated by the campaign. You should refer to the key performance indicators that you consider most relevant to measure the success of your campaign.
Measuring your ROI is one of the most challenging tasks in influencer marketing. So, if your budget allows, you should invest in an influencer marketing tool.
