We’ve outlined all of the key elements that your influencer strategy must incorporate in order to be effective.
TIP: To create relationships with potential partners, plan out your influencer marketing strategy as far ahead as feasible(business marketing).
Closer to the campaign date, you can become more detailed, but for now, make a basic framework based on product releases and marketing initiatives you have planned for the year.
This gives you the opportunity to build a natural rapport with potential influencers in your field by liking and commenting on their articles. If you know you’ll be releasing a new lipstick line in the spring, for example, you can start communicating with fashion and makeup influencers as early as January.
When it comes time for the “ask,” they’ll already recognise you and know you’ve loved their stuff. This technique also allows you to keep track of their style, highlight any inconsistencies, and gauge how engaged their audience is.
1. Establish your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).
When it comes to developing an influencer marketing plan, the first step is to figure out what you want to accomplish. Many businesses utilise influencers to raise brand awareness, increase their subscriber base, or, if it’s a product-specific campaign, to increase the number of sales.
Second, consider how you’ll assess whether or not you’ve achieved your objectives. You and the influencer partner both need good KPIs clearly written out so that everyone is on the same page about how the partnership’s success will be measured. This is critical not only for the brand’s internal reporting, but also for determining whether or not you should deal with the influencer again in the future.
KPIs for influencer marketing include:
They use engagement – qualitative findings in a lot of influencer marketing campaign reporting. Even if an engagement isn’t always linked to a website visit, a new email subscriber, or a purchase, it’s still a useful indicator of brand awareness. Likes, impressions, shares, comments, and brand mentions will all be included in these KPIs.
Web traffic – if your influencer marketing agreement involves link sharing, you’ll want to track visitors to your website via those links (s). When the campaign goes online and you notice an increase in traffic, you can speculate that the influencer was responsible, but it’s tough to say for sure. Asking visitors how they heard about you is one technique to improve the accuracy of this KPI, but the best option is to use a UTM code. This allows you to observe not only the amount of traffic that comes from the influencer’s link, but also more information about their user journey.
Purchases – discount codes are a pleasant benefit for buyers who are about to make a purchase on your site. However, they also serve another purpose. They make it simple to link a purchase to a certain influencer or campaign(business marketing).
2. Determine which influencers are most relevant to the campaign.
Create a map of the influencer landscape most likely to deliver on your KPIs once you’ve locked down the campaign criteria like the target audience and messaging. Ask a big question about the written asset or product, such as “who impacts the campaign’s target audience?” Use them to assist you decide on your outreach strategy, and if you’re intending to use inbound marketing, this can also help you write your landing page copy.
To keep with our springtime lipstick advertising theme, the sample below illustrates how your map might look. Assume your new collection is geared at 15- to 25-year-old girls and is cruelty-free, vegan, and sustainable.
So, on the political spectrum, you may try to link with some well-known environmentalists or animal rights organisations who can inspire young people and encourage purchases with a deeper message. You might also try to get into the “Mommy Blogger” market by emphasising gift-giving and female empowerment.
You’ll be able to home down on and solidify components of what you want to achieve through this influencer marketing campaign as you go through this exercise.
3. Overview of content promotion
Your marketing team’s minds will most likely start buzzing with content ideas throughout step 2 of creating your influencer plan. Structure this content promotion with a communication plan, depending on the scope of your campaign, so you can keep track of all your owned, earned, shared, and paid marketing activities in support of the campaign. Influencers go under the Earned category, but depending on the agreement you have with the influencer partner, they may also fall under Paid and Shared.
4. Demonstrate the influencer’s worth.
The majority of today’s influencers, whether nano, micro, or macro, are quite well-informed. They’ll want to know what’s in it for them, and they’ll want to know that working with you gives them and their dedicated following enough value.
The following are some examples of value:
Personal brand exposure – this is a big benefit, but be careful how you frame it in your initial pitch. For influencers, exposure has become a nasty word, and it can come off as the company saying “we’re doing you a favour,” implying that you expect them to labour for free or for incredibly low money. Make it obvious that you value their time over “we have a larger audience and will give you a retweet” even if the type of collaboration you’re seeking isn’t a straight monetary reward model(business marketing).
Increased authority – the influencer will earn clout as an authority, which can lead to increased prospects for brand partnerships.
Grow their audience – one of the best aspects of influencer partnerships is the reciprocal expansion of audience. The influencer may earn followers as a result of the brand enjoying and sharing their posts, and the brand gains brand recognition in front of a relevant audience.
