Step 1: Goals and metrics – What are your goals and how are you going to measure them? For example, here are some of the top objectives you can achieve with an influencer marketing campaign: Reach a new audience and improve awareness of your brand. Achievable – can you really reach that goal? Some other useful tools are: Social Bond – it’s an influencer marketing tool that helps with the full campaign, from finding influencers to collaborating with them and to measuring the success of the influencer campaign. Once you find the people you want to work with, there are several ways to connect with the influencers: Reach out directly via email (many influencer marketing tools offer influencer outreach features) to ask them if they’re interested in collaborating. They know their audience the best so they can come up with the type of campaigns that they know will make an impact and get them to take action. Or, if you’re working with the same influencer, you can use these links to help you understand what parts of your campaign worked or which didn’t and measure the ROI of the campaign. For example, if you’re working with an influencer on a social media campaign, you could test to see which updates and calls to action got the most results by tracking them with UTM links. Conclusion As you can see, there are 5 important steps that make up an influencer marketing strategy: Establishing your goals and your KPIs to help measure your results. Measuring the results and ROI of your influencer marketing campaign.
don’t trust (or like) digital advertising?
If that question is keeping you up at night… well, you’re certainly not the only one.
Although it can definitely still work, advertising on its own is simply not enough to reach your audience and get them to take action. You also need to build trust and establish yourself as one of the top choices in your niche. And you can achieve that with 2 tactics: a great content marketing strategy and collaborating with top influencers in your niche.
But, we can’t really tackle both in one article. So in this blog post, I’m going to show you how to develop an influencer marketing strategy in 5 steps.
Step 1: Goals and metrics – What are your goals and how are you going to measure them?
Like with any marketing strategy, the best place to start is with your goals. What exactly do you want to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign?
For example, here are some of the top objectives you can achieve with an influencer marketing campaign:
- Reach a new audience and improve awareness of your brand.
- Build awareness and establish trust with your target audience.
- Generate more sales/more leads for your business.
- Boost traffic to your website.
Take the time to consider your overall business goals in order to come up with an objective that will help support those goals. This will help you put together your actual campaign; for example, if your goal was to establish trust and build up your reputation, then you wouldn’t create exclusive offer codes for the influencers you work with. Rather, you’d try a different approach, such as building up close, long-lasting relationships with top influencers and then giving them the freedom to create the campaign themselves. On the other hand, if you wanted to boost sales, you’d need to create exclusive offers for your influencer campaigns.
To help you set your objectives, you can use a goal-setting template like SMART; that means that your goal needs to be:
- Specific – in other words, it needs to be detailed.
- Measurable – if you can’t measure the success of your goal, why even do it?
- Achievable – can you really reach that goal?
- Relevant – how is this goal helping your business?
- Time-bound – what is your goal’s deadline?
As you can see above, one of the essential elements of a good goal is whether they are measurable. And what’s more, at this stage, you should list out exactly how you’re going to measure these goals; in other words, what are your KPIs (key performance indicators)? It can be something like traffic to your website and social media engagement metrics if your goal was to improve brand awareness. Or, if you wanted more sales, then you’d focus on the number of sales made as your main KPI.
Step 2: Find the right influencers
Once you know what you want to achieve, the next step is to find the right social influencers to help you actually achieve that goal.
There are numerous types of social influencers depending on how you want to classify them (by audience size – micro-influencers, celebrities, etc., by type – blogger, journalist, etc.). Each type of influencer has its own benefits and drawbacks; but generally, it’s not about how many followers they have, how famous the influencer is, or anything else similar.
What’s most important is to understand how engaged their audience is and how truly influential the influencer is.
When choosing the influencers to work with, make sure to check:
- What topics they cover: What do they usually talk about on their digital channels? Is it something relevant to your target audience? You can check this with a tool like Buzzsumo; it’s a content research/influencer marketing tool that lets you look up influencers and see what links they’ve shared in the past. This helps give you a better idea of the content they like, the topics they’re interested in, and their audience’s interests:
- Who forms their audience: Who follows them? Ideally, you want to be able to reach your own target audience
- How engaged is their audience? How close of a relationship is there between influencer and followers? A true influencer is one that has a very engaged audience (one that shares their content, leaves comments constantly, and so on) – that is much more important than the size of their audience
To help you find influencers, you can use all kinds of tools – like the aforementioned Buzzsumo. Some other useful tools are:
- Social Bond – it’s an influencer marketing tool that helps with the full campaign, from finding influencers to collaborating with them and to…
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