8 Step Guide to Successful Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the most efficient way to reach potential customers for your business. Influencer marketing is promoting or marketing a product or service through people such as analysts, experts, decision-makers, celebrities, professional advisors, trendsetters, and so on, those who can create an impact on the conversation and branding of your Business. Influencers can generate 11 times Return On Investment (ROI) than traditional advertising such as Television and Desktop Ads.

Influencers can help you with writing the articles and sharing your brand information on their social media.

Some interesting stats about Influencer marketing

• According to Bloglovin’ 67% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is most powerful to reach their target audience.
• According to Twitter, 49% of consumers are influenced by influencer's recommendation while purchasing.

According to Linqia,

• 89% of marketers plan to re-use Influencer content.
•  In 2020, 60% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budget.
• Instagram is the most important social network for influencer marketing in 2020. 97% of marketers and agency professionals plan to use Instagram.
• It is estimated that Influencer content outperforms branded content by 2.7 times.
• In 2020, 77% of marketers want to work with micro-influencers.

According to collective bias,

• 92% of consumers trust Peer recommendations.
• Non-celebrity influencers are 10 times more likely to influence in-store purchases than celebrities.
• Men are 2 times more influenced by blog reviews than women.
• Influencer content viewed 7 times longer than display Ads.
• 60% of consumers are influenced by social media reviews while purchasing.

Who is an Influencer?

An influencer is an individual who has substantial followers on social media and therefore he has the ability to impact the purchase decisions of other people by his knowledge, position, and authority. An influencer can also be a normal person.

Types of influencers

• Industry experts
• Professional Advisors
• Professional Advisors
• Micro-influencers
• Celebrities
• Models
• Media personalities

8 Steps for a successful influencer marketing

Here I have collated 8 steps that can help you to successfully implement an influencer marketing strategy to your business

1. Determine your Goals

The first step of an influencer marketing strategy is identifying or defining your business goals and that is significant to determine the campaign success. The most common influencer marketing Goals are,

• Audience Reach
• Increase sales
• Increase in followers
• Content promotion
• Generate quality leads
• Increase Click-through Rates
• Product launch
• Increase brand awareness

2. Define your Audience

Without an understanding of the target audience, you cannot create a marketing campaign. Determine which demographic is suitable for your product or service. You need to find out the likes, interests, and preferences of your audience. After determining your audience you need to focus on the budget. Determine how much you can afford to spend on this campaign? This will help you to choose an influencer you can afford.

3. Determine your social media channel

Determine which social media channel is best to reach the right audience and reach the Objective of the campaign because different platforms are used for different types of people. Determining social media platform for desired engagement is vital to your campaign success.

4. Find the Right Influencers

Find the right influencer for the right campaign is the hardest part of influencer marketing. You have to find someone who has the ability to promote your product or service. You need to decide which influencer is best for your brand and who is going to match with your goals. Decide if you need an expert, an activist, an analyst, etc. You can use external sources to find influencers such as Social media, Google, and TV.

Consider the below rules while finding the right influencers for your business or industry

• Follower numbers
• Follower growth
• Relevant to your customers
• Experience
• Audience engagement with the content
• Quality of the content
• Post frequency
• Authenticity

You can use the Find your influence platform to find the Right Influencers for your business. Find your influence (FYI) Platform connects more than 100,000 high-value influencers to brands.

Social blade tool will help you to track user statistics for youtube, Instagram, and Twitter.

Identify micro-influencers as well. Micro-influencers are influencers who have followers lesser than 10,000. Recent studies show that micro-influencers have more loyal followers than macro-influencers. Micro-influencers are more affordable than celebrities, macro, and mega influencers.

5. Give influencers creative freedom

It is important that you trust your influencer with content creation. Allow influencers have creative freedom when they promoting your product or service and also they know their community better than you. According to Crowdtap influencers like to work with brands that give freedom to create content and creativity.

You should listen to your influencer’s guidance to reach your goal and this will help you to strengthen the relationship with your influencers. You can also create content with your influencers.

6. Negotiate rates and contracts

Influencers are paid to promote a product or service through their content or social media posts. Payments depend on influencer’s experience, engagement, and size of their community. You should negotiate compensation and sign an agreement with your influencers. Make sure every detail is included in that agreement. It can include,

• Compensation details
• Timeframes
• Payment terms
• Publishing schedules
• FTC guidelines
• Licensing rights for sponsored contents
• Procedure to follow if there is a disagreement

The agreement creates a good business relationship between you and your influencer.

7. Execute your Campaign

After completion of reviewing your content, Now it is the time to execute the marketing campaign. Once the marketing campaign launched, ensure to monitor the views of the posts, impression, comments, shares, and number of likes.

8. Measure your results

Track and measure your campaigns and it will help you to know the ROI. ROI analysis includes Website traffic, Social media growth, audience reach, sales, signups and clicks through rate. Read more about web and social media analytics for a better understanding of result measurement. Track the campaign results will help you to know which influencer is best for you? And which post performs best and which is worst?

Onalytica Tool will help you to measure the influencer marketing campaign.

Upfluence , Revfluence platforms will help you to find your influencers, analyze your campaign and track the ROI.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

• Influencers can build trust and credibility.
• Influencers impact the purchased decision of consumers.
• Influencers help you to drive more conversions.
• Influencers build the relationship between their followers and your brand.
• Influencers help you to build quality links and improve your search engine ranking also.
• They drive traffic to your website.
• It is an effective and quick way to reach your target audience.
• Influencers also help you to reach a new audience who are relevant to your product or service.
• Influencers build brand awareness.
• It will help you to reach your goals affordably.

Don’ts in influencer marketing

• Don’t take complete control of creatives
• Don’t try to limit influencer’s creativity
• Don’t spam influencers with follow-ups. Be patience
• Don’t hire an influencer based on followers
• Don’t forget to give guidelines to influencers.
• Don’t forget to give feedback to your influencers.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is one of the important marketing strategies for any businesses. It is one of the most effective ways to improve brand awareness. Finding the right influencer for your industry or business is a key to influencer marketing and you must aware of fake influencers as well.