Influencer marketing is no cheesy trend, but an effective strategy that can strengthen your brand or business. Yet, with no prior experience, how do you start? These 5 steps will help you conceptualize your campaign and stop you from making rookie-mistakes. Let’s start at the beginning:
Starting with influencer marketing is starting with your marketing strategy. First of all you need to realize what your goals are, and whether influencer marketing is your way to go. If it is, it all starts with perhaps the most important step.
1. Starting with influencer marketing: what influencer do I choose?
One of the most basic and essential aspects of starting with influencer marketing. It’s important to choose an influencer that matches your brand aesthetically, morally, contextually – and so on. Try to see them as the perfect brand ambassadors.
As important as the influencer him- or herself, is the target audience of the influencer. Let’s take a toy brand for example: if you’re campaigning a toy for children of 8-12 years old, you should consider mommy-blogs. Campaigning a toy for children 12-14 year old? Consider teen bloggers – our 2018 early teens spend more time behind a tablet then they do behind play-doh.
The key take-away here is that the demographics of your influencers’ audience are almost as important as their personality. Try to get as clear as possible who you are reaching, and how effectively. If you do so, you’ll be able to measure the quality of your results. Knowing where you want to end makes starting with influencer marketing a lot easier.
2. In what market does my influencer operate?
When designing a campaign, you have to consider different strategies. What market is your audience active in, and how can you reach them? Thinking big might be ambitious, but not always the best idea. Research has found that influencers with a smaller followerbase (5K-100K followers) can generate more engaging, loyal customers.
Say what? Multiple micro-influencers will generate more positive effects for your brand than one large influencer – for a fraction of the cost. Don’t believe me? Read more on micro-influencers right here. Micro-influencers might not always be business-smart like the instafamous, but working with Join makes it easy to chat, negotiate and deal with the influencer. Conclusion: try to navigate in smaller markets, it will urge you to focus on quality instead of quantity.
Thinking big might be ambitious, but not always the best idea. Research has found that (micro-) influencers with a smaller followerbase (5K-100K followers) can generate more engaging, loyal customers.
3. What is my campaign goal, and how am I going to measure it?
Do you want to reach as many people as possible, or do you want to engage with your audience? In essence, it’s about two ideas:
a. When you’re just starting with influencer marketing, focusing on reach may work for awareness campaigns. Getting the right influencers to share your brand message with their followers can help putting your brand in the back of their head.
b. Are your customers already familiar with the product, and do you want to connect them to you? Then focus on micro-influencers that generate a lot of discussion, comments and other discourse – engagement.
Anything else? Authenticity. Fake or staged posts don’t work for influencers, but especially not for you and your brand. Collaborate with influencers, make authentic content.
4. Now, you start the campaign. How?
Once you’ve supplied your influencers with your creative brief through Join, you’ll start to receive proposals. Influencers will let you know specifically what they would like to create for your brand, and how and where they will be sharing it. Make sure you negotiate with your influencers, about the content of the proposal as well as the price. That way you’ll make sure you can make the most out of your campaign.
Now don’t forget to work on the creative part as well: asking an influencer to write a review is fine, but there’s more to influencer marketing! Use your and the influencer’s personality and creativity and truly collaborate. This way, you can work together and create authentic and high quality content.
5. The aftermath: did the campaign work?
Let’s be honest: we’re not 100% sure. We analyze campaigns, dive into statistics and measure ROI – but we will never grasp the campaign and it’s results entirely. Influencer marketing is people marketing, and all about the ideas and the messages you transfer to your customers.
What can you calculate? Quite a lot. With the report-dashboard you can track your results live after your campaigns has launched. Moreover, it shows a well-arranged presentation of your analytics when the campaign is done.
Conclusion
Don’t forget: this is not a foolproof guide to influencer marketing. These steps might help you brainstorm and conceptualize your future campaigns. Request a demo below to find out how we can help you simplify your influencer marketing efforts.
