How To Build An Influencer Marketing Strategy
An influencer marketing strategy finds individuals that have a strong influence over a specific target audience or brand industry. The individual then acts as a sort of spokesperson for that product. Most often, these influencers are celebrities that already have a large audience. Therefore, when they share about your brand, you have gained a very large audience. However, not every influencer marketing campaign needs a celebrity endorsement. Depending on your product or message that you are trying to promote, a celebrity endorsement may not be the way to go. A successful influencer marketing campaign starts with the proper planning.How to Plan A Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign
Write down your goals early on. This will help you begin to develop a successful influencer marketing campaign.Here are some things that you should consider while planning:
- Brand Awareness: Helping the world to learn about your brand.
- Build Brand Identity: Help people to see your brand’s personality and its message.
- Build Your Audience: Help build your followers and subscribers.
- Building Links: Use link anchoring to draw people to your website.
- Engagement: Get people engaged with your content by having them like, share and comment on social media.
- Lead Generation: Get people to sign up for lead magnets and offers.
Once you have identified these things, then it will be easier to decide what type of influencer marketing campaign that you would like to use.
Here are some different campaigns that you can use:
- Gifting: Giving away free products to your influencer in exchange for their endorsement.
- Social Media Mentions: Create a social media campaign to market your brand, personality or share content about you.
- Contests and Giveaways: Create a contest or giveaway that is shared by an influencer.
- Sponsored Content: Pay a sponsor to post an ad for your brand on their website or social media.
- Brand Ambassador: Build relationships with those who are loyal brand fans by giving them samples of your product in exchange for them sharing your content.
Identify Your Audience
Before you skip to your next step of looking for influencers, you need to define your audience. Consider who you are looking to use your product and why. You should desire to connect with your audience in some way, to engage them in your product. Otherwise, you will not be as successful in selling your product! So, first and foremost, figure out your target audience and how you will reach them. This means that you should be planning a personality for your brand- one that will connect with the audience’s demographic. Once you have done this it will be much easier to identify the right kind of influencer.
Find the Right Influencers
Now you can look for the most important part of the strategy- the influencer himself. Consider if you want to look for someone who is a blogger, social media star, celebrity or a thought leader. Choosing the right influencer is crucial because you are using them as your spokesperson. Remember, they will be representing you and your brand!
Create Content that Entices with Content Marketing
It is of the utmost importance that you gain the trust of your potential clients. Why? Because people want to know that they are getting a quality product for a good price. They want all of this from someone that isn’t just out to make a profit off them. This means that you need to build a relationship with them from the very beginning. As mentioned earlier, you need to engage your target audience. Get on their level so that there is a real connection. It’s only then that you’ll be able to have a product that meets the client’s needs. Building relationships will also mean that you’ll need to be completely open and honest. Share what other people are saying about your product. And very often, if your clients are happy about their experience with your product, they will want to share it on social media. This will only help to establish your brand’s reputation. For all of these reasons, it is important to implement content marketing into your influencer marketing campaign. By using individuals to create engaging articles using specific keywords, you’ll have a more successful campaign. This means that you’ll need to research what keywords will be most effective and prepare them in such a way that your influencer will be eager to share.
The Influencer Marketing Hub
If you are new to using the influencer marketing strategy, then you most likely don’t have a lot of connections to potential influencers. This is where the influencer marketing hub (or platform) comes in. By using the system, you will be able to look at potential influencers’ profiles that includes their social media statistics. If you so choose, you can use filters to search for an influencer according to a specific product or service. After an influencer works with a brand, the individual’s marketing platform will supply statistics regarding the impact of any advertisements that were launched for the campaign. The rules that the platform seeks to follow are:
- Search and Discovery: Building a type of search engine of sorts that will seek and find influencers to match with brands.
- Contact and Contract Management: Providing contact information for each influencer for them to be hired by those creating influencer marketing campaigns.
- Campaign Content Management: Managing all the ad’s text and visual graphics, hashtags, @mentions, deadlines or giveaways and so on.
- Promotion of Influencer’s Ad Content: Reinforcing the impact of an influencer’s content by paid ads on social media.
- Analytics and Reporting: Analyzing the effectiveness of the influencer’s ads for the brand. Reports will reflect this analysis.
If you are considering creating your own influencer marketing strategy, following these steps is the best way to guarantee a successful campaign.