Influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach your target audience, but it can also be challenging to manage multiple influencers and campaigns across different platforms. How do you keep track of everything without losing sight of your goals and budget? Here are some tips to help you organize and optimize your influencer marketing strategy.
Before you start working with influencers, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you will measure your success. Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive sales, or boost engagement? Depending on your objectives, you will need to define relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) such as impressions, clicks, conversions, or comments. These will help you track the performance of your influencers and campaigns and adjust your strategy accordingly.
What you don't need: - super expensive influencer marketing products What you do need: - A good database Airtable and/or Notion (or similar) are my go-tos. Track everything in your databases: - names - e-mails - costs - post dates - platforms - performance metrics A functional database will allow you to sort your posts by platform, performance (etc) and will give you everything you need to make decisions about your campaigns. Good tracking = good decisions = good campaigns. Pro tip: use your database to figure out what posts are working, and then double down on those.
We often came across clients with multiple objectives, also KPIs OR started with one objective and measured KPIs unrelated to the original objective. It is recommended to have well-defined expectations and objectives and evaluate feasibility before you move on to the next step. E.g. When early-stage companies without a product market fit OR Story-Consumer fit approach us to design a Creator campaign with the objective of immediate sales/downloads etc we advise them to rethink and revisit this medium at a slightly mature stage later.
Not all platforms and influencers are created equal. Depending on your target audience, product, and message, you will need to select the most suitable channels and influencers for your campaign. For example, if you want to showcase your product features, you might want to use YouTube or Instagram, where you can leverage video content and stories. If you want to build trust and credibility, you might want to use blogs or podcasts, where you can leverage long-form content and testimonials. Similarly, you will need to find influencers who match your brand values, voice, and niche, and who have a loyal and engaged following.
One of the most effective ways to keep track of influencers and campaigns on different platforms is to use a spreadsheet or a tool that allows you to organize and monitor all the relevant information in one place. A spreadsheet or a tool can help you store and update the contact details, rates, contracts, deliverables, deadlines, and metrics of your influencers and campaigns. You can also use it to compare and contrast the results of different platforms and influencers and identify the best performers and opportunities for improvement.
At this stage in influencer marketing, if you are investing in influencers, you should be investing in a tool. I personally have used Tagger Media at 3 companies over the past 6 years and highly recommend but I encourage you do to your own research and choose the platform with what you need for the scale you are planning. Tools have so many benefits from IDing partners to workflow to the having the ability for creators to authenticate in to automatically get their data. All of this will make your team more efficient and effective, freeing up much needed time to build smart strategies, test/optimize paid, etc.
Communication and collaboration are essential for successful influencer marketing. You need to establish a clear and consistent communication channel with your influencers and provide them with all the necessary guidelines, resources, and feedback. You also need to collaborate with them on creating authentic and engaging content that resonates with your audience and aligns with your brand message. You can use tools such as email, chat, or project management software to facilitate communication and collaboration and to keep track of the progress and quality of your influencer content.
In our experience at GetEvangelized, we have observed that Creator relationships evolve starting with basic professional courtesy and reminding yourself that this person's profile is not a billboard where I can stick my ad as a brand. Invest some time in understanding their persona, content themes, formats, and their audience first. Draft your brief so that it allows them a broad canvas with creative liberty to stay true to themselves and their audience while intertwining your message in their story. As a brand, you need to communicate well and articulate who you are, why they should collab with you building upon their finer synergies= and that is what gets you a potential long-term relationship instead of a trasnaction.
Finally, you need to analyze and optimize your influencer marketing strategy based on the data and insights you collect from your KPIs and metrics. You need to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of your influencer marketing campaigns and determine what worked well and what didn't. You also need to optimize your strategy by testing different variables such as platforms, influencers, content formats, hashtags, or calls to action. By analyzing and optimizing your influencer marketing strategy, you can ensure that you are getting the most out of your influencers and campaigns on different platforms.