5 Influencer Marketing Hacks

As we continue to navigate through this marketing jungle, the need to leverage every weapon in our arsenal to plant our brand flags at the mountain-top of consumer minds remains a top priority.

Most especially as we go through the uncharted territory of a continuous shift in market dynamics, we must endeavour to make our rounds count in order to justify budget spend to stakeholders.

One of the rounds you could consider using is influencer marketing.

According to  Hubspot, 92% of consumers would trust an influencer over a brand when making a purchasing decision, and based on a  Marketing Dive study, 41% of marketing professionals have seen more success in influencer campaigns, than traditional advertising.

Influencers amplify your brand's reach and awareness which in turn helps ensure that the desired target audience consumes and engages with your content, and most importantly they lend credibility to your brand. 

I mean ?? there's only so much you can say about your brand and product before you run out of what to say and start repeating yourself. But with the help of influencers, you can spice things up a little bit.

Here are 5 things to have at your fingertips when dipping your toes into the influencer marketing pool.

Set Clear Goals

Just like every other part of your marketing strategy, your influencer marketing campaign must have clear goals. Before taking any step to launch an influencer marketing outreach, you need to understand, highlight, and document what you specifically intend to accomplish.

Define your expectation so that everyone knows what success looks like at the end of the day. Your goals can be brand awareness, lead generation, lead nurturing, sales, etc. Vanity metrics such as likes, retweets, etc may not appeal much to stakeholders as their primary concern is usually how the whole thing affects the profit margin. So focus on KPIs that reflect your bottom line when dealing at the leadership level.

Also, aside from setting overall goals for your campaign, set specific goals for each influencer. But make sure these individual influencer goals align with your campaign goals. Platforms like TapInfluence and Grin allow you to manage and track your KPIs for the whole campaign and for specific influencers.

Pick The Best Guys 

I'm not saying pick the guys you feel are the best based on mental judgment or follower count. I'm saying pick and reach out to those influencers who are a perfect fit for your brand and campaign. Consider their audience, engagement, compatibility, personality, sentiment, media impact, honesty, brand affinity, etc.

Choose with your brand and goal at the back of your mind, because a tech-savvy Fisayo Fosudo, might just not be the best choice for your cosmetic brand even though he smashes other tech-related campaigns. 

Secondly, these guys are humans, not things you pick up and use when you need to. Show some love fam, take into account their skills first, show them that you value their skills and the contribution they bring to the table beyond their audience reach and engagement. Make them understand you truly respect and value their craft because influencers will judge your realness and authenticity just as you are judging theirs.

Co-creation / Collaboration

Most times, brands create content themselves and then share the same content with influencers either directly or through agencies, while others leave the whole content creation process to influencers.

I'm really not a fan of such an arrangement. The content creation process should be a collaborative effort between your in-house team and the influencer. You know your brand and they know their audience, so it's best if you're both in sync in order to come up with original content that reflects your brand or product in a way that resonates with their audience without losing touch of your brand essence.

Another thing is, you're still going to share said content with your own audience, so to avoid looking or sounding different, I suggest you get in the mud with your influencers.

Build Long Term Relationship With Micro-Influencers

Unless you are Google, Coca-Cola, OffWhite, or any of the big brands out there with deep marketing pockets to splash millions on celebrity influencers, your best bet for meeting your KPIs are micro-influencers.

Though these guys come at a more modest price, they'll still give your brand exposure to highly-targeted audiences. The benefit of using these guys is the opportunity of reaching a very engaged group of people who may not have responded to your broader campaigns. Micro-influencers have between 5000 - 150,000 followers who trust their opinions mostly because they share similar interests and can relate to their everyday life.

Having and maintaining relationships with micro-influencers is important because they are progressively growing an engaged audience you can repeatedly tap into. From basic brand awareness, you can grow your brand's relationship with their audience to the point where they become brand loyalists.

Measurement

It's important to have a measurement strategy in place before your campaign results start to come in. No matter how creative, impactful, or popular your influencer campaign is, every asset will be judged by the impact it makes on your business’s bottom line.

Measuring your campaign against your set KPIs is a must. It's not enough that a lot of people liked or commented on your various posts. You must measure to see if there are actual returns on investment due to your campaign. Ask questions like, what did we do wrong? How can we improve? Did we use the right influencers? Etc.

Feel free to drop your comments or thoughts in the comments section.