Influencer Marketing Tips and Tricks for Beginners
1. Understand Your Influencer Marketing Need and Goal
For any marketing strategies to be successful, the main step is to pinpoint all the goals. Influencer marketing is no different either. In order to begin influencer marketing, find out what are the goals that the influencer marketing campaign is going to achieve.
For businesses that are just taking off or want to reach the bigger circle of the audience, influencer marketing is most effective for them.?
Think and understand how influencer marketing is going to enhance your major marketing strategies. Specifically, how much?value?it is going to add to your social media marketing or content marketing efforts.
While setting up your goals, the first focus must be on your brand niche. Brand niches like fashion and beauty are the biggest users of influencer marketing. Other brands that are profiting from influencer marketing include food and beverage, technologies and gadgets, health and wellness.?
There are a number of goals that you can achieve using influencer marketing. You can increase brand awareness, audience reach, and engagement, also generate revenue and leads. Find and prioritise the goals. The goals will help you to plan and measure the campaign properly. It will help you understand the key metrics and assess the performance of your business.?
In case your goal is to increase your brand awareness and engagement rate. You will need to measure the impression, likes, comments and share of the post and page. All these will give you ideas on the number of people who have seen or interacted with your content.
Similarly, if your goal is lead generation, you can ask influencers to share your business’s page link while promoting your brand, product or service. Using the number of lead generation from their link can help you calculate your ROI.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
Everyone is not interested in your brand or business, and everyone will not buy your service. However, all business has their target audience. Hence, you need to know your target audience. It is one of the vital yet overlooked parts in order to create a successful influencer marketing campaign.?
You can make your campaign strategies more easily and efficiently once you have a clear idea of your target audience. Your target audience is the particular circle of people you want to reach with your message, brand, and products. The target market is like a pool within which your target audience swims.
There are a lot of factors that must be taken into consideration while identifying and knowing your target audience. For example, age, location, interest, income and so on.?
If you know who your business should target, you can make the campaign according to it them. As a result, your campaign will reach the right people. This, in turn, will help you find out the right influencer for your business whose followers have similar interests as your brand.
3. Find the Right Social Media to Market Your Brand
Finding out the right social media platform to advertise your brand stand out to be an important factor. Social media plays a key role in figuring out your target audience. All it helps to understand their behaviour, trending things they are following in relevance to your brand niche.
Just like identifying the target audience, you need to know where they spend their time mostly. Likewise, different influencer influences people on different social media. For example, an influencer can have more followers on Instagram than on Facebook or YouTube.?
So depending on what social media your target audience is using, you can find the best influencers on that platform. Also, find someone who works closely with your brand niche.
4. Understand The Three R’s of Influencer Marketing
You can influence your target audience using three main components: Relevance, Reach and Resonance. These R’s are very important and helpful to choose the correct influencers and make an impact with your influencer marketing content.
Relevance:
It all comes down to relevancy and how people interact with you and your influencer’s content. A relevant influencer makes relevant content for your business so that your target audience can connect with it easily.
Reach:
The number of people who potentially come across your business from the base of the influencer’s followers is the reach. If the content is relevant and engaging, a small audience can be effective. However, you need to ensure there’s enough audience following your chosen influencer so that you can reach your goals.
Resonance:
Resonance is the degree of engagement the influencer will likely make with the target audience of your brand. So as we said earlier, just having a big fan following of the influencer is not enough. If the follower is not interested in your product or what you have to offer, a big fan following doesn’t matter. Niche influencers work best in this case as they usually have very dedicated fan followings. They are likely to go up and down on the words of the influencer.
5. Research The Influencers who are Relevant to Your Brand
Researching the influencers is an essential part of influencer marketing before you begin collaborating with them. Influencer marketing is the most trending marketing strategy to boost traffic and sales. As a result, there is a vast number of influencers out there, and it also increases the number of fraud influencers.?
That’s why you should do thorough research and run background checks before contacting someone.?
Fake influencers often buy followers, likes, and comments on their posts to increase their follower count and engagement rate. This is a trap to attract brands who are willing to pay depending on their follower counts, engagement and content, which will be ineffective in the long run. Collaborating with this kind of influencer will also hamper your brand reputation, and brand awareness will be ineffective.
Ensure that you are going through background research on the influencers and also their social media profile before you sign up with them. You can simply check the amount of engagement they are getting per post and use it to calculate the engagement rate.?
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Consistent and higher engagement rate on their content such as comments, likes and shares means that the influencer has a loyal follower base. Furthermore, it also means that the followers are dedicated and trust the person they are following. Some essential campaign measures revolve around engagement. These include:
Compare and analyse influencers’ organic and sponsored post engagement rates to help your campaign to become successful. However, a lot of marketers ignore this basic practice and focus too heavily on vanity metrics.
Also, you can take a look if they have worked with any other reputed organisation or brands before.
6. Know The Laws
Now that influencer marketing is a trending factor, governments have imposed some laws on influencers and businesses conducting influencer marketing. Consumer protection law is designed to protect the audience from misleading advertisements that can happen through influencer marketing.?
According to this law, anyone who advertises or endorse a service or product on social media must reveal clearly how they came across the service and product. In addition, they must state if they got any benefits like free gifts or received any incentive for the promotion.
Moreover, an influencer must not give an impression that they are a customer of a product or service if they are not. For instance, if you claim or give an impression that you personally brought or used something when in reality you didn’t, you could be disobeying the law. As a result, the reputation of both the business and the influencer is at stake. There is also a strict penalty for disobeying this law.
The law applies to all social media and advertising related to it. You need to be open, upfront and honest with the audience while doing influencer marketing.
7. Business Outlook is Equally Important to Influencers
Your business should be equally appealing and attractive to the influencers with whom you want to work with. Keep in mind that you need to build a long-term relationship with influencers you will be working with.?96%?of brands want a lasting relationship with the influencer, which also results in multiple campaigns.
It is important that your business aligns properly with the audience of the influencer. This is because?72%?of influencers think brand alignment is a key factor when it comes to choosing a brand to work with.
Moreover, influencers are creative beings. They like to have their creative freedom.?One in every three influencers?doesn’t like brands that offer them collaborations which comes with long guidelines. Simply, influencers prefer freedom when it comes to creating content. Sure, you have a say in it, but you need to have trust in the influencers as well. Share your thoughts and ideas when and see how well they reciprocate with them.
8. Reach Out to Influencers Privately and Personally
While approaching an influencer for your brand, start communication slowly. Interact organically with their existing posts. Like their content make comments be appreciative of their work but do not sound ‘salesy’.
When you feel the influencer is a perfect match for your brand, message them and start a conversation with them. Email is a good way to start. Avoid sending mass emails or generic DM to every influencer you want to collaborate with.
Though it might take you a bit longer to write a personalised message, it shows that you are serious about partnering with them. This will help increase the chance of making a deal with the potential influencer.
Give influencers as much information about your business as possible. Explain to them your goals and what you want to accomplish from the influencer marketing campaign. Also, make them see how they can benefit from the deal beyond the payment they will be getting.
One key thing you need to know during this process is that you don’t want to address the person as an “influencer” while reaching out to them. Influencer’s like to be referred to as creators.
9. Decide Your Influencer Marketing Budget
Now let’s come to the cost that you need to make for influencer marketing. There are lots of many factors that contribute to making the budget for influencer marketing. They include the following?
The influencers reach and the channel the content will be posted on. Also, determine how many posts you want and the kind of post. Estimate how long it will take to create the content and any agency payment that may be included.?
The most expensive form of content on Instagram is an IGTV, followed by a reel and then a feed post. Instagram story is the cheapest type of content. Influencers may ask for more charges for product review, organising giveaways, and event attendance.
10. Measure The Campaign Performance
Vanity metrics such as likes and comments can be tempting to focus on when just launched your influencer marketing campaign. However, if the follower base of your chosen influencer is more than the follower base of your business page it all the reactions and comments can distract you from the main goals.
Yes, content engagement is one of the factors to observe campaign success. But the in order to measure the efficiency of a campaign, you need to understand measure success in terms of return on investment.
One of tracking the visitors that comes to your website from the influencer is by using?UTM parameters. UTM parameters are short text codes that you add to URLs that help you track the performance of a webpage or campaign. As a result, you can measure the actual engagement your campaign is getting.?
When you sign up with influencers, assign them their own unique URL with the UTM codes. It helps you see the performance and get a clear picture of influencer marketing.?
You can also give the influencer a unique discount code. It will also help you track the sale and customers that came through the influencer.?
Using the Facebook or Instagram analytic tools for influencer campaigns, you can gain insights into both feeds and stories. You can also ask the influencer to send you a detailed report on the content reach and engagement level.