What is Influencer Marketing?

Strategies & Examples To Drive Growth

Introduction

Lately, people have been talking a lot about Influenced Marketing. They have been discussing it on various platforms. Even some are writing about it how it is the next big thing on the internet? How can it replace social or content marketing? Now, let’s answer these two things briefly. First, yes, it’s arguably the most significant thing on the internet as far as branding is concerned. Secondly, no, it is not going to replace social or content marketing because it thrives on their presence. Now, for anybody who is not so aware of Influencer Marketing or looking to learn more about it, then this is the perfect place for you. I’m going to breakdown on certain vital aspects of Influenced Marketing like how it works as a champion brand awareness creating tool. But first thing first, let’s start with the introduction to Influenced Marketing.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing is the balanced tool comprising of part from old and modern-day marketing based on content-driven to create a marketing campaign in a way where it mostly targets an influencer rather than customers to build endorse brands. Now, who are these influencers?

A lot easier guess would be celebrities which are not wrong. But this is precisely not right as would involve a high cost in the marketing itself and these days, any smart businessmen or entrepreneur would look to invest as much less as possible and make it work as much more as possible. So, to exactly say who fits the bill on an influencer would be the ones with the right online followers. Follower has been earned one by one over time as that reflects both the influencing power of the person and the trust factor the followers have on him. So, yes any celebrity with a vast online follower is an influencer and so is any motivational speaker, or a fashion blogger or an Instagram photographer or even a YouTuber. There are influencers in every field, and one just had to convince one who fits their bill. “Convince” is a keyword here since these influencers cannot be bought easily as most of them are wary about maintaining their reputation, which has granted them their vast followers. So, they wouldn’t want to risk losing it. So, one need to do an entire content-driven pitch to get them on board maybe alongside with a monetary offer on the table and finally create the collaboration between the brand and the influencer.

A great example of this would be the most popular YouTuber, PewDiePie, who has more than 25 million followers on his YouTube channel. What he did was collaborated with a movie director and created a series of videos which ultimately boosted the movie trailer like both on house channel and PewDiePie’s.

Influencer Marketing Strategy

Influencer marketing may look simple, but it isn’t. Getting an influencer isn’t going to be a cakewalk and so on getting the influencer with your target audience is going to be more work and might cost some money as well. Either way even after you have achieved the first goal of having the influencer on board it becomes imperative to have a perfect strategy layout to bring complete brand awareness and exposure, built authority and create the connectivity with the target audience. Yes, it can be a complicated, confused and time-consuming process. Still, if the strategy is set up, launched and managed right, then it can lead to driving significant traffic to your website and will also lead new customers to your products and services. Therefore, it’s highly essential to have a full-proof strategy and below you can our strategy guide, which can help you in building your perfect influencer marketing campaign.

1.   Setting up your Goal and Metrics

For any plan to succeed, setting up its goal should come naturally at first. Once you have figured out your goals, you can quite quickly start building a strategy around it to achieve your goal. Another critical factor “Setting Up A Goal First” helps in making is having an idea of the metrics you should track and monitor to calculate your success rate at the end of the campaign.

Therefore some objectives you might consider for your influencer marketing is as followed:

●     Brand Awareness: This aims at reaching new target audience and getting them to recognize your brand.

●     Brand Identity: This aims at getting people to see your brand personality and values and connect with it.

●     Public Engagement: This one is for getting people more engaged in Liking, Sharing and Commenting on your post.

●     Lead Generation: This aims at getting more people enrolled for your services through offers and discounts.

●     Sales: As the words says, this aims at getting people to purchase your product and services.

●     Customer Retention: You cannot be working on getting on new people to buy things from while you keep losing the ones who have already been purchasing your product and services. A balance must be maintained.

●     Building Links: This aims at creating links to direct people back to your websites.

To further ensure your objectives and goals meet with success, you can set up a “Time-Bound” scenario where you can assign yourself and your team to achieve a decisive goal within that period. In other words, work with deadlines.

2.   Getting the right influencer

Once the goals and metrics are set, you will know what you want to achieve through your marketing campaign. Then you can move onto the next vital part, which is finding the right influencer to help you finally reach your goal.

There are several types of social influencers, depending on how you want to specify them. It can be a celebrity, a journalist, micro-influencers or anyone with the right size of followers, etc. Each type of influencer has its benefits and disadvantages. But truth be told, getting the right influencer is never about how many followers they have, how famous they are.

What matters most is to understand how engaged their audience is and how much influence the influencer truly has. Therefore, while choosing the influencers to work with, make sure to check:

●     The areas and topics they cover: Any influencer would mostly talk, share or discuss the issues that are relevant to its followers. This is because even the influencer understands the value of customer retention. He uses its platform to target both specific people and area.

●     Their audience: Once you have understood the influencer vision, you can go ahead and check their audience to see if they are the ones you want to target as well.

●     Audience engagement: See for how close the influencer and audience are to each other. It will give you an idea and estimate how much your marketing can make an impact through the influencer.

●     Social Bond: This is an influencer marketing tool that which helps with the full campaign, from finding influencers to collaborating with them and to measuring the success of the influencer campaign. The best part of this tool is that you can look up into influencers’ based on their followers and demographics (location, language, age group, gender, niche) and you can even check which other brands they’ve worked with before. This way, you can have a surety of sort whether you’re reaching the right target audience. It’s also worth mentioning that social bond is a platform which connects brands and influencers directly, as it has an influencer marketplace where you can search for and reach out to influencers.

●     Upfluence: This is an influencer marketing software with three main tools which are influencer search, campaign manager, and influencer marketing analytics. This can be used to find the top influencers as per your requirements, from blogs or social networks, with all kinds of filters such as geo-location, how active they are, and the engagement metrics which they get on social media. Once you find them, you can then directly reach out to them via email, even use the software to manage the campaigns, and then measure your campaigns’ performance.

3.   Connect to the Influencer

Once you have figured out the influencer you are willing to work with, start connecting with them. There are several ways to communicate with your desired influencer. For example, you can email them or use the influencer marketing tools used for influencer outreach and contact them. You can even follow them online and organically built a relationship with them over time.

4.   Designing the Campaign

After you have connected with your influencer and have successfully been able to build a working relationship, you need to focus on designing a campaign with them which can work. One might want to look at the first point I mentioned about in the Goals and Metrics section for this part resemble some of the metrics and objectives there. Take, for example:

●     Extra Brand Awareness: Get your influencers to review your products and services on their websites, channels and social media pages. Ask them to create contests, giveaways, and perhaps even host them on their pages.

●     Increase Sales: Make an exclusive discount and special offer codes to promote on social media or use an affiliate marketing program.

●     Building more Trust and Reputation: Keep your influencers happy. Use them as your brand ambassadors. Look from target people and see who can help you in further reaching your goal in time. Send them gifts related to your products and services via your influencers on behalf of you.

5.   Optimize and keep a Track

Once your campaign is ready and has gone live, you still can be a part of it. You can monitor it and optimize the campaign as you go along. Always keep an eye on the campaign and keep looking for what’s working and what isn’t. Depending on the type of campaign their ever chances for you to make adjustments as the campaign goes along and keep optimizing it for better results.

Hence, you must keep an eye out for any mistakes. It can be related to posting the wrong thing or any grammatical errors. Always keep an eye out for them and remove them immediately. Look for social posts that are working very well and pay to boost them to generate even more results. Always have a back up planned and change for action if something is no longer working.

6.   Calculate your Return on Investment

Another important of having the goals discussed and set up first is because, in the end, you will have to pay attention to the return of investment. This finally decides whether your campaign was a success or a bust. What worked for you? What not? in the whole duration of your marketing campaign. This also allows you to understand where you were lacking and how possibly you can build a better marketing campaign next time around. 

So, how you can calculate your Return of Investment or ROI?

Well, there are few ways to do it.

Use the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) outlined when you established your goals, measure the success of your campaign. Yes, you’ll also require some tools like influencer marketing tools, like the ones I mentioned about earlier which also offers influencer marketing campaign analytics. But, there are still some other dependable tools that you can use.

For example, you can add UTM tracking codes to your campaigns’ links. These are custom parameters which are added at the end of a link to help you keep track of it. These codes will then allow you to monitor your campaign links in detail and help you establish your Return On Investment.

Conclusion

As you see, I have discussed six important points step by step to help you understand how to build an effective Influencer Marketing strategy to promote or build your brand. Everything boils down to a few significant points, which are:

●     Know your goals and your budget.

●     Know your influencer.

●     Set some KPIs.

●     Use the available tools smartly.

●     Keep track of your campaign always.

●     Have the results of your ROI measured from time to time

What next?

Get hands-on! Learn and practice influence marketing in PG-Strategic Digital Marketing by Great Learning. You can study as much as you want, but without practice, it will just stay knowledge.