Working with Influencers - 5 Simple Steps to Get Great ROI in 2020

According to many digital marketing experts like Gary Vaynerchuk, social media influencers can provide a significant ROI to the firm because the exposure to their audience can be significantly underpriced. However, this opportunity also can be a colossal waste of time and money. That is the reason why we at the Birchstone Associates have created a short Social Media Influencer 5-Step process I would like to share with you:

1. Verify how REAL is the Social Media Influencer's following. Why? Because many Social Media Influencers have inflated their numbers by buying bot followers and bot likes. Why is this a problem? Because these bots are not your customers and won't be buying anything from you, but business owners often pay higher engagement retainers due to these inflated numbers
2. Deploy Sales Tracking and Brand Monitoring Analytics across the company's digital assets. Make sure that there is a clear understanding of how social media influencer will be providing an ROI. Why? Because today many campaigns have a spray-and-pray approach to working with Social Media Influencers and after the campaign is over nobody at the company can't clearly say which influencer has provided the best delta in sales or brand development. How to solve it? Use modern CRM, and Digital Analytics deployed across all of your digital properties and to make sure data can freely follow your customer's journey. 
3. The Right Fit. Not all influencers are alike, so you need to make sure that first, you do a deep dive in who are your best customers and how similar they are to the audience of the Social Media Influencer.
4. Agreement on KPIs of the Campaign. Influencer must understand the business's goals and how the company will be evaluating their campaign. What we often see is that business leadership is hearing sales when an influencer is promising "likes." 
5. Test Run. Make sure not to sign up for a long term engagement until the company verifies all of the points above through live campaigns with the influencer. Our company often will engage an influencer for our client for about one month and monitor analytics to see how sound is business ROI and whether there is a foul play on the side of the influencer, such as fake bots that are trying to increase engagement numbers (likes, comments and followers).

I have created this post because one of my recent clients shared how his company signed up for a $140K engagement with their business and grossly under-delivered on their promise. Let me know if you have any additional questions I would love to provide more practical advice to fellow business professionals and business owners.

Birchstone Associates is a Los Angeles based marketing and business management consulting company. Company is founded by UCLA Anderson MBA Alum.