Your 5-Step Road Map to an Effective Influencer Program

Influencer marketing has been around for decades but it's becoming more widely adopted since the uptake of social media and online marketing.

 Now, since more and more brands are turning to influencer marketing over traditional advertising and marketing strategies, it's important to understand how to kick off an effective program, or run the risk of wasting A LOT of time and money.

 So let's take a closer look at how to launch an influencer program in five easy steps.

 Step 1: Create an influencer marketing strategy with clear goals

 Before you reach out to influencers, or even login to check out relevant hash tags on your social media accounts, it's important to be clear about what you want your influencer marketing program to achieve. Setting out on any journey without a destination in mind is never a good idea.

 To ensure you remain focused and on track, you need to develop a clear, mapped out strategy that includes your end goal, how you will measure success, and a detailed outline of your budget. Not only will this help steer your course, it will ensure that everyone who’s working on your campaign is clear on what you’re trying to achieve, their roles in achieving these outcomes and the steps needed to make it happen.

 Step 2: Choose your influencers

 Selecting the right influencer/s s is one of the most important steps in any influencer marketing campaign. That's because a good selection will boost your brand in multiple ways, but the wrong one will be a waste of time at best. At worst, aligning your brand with the wrong influencer could have a disastrous impact on your brand's reputation and image. Crisis management anyone?

 So when assessing potential influencers, there are three considerations you need to ponder:

• How relevant are they to your brand? Is this influencer's target audience a good match with yours? Don’t make the mistake of approaching every single influencer in your industry – you want to stick to the ones who are followed by your target customers when it comes to age, gender and spending habits. 
• How wide is their reach? It seems obvious that the higher the reach of an influencer, the more people are going to be exposed to your brand. However, the reach of an influencer is about more than just their own follower numbers since the ripple effect can flow on to their followers’ followers and beyond. To make a more accurate assessment of the true reach of any influencer, check how many views or page impressions the influencer has for each post. This measure is far more meaningful and will inform how many people are actually viewing and consuming their content. Just as important is checking which social platforms they favour so you can gauge whether amplification of your message on their preferred platform/s is likely to reach your desired audience.
• How much do they actually influence people? Influence is not just about visibility, it’s about affecting the behaviour of the right people. Influence is why it’s important not to judge a person solely on how many followers they have. If you want to be sure the person you’re targeting is actually an influencer, you will need to look at the levels of engagement on their social media posts, how fast their engagement levels are growing and whether or not they are followed by other influencers. Personally, I'm less impressed by large follower numbers. Instead, I'm more interested in influencers with smaller, more engaged followers (aka 'microinfluencers') because these influencers' opinions are more likely to sway my target audience's purchasing decisions.

I'm more interested in influencers with smaller, more engaged followers (aka 'microinfluencers') because these influencers' opinions are more likely to sway my target audience's purchasing decisions.

 Step 3: Reach out to your chosen influencers

 Once you’ve narrowed down your choice of influencers to the ones who are the most relevant, have a wide reach and show high levels of engagement, the next step is to approach them. Building a positive relationship from the start is going to be crucial to the success of your influencer marketing program.

 There are a few seemingly natural, organic ways you can connect and build relationships with influencers that take time, like:

• Following them on social media and commenting on their posts.
• Sharing their content.
• Quoting them in blog posts.

Through the laws of reciprocity, you'll find that many influencers will want to 'thank you' for the mention either directly or (best yet) by promoting your post, which mentions them, to their own networks, thereby elevating you in the hearts and minds of their audience.

While this a great long-term strategy for building relationships with influencers, the fastest way to initiate contact is to send an outreach email. Generally, I've found this approach works best if you're looking to build a formal, paid relationship with an influencer. In this case it's important to be clear from the outset on what you're looking for from them, and what you have to offer in return. And while not everyone will be interested in working with you, it's better if they indicate that up front, rather than when you've invested time and money nurturing this relationship.

But it's also important to explore relationships that offer money-can't-buy rewards for those microinfluencers who genuinely love your brand and what you have to offer. These sorts of influencers are worth their weight in gold because they are often so much more invested in their relationship with the brand and value the sorts of incentives that only you can provide.

"It's also important to explore relationships that offer money-can't-buy rewards"

A particularly powerful, and often overlooked subgroup of these 'super fans' are your own people. And it's funny, when I suggest organisations approach their people to be champions in their influencer program, I'm met with a range of objections; most commonly: "But we're only a small organisation" or "My staff wouldn't want to share our branded content with their own social networks".

The funny thing is, these frequent objections are not based in reality. In fact, in my experience, the reverse is true.

When we started our influencer platform a few years ago, we would have grudgingly agreed with these objections. But back then, I was basing my assessment on my preconceived ideas about what influencer marketing was, and what was needed to drive an influencer program that generated serious results.

Fast forward to now, and I know that a network of nine engaged microinfluencers (with average follower numbers of approximately 2,000) can amplify branded content and boost online traffic by more than 400%. Not only that, I also know that brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when distributed by your team individually, than when the same message is shared by the brand itself. Likewise, brand messages reach 561% further when shared by your people than if shared via your official brand social channels.

I also know first hand that keeping your people abreast of your organisation's product lines, various initiatives and successes not only informs them of what's going on within an organisation (resulting in greater engagement), it also empowers these people to want to share this content externally to their own networks.

As a result of my experience in this area, I think it's a major failing for organisations not to look within for internal influencers to champion the cause.

As a result of my experience in this area, I think it's a major failing for organisations not to look within for internal influencers to champion the cause.

 Step 4: Plan the specific actions your influencer will perform

 To avoid any misunderstandings, it’s important to formalise any agreements you have with professional influencers you're paying to participate in a campaign, that outline exactly what they will do, how often they will mention your brand, and what happens if there is a dispute. Getting all this worked out upfront can save you a lot of stress later on.

 Because each influencer will probably have different strengths and talents, any plan you make should be tailored to each person individually. For example, if your influencer is a big YouTube star, you may want to focus on video content, but if they're active on Twitter, mentions of your brand in their tweets is probably going to make more sense.

 Some common actions that influencers perform for brands include wearing products and giving credit, sharing pictures and providing exclusive discounts on your products or services, or providing a review or personal recommendation to their followers.

 Step 5: Measure the results

 If you want to be sure your influencer marketing campaign is working, you’ll need to measure your results, in particular your return on investment. There are a number of different ways to track the results of an influencer marketing campaign, depending on your original goals, which include:

• Website traffic increases
• Subscriber count increases
• Sales increases
• Coupon-related sales
• Number of online mentions of your brand or hash tag
• Increase in followers on your social media accounts

 Whatever your goals, it's important to track these to identify which influencer marketing tactics are working and what might make sense to tweak or abandon altogether.

While for many, employing an influencer marketing program may still be a novelty, bear in mind that Google saw a 325% increase in "influencer marketing" searches in 2018, which would suggest that this isn't just a fad. Rather, with the amount of infrastructure built around the concept, it’s looking set to dominate the online marketing industry well into the future.

Google saw a 325% increase in "influencer marketing" searches in 2018

 A well thought out and executed influencer marketing program can bring great results for your brand, increase your visibility and extend your reach online. It can also help you build trust and credibility at a fraction of the cost of more traditional forms of advertising – so if you haven't tried it yet, it's well worth a look.

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Bec Derrington is the CEO and founder of free publicity platform SourceBottle; and influencer marketing made easy (and affordable) platform Influencer HUB. 

She helps brands get their stories amplified by the media and microinfluencers and generate powerful (and often game-changing) results. 

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