Influencer Marketing 2018

Having trouble with influencer marketing strategy? Making it easier with influencer marketing examples of creative influencer campaigns! With the advent of blogging and social media, influencers can reach people on exciting new levels. To take advantage of these shifts, an influential marketing campaign must have specific elements.

Define Your Goals

Obvious though this may sound, many people start an influencer campaign without a clear objective of what they want to achieve. Therefore, you should use your goal as an endpoint and create a campaign around it. Some influencer marketing strategies goals include:

• Increase Brand Awareness
• Drive Traffic to Content
• Boost Online Sales
• Increase Mobile App Installs
• Promote Seasonal Purchases

Identify Your Audience

If you market your business, you should have this information at hand but, depending on the scope of your influencer campaign, you may need to make adjustments. Start with:

• Where do they live?
• Which demographic groups are you trying to reach?
• What social media platform do they use?
• Who do they view as “experts” on the topics you want to promote?

Once you’ve reviewed this information you can identify the influencers that will effectively connect your brand to this audience.

Select Your Influencer

Create a pool of potential influencers by conducting online searches and scanning popular forums. Use analytics to identify trends on related topics and read posts to see who everyone is talking about. Once you’ve identified a few influencers, don’t be shy about asking them to give you additional names.

Narrow your list by relevance and influence. For relevance consider:

• What topics do they discuss?
• Whether their audience matches your target regarding age, gender, and location.
• If their personal brand a fit for your business brand.

If you find they have relevance to your target audience, determine if they have influence by reviewing their numbers including:

• Recent engagement rate: What is their average number of likes, shares, and comments over the last three months?
• Engagement growth rate: Is it growing and how fast?
• Comments: Are the comments real or spam (e.g. “#follow4follow”)?

It is an organic process

Unlike traditional marketing, this is a collaborative effort. Consequently, you are inviting influencers into the process. Expect to not have complete control over what influencers will say or do. To manage the contributors, create guidelines that include:

• Timelines
• Deliverables
• Content Limitations (topics, word count)
• Expectation of Results

Most importantly, remember that you want to use the influencers to promote your goods or brand. The influencers want to use this opportunity to expand their audience and raise their level of perceived authority. Thus, you must strike a balance, but do not lose sight of the fact that you brought this group together to serve your needs, and everyone else’s should be secondary.

Bottom Line

Influential marketing can create buzz for your brand or drive business to your website. Marketing efforts are compounded with each influencer you invite to join your project, and you can capitalize on their followers. This process can be challenging but, if done well, the results are worth the effort.