You spend hours racking your brains about the content angle, which influencers to work with and how to achieve that viral influencer marketing campaign. Well, to ensure that your hard work is not wasted, we have prepared an influencer marketing guide to ensure you are on the right track for your campaign.
Influencer marketing checklist: #1 You have chosen your influencer well
Choosing your influencers might be easy. However, choosing the right influencers is a lot harder than stead, when choosing your influencers, keep in mind your brand’s goal, the influencer’s content and how well does the influencer fit into your brand’s image.
If your brand’s goal is for sales conversion, choose influencers with a high engagement rate (meaning their followers are more interested in the content they post). This will increase the probability of sales conversion from an influencer marketing campaign.
On the other hand, if you are looking at brand awareness, you might prefer influencers with a large reach.
Other factors to consider include the relevance of the influencer. Does the influencer often post content related to your brand? Or have they mentioned liking your brand previously? These are important questions to keep in mind when choosing your influencers.
After all, it would be more convincing to work with influencers that believe in your brand and are relevant in your line.
Influencer marketing checklist: #2 You have brainstormed a content angle
Facebook alone holds a whopping 2.4 billion active users — you can imagine the sheer number of social media postings out there.
Therefore, behind every successful influencer marketing campaign is a good content angle. After all you are competing with billions of content creators on social media.
While you can always choose the ‘hold & pose’ option (where your influencers pose with a product), such an approach might not be as effective to attract eyeballs in the fast paced world of social media.
Thus, you can consider creating more innovative content that will allow your campaign to stand out from other traditional influencer marketing campaigns.
For an example of a well planned campaign, do look up Gap’s Styld.by Campaign. Going beyond dressing their influencers in GAP clothes (which a typical campaign might do), GAP allowed influencers to incorporate other brands into their outfits — based on the philosophy that most of us dress in different brands. The bid to remain relevant and relatable to their target audience was one of the driving forces behind the success of the campaign.
Influencer marketing checklist: #3 You have made an effort to communicate well with your influencers
Working with influencers is so much more than engaging their help in a campaign. You should always be in close contact with them to ensure an impactful campaign.
Communicating with your influencers helps to set expectations. It will be good to include them in your brainstorming sessions to hear their feedback. After all, they are the ones who knows their followers best.
Furthermore, constant communication ensure the correct message is being delivered onto social media. We all do not want a case where the brand’s image/product is inaccurately portrayed online.
Influencer marketing checklist: #4 You have vetted and checked through the whole campaign
It is always good to be extra careful in an influencer marketing campaign. After all, content released online can go viral before you have the chance to click the delete button.
You would not want a case like the Duchesnay influencer marketing campaign with Kim Kardashian. Her original postings for the pharmaceutical brand received bad publicity as the FDA deemed that it did not accurately reflect the limitations and risks of the drug. Such a case could have been avoided with careful vetting of the content posted (pictures, captions etc)
Influencer marketing checklist: #5 You used a variety of methods
This is a simple one. If possible, try to experiment with multiple social media platforms and respective functions when planning a campaign.
This is because various features on social media serves different purposes. For example, the Instagram live function is great for close interaction between influencers and their followers. After al, it allows live streamers to reply to comments in real time. On the other hand, traditional postings are often viewed by a larger number of people, since they are accessible at any time of the day for as long as possible.
Therefore, you should really try to explore and tap onto the varying methods you can use to carry out an influencer marketing campaign on social media.
Influencer marketing checklist: #6 You measure your results
You might think that your job is done once the influencer clicks upload to post the campaign content onto social media. However, this is a vicious mistake that you might be making. The last and arguably the most important step is to measure the campaign results.
Firstly, the measurement of results is an indication of whether your goals for this campaign has been met. For example, if your original goal was brand awareness, the total reach of an influencer marketing campaign can be a good indication of the success of a campaign.
Secondly, measuring your results using specific ROI indicators will not only help in indicating how well your campaign has done. It can help in identifying specific mistakes from your campaign, helping you make improvements in future.
For example, a campaign like a lower engagement rate (likes and comments) could be an indication of content that is overly common (therefore not attracting the interest of many). Therefore, our influencer marketing guide would really recommend you to go through key ROI indicators after every campaign!
A quick scroll through Instagram would reveal multiple influencer brand collaborations. They might seem easy, even effortless to some. However, there is actually a good amount of hard work that goes behind the content you see on social media. Therefore, do ask yourself these 6 questions from this influencer marketing guide before diving into an influencer marketing campaign to ensure your campaign is an impactful one!
Sources
Shanebarker, blog/influencer-marketing-fails/
Blog.hubspot.com, marketing/examples-of-influencer-marketing-campaigns
