How much time do you spend on social media each day? Well, chances are that you look through your accounts at least once a day.
The social media phenomenon has given rise to a new marketing form. One of them being influencer marketing.
What is influencer marketing? And if you heard of it, you may be thinking “how influencer marketing works?”
Influencer marketing refers to the use of influencers to market a brand/product to your target audience.
Influencer marketing has been a buzzword amongst marketers as of late, but not everyone truly understands the gist of it. Therefore, today’s influencer marketing guide hopes to outline 8 steps to break down the process of influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing Made Simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #1. Start with your goals
Firstly, you should always have clear goals in mind. What do you wish to achieve out of this campaign? Brand awareness? An increase in sales?
Like any other marketing campaign, you should always define your goals. Defining your goals is not only useful when you measure the success of your campaign, it will also be useful to determine the general direction of the campaign.
For example, if your brand is aiming for brand awareness, the campaign might seek an educational approach. Instead of merely talking about the functions of the product/services, the campaign might want to talk about the vision/goal of the brand.
Likewise, if your end in mind in sales conversion, you might choose to include discount codes, or to focus the campaign on the benefits of your product.
However, do keep in mind a few things when setting your goals. Firstly, it must be measurable, either with quantitative or qualitative statistics. Secondly, it must be specific. For instance, if you want to work on branding, what type of brand do you want to be known as? An ethical brand? A trendy brand? Lastly, it must be realistic. While social media is known for its ability to make things go viral, goals must still be realistic.
Influencer Marketing Made Simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #2. Determine your campaign angle
This step is closely linked to your goal setting in step 1. To determine the type of content you want to post, where and how you want to deliver it, look at your goals.
Different goals and objectives will require implementing different campaign angles to achieve the results.
Do you want a campaign for branding purposes? Or do you want a campaign that focuses on sales conversion? Use these questions to determine what kind of direction your campaign is going to take.
Influencer Marketing Made Simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #3. Determine who you want to work with
Now that your goals and direction have been decided, it is time to decide who are the relevant influencers that you would like to work with to achieve these goals.
To pick the best-fit influencer for your campaign, it is not enough to focus on superficial numbers.
Other factors like relevancy, past interest in your brand, and followers demographics are important too.
For example, if your brand belongs to the F&B industry, you will want to approach food influencers (influencers that always talk about food). Such campaigns are likely to come across as more authentic and more relevant to your target group. This is because the followers of these influencers are likely to be foodies that would be more interested in what your brand has to offer.
To get the best of both worlds, you should also pick a good mix of macro-influencers and micro-influencers. Macro influencers refer to those with a large following while micro-influencers refer to those with higher engagement rates (but a smaller following).
Influencer Marketing Made Simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #4. Searching for your ideal group of influencers
source: Oberlo – 100 Best Instagram Hashtags for Likes in 2019
Now that you have an idea of the type of influencers you want to work with, start searching and approaching these influencers.
A good way to find influencers relevant to your brand is to check through those that have mentioned your brand before. For instance, they previously have reviewed your product online or raved about it on social media.
To add on, you can always search for influencers through relevant hashtags. For example, fashion influencers commonly use hashtags like #ootd. Searching up keywords related to your brand can help you find the relevant influencers you need for your campaign.
Next, approach these influencers for a collaboration. A simple way to do so would be to communicate with them via your brand’s social media account. Of course, you can also do so via email.
If you need help with selecting the right influencers, there are many agencies out in the market that can help you to do that.
Influencer Marketing Made Simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #5. Communicating and Creating content
Once the influencer agrees to a collaboration, you can move on to communicate the details of the campaign.
For a campaign to be truly persuasive, you need the message bearer (the influencer) to sound convincing. Therefore, your influencers should have a good understanding of your brand to sound convincing.
Thus, do not only communicate information about the deliverables (how many posts etc), do try to explain your brand’s goals, vision, and purpose to the influencer.
The conversation should also not be one-sided, you should hear what your influencers have to say about your campaign angle. After all, influencers are the ones that know their followers the best. Take in their opinions and give them sufficient space for them to use their creativity.
Influencer marketing Made simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #6. Checking through
This is an important but commonly neglected step — checking through your postings. You should always double-check the final content. After all, we would not want a campaign that would bring about a backlash.
Therefore, always ask yourself these questions when going through your content. Are the postings offensive? Do they represent my brand? As a brand marketer, we should be always be looking out for brand safety.
Influencer marketing Made Simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #7. Post & Promote
Now it is time to showcase the final product. Get your influencers to post their content online.
Your job does not stop here though. To maximize the success of a campaign you can always use your brand’s account to promote your influencers postings. For instance, if it is an Instagram story, get your influencers to tag you. This allows you to repost the sponsored content on your brand’s account.
Doing so has 3 benefits. Firstly, the postings are seen by a larger group of people. Secondly, reposting their content helps associate your brand with these influencers. Lastly, it helps build a relationship between your brand and the influencer you are working with.
Influencer marketing Made Simple | Influencer Marketing Step by Step Guide: #8. Monitoring your ROIs
source: Hopper HQ
How do you know your campaign has been successful? Well, there are a few key ROIs you can refer to.
Firstly, the reach of your campaign — how many people have seen my postings?
Secondly, the engagement rate— how many users have liked, shared or commented on my posts? Other ROIs include website traffic direction, sales revenue, and brand awareness.
Once you have determined your ROI, link it back to your original goals. Are your original goals met? If they are, identify what you did well to ensure future campaigns see similar levels of success.
If your original goals have not been met, ask yourself what went wrong to prevent making similar mistakes in the future.
Conclusion
We hope these influencer marketing guide helps to break down influencer marketing for you. The last step would be to not be apprehensive, try working with influencers today! Do share this influencer marketing guide to anyone you think will benefit from it.
Influencer Marketing Guide FAQs
In this section of influencer marketing guide, we are going to share some of the more commonly asked questions by our clients and the public.
Q) What are the steps to implement an Influencer Marketing campaign?
A) Here is the breakdown of Influencer Marketing Guide:
1) Start with your goals and objectives.
2) Determine your campaign angle.
3) Determine with influencers you want to work with.
4) Searching for your ideal group of influencers.
5) Communicating and creating content.
6) Checking through.
7) Post and Promote.
8) Monitoring your ROIs.
Q) Can I just use popular or influencer with huge number of followers to promote my content? In this way, the campaign would be more successful.
A) When it comes to selecting the right influencers, reach (which is the number of followers) is only one of the components that we look at. Always focus on the 3Rs – Reach, Relevance and Resonance. Reach is important because without people seeing and sharing the post, the marketing message cannot be spread. Relevance is how relevant the influencers are to the campaign angle, and how relevant the campaign is to the influencers’ followers. Resonance is the messages shared with the followers or audience, and they must be able to relate and resonate with. People are trained to ignore advertisements already, but if we do it with storytelling and experiential, they will take in your marketing message.
Q) Do brands need to leave the creative control entirely to the influencers?
A) Influencer marketing is not about leaving the entire creative control to the influencers. It is about co-creation content. It is important for brands to find out about their brand story, unique selling proposition and what is the marketing objectives they want to achieve using influencer marketing. With the information in mind, the next step is to think of the campaign angles and find the relevant influencers who can achieve the campaign angles. In Kobe, we have a trademarked canvas which we use for this purpose. It has allowed us to understand the brands better and find the right influencers for the influencer marketing campaigns.
Email us at contact@getkobe.com if you have any questions on influencer marketing and we would love to share your questions on our influencer marketing guide.
We hope this influencer marketing guide is able to help you kickstart your influencer marketing strategy.
Sources
topdogsocialmedia , 8-steps-effective-influencer-marketing-strategy
