While an influencer marketing strategy might seem pretty straightforward, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Building relationships with influencers and establishing effective campaigns for exposure can be extremely challenging without the proper knowledge and strategy. Thankfully, MuteSix is here to help with these 10 tips for profitable influencer marketing and a high engagement rate.
Before you begin your influencer marketing campaign, you first need to determine who your target audience is since this will determine the entire course of your campaign. If you’re not quite sure who your target audience is, think about who would want to buy your product or who already is buying your product.
Are they young professional women ages 25 to 35? Are they established businessmen ages 40 to 60? Are they teenage girls ages 13 to 18? While it helps to start out with demographics, you really need to go beyond basic age and gender groups to better target your ideal audience and potential customers.
The best way to do this is to come up with a customer persona that goes deeper into insights like who a person is, what they enjoy, what they buy, what they value, and so on. A customer persona should look like an actual human being rather than just a generalized group of people.
Next, you need to determine what the goals of your influencer campaign will be. If you’re a company that’s just starting out, you may want to focus on building brand awareness and getting your name out there. If you’re a more established brand but are trying to promote a new product launch, you may want to focus more on leads and conversions.
Brand awareness, leads, and conversions are all great goals for an effective influencer marketing campaign.
Your budget will also determine the course of your marketing campaign and can potentially limit what social media channels you use and what influencers you can afford to work with, like celebrities as opposed to influences with a lower number of followers.
If you’re a new brand that’s working with a limited marketing budget, you likely can’t afford to work with mega-influencers like Kylie Jenner. The good news is that it’s totally possible to have success in influencer marketing with a more modest budget so long as you use it wisely.
Now that you have a better idea of who your audience is and what your goals are, you can choose the best social media platform to cater to these elements and increase average engagements. Some social media platforms are more popular with certain demographics. For example, TikTok is a great platform to target younger people, whereas Facebook is an ideal platform to target older people. Instagram and YouTube can be used to reach wider groups of people.
After you’ve laid the groundwork for your influencer marketing campaign, it’s time to start researching potential brand ambassadors. Go to your platform of choice and start searching for some of the hot keywords in your industry. For example, if you’re a fitness brand, you will need to find a fitness influencer.
Go to TikTok or Instagram or whichever platform you are on and search for a topic like “fitness,” “working out,” “exercise,” or “weight loss.” See which content creators and blogs frequently come up in the results and recommendations. Check out their social media profiles and start building a list of potential partners based on what you see on their profiles.
Finally, it’s time to choose the influencer you’re going to work with. Keep in mind that when it comes to influencer marketing trends, follower count is not the most important factor. Instead, you need to focus on the influencer that best fits your brand and will best resonate with your target audience to increase sales.
In fact, micro-influencers are particularly effective as they can build more of a dedicated following and develop more personal, long-term relationships with their followers. Micro-influencers are influencers that have less than 10,000 followers on their platform of choice. Micro-influencers often have more specific niche areas that brands can then tap into through a partnership.
So, before you automatically choose the influencer with the most followers, ask yourself if you want this person representing your brand. Ask yourself if their values align with yours, keeping in mind that any scandals or drama that they are involved in won’t just reflect negatively on them but on you, too!
Once you’ve made your final selection of the influencer you want to work with, you need to initiate contact with them. Most influencers will have an email address in their bio that you can contact with inquiries. However, if you’re not able to find an email address, you can just message them directly on the social media platform.
In terms of the content of the message you send, you need to be extremely strategic. After all, influencers likely receive messages from many brands asking to partner with them. So why should they choose to work with you over the competition?
In your pitch, you need to explain why this partnership would be beneficial for them, as influencing can and should be a mutually-beneficial relationship between an influencer and a brand.
You also need to be as specific as possible in your pitch. Messages that just state “would love to collaborate, please email me back” won’t get a response. Instead, you need to provide information about what you want them to promote, how, why, and when. If you are gifting them a product, be clear about that as well.
It always helps to include a deadline in your pitches to add some level of urgency to your inquiry. Plus, it also gives you the freedom to move on to the next influencer on your list if you don’t end up hearing back by the specified deadline.
While you should be specific in terms of information and expectations, it’s still important to give the influencer creative freedom over how they actually promote your brand and product. After all, effective influencers are expected to be authentic and trustworthy. Their dedicated followings would likely notice if they were reading directly from a script that didn’t seem to match their regular content.
Influencers have established lucrative careers thanks to their expertise and creativity—so let them use it within your marketing campaign for the best possible results.
Speaking of results, you also need to come up with a way to measure the campaign’s success. These metrics will vary based on the goals of the campaign but can usually be measured with relevant key performance indicators or KPIs.
For example, if you’re focusing your campaign on building brand awareness, you might want to track KPIs like impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per thousand impressions (CPM).
On the other hand, if you’re focusing your campaign on boosting conversions, you might want to track KPIs like revenue, conversion rate, generated leads, cost per acquisition (CPA), and average order value (AOV).
Clearly, a lot of work goes into establishing a successful influencer marketing campaign. And while tips can be helpful, they don’t actually do the work for you. So if you’re looking for someone to do all the work for you and get you the best possible results, you should consider working with an influencer marketing agency.
MuteSix is an influencer marketing agency that has extensive experience working with influencers big and small on a wide range of social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and more. MuteSix has already established relationships with tons of influencers and makes securing the right partnership easier than ever.
From there, they help guide the influencer through the campaign—tracking your results along the way and making any necessary tweaks to boost effectiveness. So instead of doing all this work yourself, reach out to MuteSix for a complimentary marketing consultation to see how we can help you with influencer marketing.
Sources:
How to Find the Right Social Media Influencer for Your Campaign | Inc.com