Knowing how to set up your influencer marketing campaign the right way is critical to your success. What does it look like to “press GO”.
In this quick guide, we’re going to discuss 5 simple steps to help you get started:
- Establish Your Goals
- Pick the Right Influencers
- Establish Influencer Marketing Opportunities
- Track Results
- Tweak and Repeat
It’s important to cast a wide net when you are first getting started with influencer marketing. This will help you compare results and identify which influencers are the better fit for your brand.
Step One: Establish Your Goals
What end result do you hope to achieve by the end of your influencer marketing campaign?
Ideally, you have a primary and secondary goals in mind for your influencer marketing campaign.
Here are just a few other marketing goals for which influencers are uniquely gifted to help you achieve:
- Increased sales
- User-generated content
- Increased website SEO
- Direct engagement with your brand’s social media channels
- Inform your audience
- Increased brand sentiment
Step Two: Pick the Right Influencers
Researching potential influencers for your brand is the most important step when learning how to set up your influencer marketing campaign. The wrong influencer will not only generate poor results; they may negatively impact your brand.
Real Vs. Fake
In influencer marketing, you need to examine an influencer’s engagement metrics and differentiate those metrics from “vanity” metrics. Instagram, for example, found that vanity metrics – follower counts and likes – metrics by which to establish authentic engagement between an influencer and their audience is vital. Other factors to also take into account;
The credibility of an influencers’ audience forms a big part of the influencer selection process. Is the influencer’s following genuine? Or has a large portion been bought ? Do the followers fit the demographic of the campaign, brand or product? Is this the audience you want to reach? And is the engagement largely positive? Such information is obtainable through Influencer Marketing platforms.
To get a better sense of the influencer’s authority you need to analyse post shares, read positive comments underneath the posts and check ongoing user-generated content.
Influencer Types, Industries, and Approach:
Micro Influencers curate a social media audience of between 1k and 50k followers.
Power Influencers meaningfully engage an audience size of 50k and above.
And then there are Celebrities.
It is best practice to work with a mixture of Micro & Power Influencers as their audiences are more engaging, authentic and give more of a relevant customer base.
Agreeing on Terms
You and your influencer must be on the same page about influencer marketing ethics.
It is crucial that you and your marketing team collaborate with your legal team to develop solid T&Cs for all your influencers.
Know your influencer’s price and establish what the payment is and when you will disperse those payments. It is vital your influencer is fully aware of such processes to avoid any unnecessary issues.
Keep tabs on your influencer to make sure that they remain compliant, but refrain from trying to control their honest efforts to help you achieve your marketing goals.
Nurturing Collaboration Between Your Brand and Your Influencer’s Brand
Influencers form a strong bond with their followers, the interactive nature of the relationship informs the type of engagement they receive. Be clear on what you need from your campaign and make sure they understand your brand and objectives. Trust their expertise and do not micromanage them. They can engage members of their audience so let them be creative!
Allow influencers to embody their marketing through the same approach that grabbed your attention in the first place.
Step Three: Establish Influencer Marketing Opportunities
Typically, you would discuss opportunities with your influencers during your initial email introduction. But just in case you’ve not established your influencer marketing campaign approach, it’s important to get on the same page.
Here are just a few examples of influencer marketing opportunities that might work with your brand:
- Product Reviews
- Product Giveaways
- Sponsored Social Media Posts
- Guest Blog Posts
Once you both have what you need to set up and run your influencer marketing campaign, sit back and let your influencer perform their magic.
Step Four: Track Results
After a month, you should be seeing notable traction on your influencer marketing campaigns. Take the time to track those results. This will help you establish your influencer marketing ROI. In time, you will need to look into a third-party platform that can help you maintain and scale up your influencer marketing results.
Short-Term ROI
Usually, your short-term ROI pertains to sales generated directly by your influencer marketing campaign. Of course, increased sales are a wonderful win for your organization. That being said, don’t forget that your ROI is much broader than those initial sales.
Long-Term ROI
When you set your goals in the beginning, you should have defined ways to measure whether or not you’ve met those goals. Studies show that increased user-generated content & brand awareness, in the longer term, leads to more sales increase.
Step Five: Optimise & Repeat
Continue to iterate your influencer marketing techniques. Debrief with your top-performing influencers, make necessary adjustments, and then relaunch.
As you become more experienced in managing your influencer marketing campaigns, you will intuitively know how to set up your influencer marketing campaigns for even better results.
Are You Using the Best Tools to Set Up and Manage Your Influencer Marketing Campaign?
Setting up and managing your influencer marketing campaigns the right way takes time and careful planning & monitoring. Launching Influencer Marketing at scale manually is a mammoth task.
IMPACT built by Audience2Media is an influencer marketing tool that streamlines time-consuming repetitive tasks, helps you more easily manage your communication with influencers, provides true revenue attribution and reports campaign data in real-time to allow maximum efficiency.
