Originally published at Rose Street Creative on March 10, 2020.
We all see it while scrolling through Instagram, #ad or #sponsored on a celebrity post promoting a product that they use, letting their followers know how much they love this product and how it has drastically changed their lives. But what does influencer marketing mean to businesses?
Influencer marketing is a cost-effective way for brands to increase brand awareness, purchase intent, and brand interest through targeting their niche markets. A study completed in 2020 by Statista showed:
44% of respondents shared that they already (learned about and subsequently) purchased a product because of a social media influencer.
Why is that? Identifying an influencer that resonates with your customer base is important in building that trust authority and engagement with your consumers.
Identifying Key Influencers
Take a look at your audience. What are your customers’ interests? Who do they follow? By knowing the ins and outs of your customers and their purchasing habits you can start to identify key influencers that will resonate the most with current and future customers. Choosing a compelling set of influencers that will work to represent your brand is key in driving post effectiveness and impressions.
Most of you have a business goal in mind, be it increase engagement, boost authenticity, or drive conversions & web traffic. Determining how these goals fit into your influencer campaign will help clearly define your strategy and the types of influencers you want to represent your brand.
Your business’s budget and business size justify the types of influencers you want to collaborate with. Below is a breakdown of the scale of influencers. (Typically, businesses focus on 3 — Micro, Macro, and Mega.)
How to reach out to potential Influencers:
Depending on the level of influencer you are targeting, the initial contact for partnership can be the most difficult.
Most celebrities have PR agencies representing them and their brand. My recommendation for reaching out to work with a Mega influencer or celebrity is to partner with influencer agency.
If you are looking to start small and reach localized and niche markets, reach out to the influencer from your brand page with a personalized message. Let them know how much you are a fan of their brand, what you like most and how your partnership can be mutually beneficial.
Developing your strategy
Just like your social media strategy, your influencer strategy needs to be planned well in advance of the activation.
Identify key areas in your communications plan where you can tie in your influencer pillar. Are there key product launches coming up where you would like to grow product awareness? Does your product sales increase during certain holidays?
Take advantage of local trends and holidays that are popular with your audience to build out your communication strategy with the influencer(s).
Working with more established influencers (micro & macro) relieves the stress of having to handhold during the content curation process. Most of these influencers are already producing agency style content for their brand, so they know what works for their feed and their audience.
Provide the influencer with a briefing sheet with your business identity, tone, guidelines, and samples of previous work so they can start developing what works for them and your brand.
Measuring success
There are multiple ways to measure the success of your campaign — reach, impressions, engagement, and follower count. But, you should also measure the success of your activation against your ongoing organic or paid campaigns.
Was there an increase in conversions or click-throughs that could lead to sales? These specific actions show that you the consumer followed through and the post-converted into a click-through.
As you can see, there are many ways to measure success, most of which depend on your goals and objectives.
If you did not see conversions or an engagement jump, listen to what your customers said. Did they provide product feedback on the influencers’ posts that you can incorporate into your overarching communications strategy or product development? There is value in listening to what your customer says — even if the activation was not successful.