Influencer Strategy

   Some people hate the term “influencer marketing.” Dress it however you like, but building relationships with world-class bloggers, organizational leaders, and public figures works. It allows you to capture a wider audience and build new business opportunities. According to AdWeek, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from their friends and family over branded advertising or content. 

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While the early days of influencer marketing were all about celebrity influencers and social media stars, people soon realized an influencer’s ability to reach and influence an audience of your target consumers, and carry your brand message authentically was far more important than their reach alone. Influencer marketing is leveraging the reach of an existing influencer who has built a large following and strong brand reputation in a particular niche to support your brand, endorse your product, or co-create content, with the intent to increase brand awareness and drive sales. Roughly 67 percent of marketers report that they are engaged in some form of influencer marketing, a number that’s likely to grow as social media influencers gain more mainstream exposure.

Guest posting, sponsored content, re-targeting, co-creation, competitions, mentions on social, discount codes, and more are terrific examples of influencer marketing campaigns. Instagram has exploded in the last few years, and recently exceeded 1 billion users. This was announced in tandem with the launch of IGTV (Instagram TV), which along with Instagram Stories represents a concerted effort by Instagram to push into the video space. Collaborating with top Instagram influencers is a great way to position your product or service in a visually striking and highly personalized way. It tends to have a high concentration of influencers in fashion and beauty, travel and hospitality, lifestyle, fitness, food and other verticals.

They are also jumping on trends such as real-time social to hand over the reigns to influencers for a more authentic experience, trading the perceived brand control of static social for performance increases from Snapchat’s 10 billion daily views and Facebook Live’s 3x longer watch times. Social influencer marketing is more accessible than ever to brands. As one of the most effective forms of promoting a business, it’s increasingly used as a means of increasing brand awareness, gaining more traffic and more engagement, and boosting overall sales. One of the best ways to show the return on your investment is a influencer marketing campaign is to determine a dollar value for the content itself, the audience it reached, and the engagement it received to calculate a Total Media Value of your influencer content.

The data you gather will help decide which influencer channels, platforms, and content formats generated optimal results, ultimately allowing you to optimize your influencer marketing strategy for your next campaign. If you create an influencer marketing strategy that involves guest posting or creating content for the influencer’s website, you will have the best success if you present ideas the influencer can’t refuse. For an influencer marketing campaign to be successful, you need quality content for your influencers to share. A critical component of an effective influencer marketing campaign is establishing a trusted relationship with a relevant influencer, one who’s in tune with your audience’s needs and desires and whom your audience will look to when they’re making purchase decisions.

It makes sense that you carry out a Content and Opportunity Audit at the start of your process to better understand the needs of your target audience. Carry Out a Content and Opportunity Audit It makes sense that you carry out a Content and Opportunity Audit at the start of your process to better understand the needs of your target audience. For brands, partnering with bloggers can also be a great way to drive brand awareness, sign-ups, website traffic, promotions, and other direct-response KPIs. Successful sponsored blogs also have the unique advantage of building organic search traffic over time, meaning a single blog post could lead to ongoing returns over several years as it appears in search engine results. Influencer marketing works because of the high amount of trust that influencers have built up with their following, and recommendations from them serve as a form of social proof to your brand’s potential customers.

A successful influencer marketing strategy helps you increase brand exposure, build authority, and connect with new audiences. At a fundamental level, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers–individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche. If you’re using social media often, then you’re probably already aware of some of the influencers in your niche. However, for many influencer marketing campaigns, you’ll need to find and reach out to a much larger number of influencers. Thus if you wish to undertake a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to find the people who your target audience look up to as thought leaders.

Measure the Results of Your Influencer Campaigns Ultimately the success or otherwise of your influencer campaign comes back to the objective you set at the start of the process. When you complete an influencer marketing strategy campaign, it can feel like a victory just to see the brand mentioned or shouted out on social media. A robust influencer marketing strategy will often include macro-influencers, “power middle” influencers, micro-influencers, brand ambassadors, brand advocates, employees, and even celebrities, as needed. As you create your plans, use one or more of these ideas to create a customized influencer marketing strategy that works for your brand and audience..

There’s no doubt about the fact that that influencer marketing is huge these days, with more than 70% of brands using influencers as a part of their marketing strategy this past year. To find brands and companies that are authoritative in the leadership space, you could use the Share of Voice Tool to find a list of sites that are driving a lot of traffic for that keyword. The majority of these brands found success -- and indeed influencer marketing can be an effective tool for newer entrepreneurs who are scrambling to get a piece of the action or even for businesses who are already established and are looking for new ways to reach certain audiences. An excellent influencer marketing strategy targets key influencers that could relay an organization’s messaging or product to their target market, or to an influencer’s engaged audience. Once you’ve determined your influencer marketing strategy – its duration and its spread (the number of posts daily, weekly, or monthly) – co-creating is the next logical step.

In the world of influencer marketing strategy, many brands simply opt to send a product sample to the influencer and wait for the related post to appear. Over 15 million viewers spend an average of 95 minutes per day on Twitch, which represents over double the time spent on any other social channel. A slew of brands have stepped in to leverage this engagement — largely gaming companies, although brands like Coca-Cola, Old Spice, South Park Studios and KFC are experimenting with Twitch influencer sponsorship as well. Twitch is emerging quickly, and represents a powerful new channel for brands looking to innovate and reach highly attentive audiences.

One of my favorite parts is that you can look up influencers’ based on their followers and demographics (location, language, age group, gender, niche) and you can even check what other brands they’ve worked with before – this way, you can make sure you’re reaching the right target audience. Leveraging micro-influencer collaborations is a promising influencer marketing tactic that can help you efficiently engage your target audience. By actively listening to your influencers you can understand the types of conversations your target audience are having. Influencer marketing is a strategy that identifies people who have a strong influence on a brand’s industry or target audience.

Another handy tool is Influencer Marketing Hub’s Instagram Influencer Earnings Calculator, which breaks down the user’s follower count, number of posts, number of likes, number of comments, estimated earnings per post, and the extremely helpful engagement rate.

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