Today, businesses have various options to promote their brands, products, and services. At the same time, due to the abundance of options, customers have doubts about which product or service to choose.
That’s why marketers appeal to authority and apply an influencer marketing strategy to promote goods.
In this article, you will know about fundamental influencer marketing tactics and some advanced tips on how to do influencer marketing right from the beginning.
What is Influencer Marketing
Before all, influencer marketing is a way for companies to promote their goods or services on social media with the help of people (influencers) who are authorities for the companies’ target audience. In other words, the brands contact influencers who agree to share the information about, discuss, or promote certain products among their audience.
As their followers appeal to them, consider them experts, or see them as role models, the brands will likely get prospects interested. It works by the principle of social proof, yet, the effect is more substantial as the influencer’s opinion and reach are more significant compared to ordinary methods.
How to Build an Influencer Marketing Strategy
To create an effective influence marketing strategy, you should take a structured and well-thought method. What does it mean? It implies having a plan, a clear objective, and using the available resources for greater results.
To achieve influencer marketing effectiveness, you should know why you will approach specific influencers and what they will bring you. Sounds simple? Yet, it will need thorough influencer marketing research so that you can align your vision with the influencer’s ideas.
From where to start? Consider the following influencer marketing activities:
1. Set the goal
When starting an influencer marketing strategy, you need to understand what you want to achieve. You may want to raise awareness about the product, improve sales, increase engagement, or generate leads, among other things. When you define it, you can switch to the next step.
2. Pick the right platform
Well, at this stage, you should reflect on where your audience hangs out and consider what dividends it can bring to you. For instance, if you target bloggers, then a guest post on an authoritative website or blog can be a solution.
If you are selling fashion goods with an aesthetic look, Instagram can be good. Notably, pick the place where you can find your audience, and do not forget about influencer marketing blogs.
3. Find influencers
The influencers should match your values and have similar values to make your influencer strategy work. That way, it would be organic. In this regard, you have to find the influencer that will match your goal, values, and vision you have. If you have a B2B niche, you need an expert with experience.
For general use products or those related to the fashion niche, you can resort to social media celebrities or bloggers. Yet, remember that you should make sure the influencer’s audience fits within your buyer’s persona. Thus, you may have a whole pool of influencers to select from.
4. Contact them
As soon as you have determined the influencer within the pool resulting from the research, you need to contact them. In the case of the social media opinion leaders, you have the function of a direct message. Besides, they usually leave their email in the bio. For experts with their blogs, you can use email finders that will help to find emails based on the corporate domain. In the case of LinkedIn, you can take advantage of email finder extensions.
5. Set the agreement
Online influencer marketing implies that you give the power to the influencers to promote a brand. In this regard, a brand may want to define the responsibilities and roles for parties to the collaboration. For instance, you may want to give more freedom in the content creation or development of your message. It is essential to find common ground where your values are underlined and the content suits the influencer. Moreover, there you can define the performance indicators to track the results and evaluate the effect.
Tips For Advanced Influencer Marketing
The block above illustrates the fundamentals of developing an influencer marketing plan. However, the effectiveness of the influencer marketing campaign usually depends on how you approach the influencers, engage with them, and concentrate on vital elements. A marketer should also focus on influencer marketing research and the creation of the vision. Let’s look at some of the influencer tips you can use:
Nurture before contacting
Before writing to any influencer, it is better to develop relationships. The best influencer marketing tactics contemplate following their posts and commenting on them for a while. Firstly, it will give you an idea of how they share content and whether your values align. Next, it will provide you with enough insights to develop understanding, as you will be able to provide value.
Also, writing comments and participating in their discussion will make you look familiar to them. It is important when you decide to extract their email with the email finder and send a letter to their inbox all of a sudden.
Besides, it is a good idea to nurture them as they grow. You can offer them products, and your coverage will improve with their growth. That’s why one-time cooperation is not advised, as the long-term partnership will likely bring you a sustainable effect.
Focus on audience
When you do influencer marketing research, concentrate on the audience you want to influence instead of influencers. The main reason is to affect them via your content and solutions. Thus, your main question should be, “Would the post or content piece be helpful for the influencer’s audience and simultaneously add to your promotion?”
In this regard, you can combine several tactics. Firstly, analyse the information you have on your audience. You can use some tools to create a map of your customer journey and combine them with influencer marketing programs. Then, find out where your prospect comes from. If you ask the most active users, they will give you insights.
After evaluating the customer persona, do the search on the landscape within social media. You can analyse hashtags, experts, topics, anything that allows knowing the trends. From there, you can find the best influencer and offer value that will answer the audience’s needs, benefitting both you and an influencer.
Communicate having a channel and context in mind
Importantly, when you design the influencer marketing strategy, you should see that the campaigns would be different depending on the platform. LinkedIn needs more facts and opinions; YouTube requires video integration, while Instagram users favour aesthetic looks.
Besides, the context sets the style of communication and the perception of the brand. If you see that the expert is rather informal with their followers, then pick the same communication style for your campaign. However, remember about your positioning and the image you want to project. It is important that the existing image and the one desired for the campaign are not in conflict with one another.
Favour engagement, not followers
Another critical thing to consider is the analysis of engagement. Nowadays, there are many people with followers. Yet, what matters is engagement. It defines the visibility of posts in social media and the effect of the sponsored post. For instance, you can find a person with five thousand followers, yet, if they have low engagement, you would want to pick a person with high engagement and 3 thousand followers, for instance.
For a brand, engagement plays a critical role, primarily if the audience is not differentiated. That’s why to look at how the audience reacts to influencer’s posts and whether your products would be interesting to it.
Give them freedom on content producing
Lastly, today many influencers have their content plans and vision of creating content. In this regard, a marketer should trust their idea of how to proceed with promotion campaigns. It is in the influencer’s interest to create content that will be exciting for their followers. Besides, they know them better.
Nevertheless, you need to define the boundaries which shall not be crossed concerning your values and brand’s perception. Try to document them in the agreement so that if any dispute arises, you can determine who is responsible.
