As consumers become more digitally connected, influencer marketing has grown in popularity as a marketing tool to reach the more tech savvy consumer. Influencer marketing is essentially when a business utilizes a public figure or influential leader to recommend their product to a specific audience. Typically, influencers have a large following across social media platforms to capture a large segment of a market. Influencer marketing can be a successful technique, as consumers are more likely to purchase a product that is recommended by a person they trust over a normal advertisement.
If you are looking to implement influencer marketing into your brand strategy, it may seem overwhelming. However, we have broken down the process of how to build an influencer marketing strategy into seven easy steps, so that you can easily capitalize on this growing tool.
- Determine Your Goals
The first step in building an influencer marketing strategy is to clearly define the goals that you aim to achieve with this strategy. This goal will help you to work backward to understand which preliminary steps must be taken first to achieve this goal. Additionally, this will help provide milestones to ensure that your campaign is carried out as planned. Some examples may include, increasing engagement on a specific social media platform such as TikTok or increasing sales of a certain product that you are trying to promote.
- Outline your Target Audience
When determining which influencers to work with it is crucial to understand who your brand is trying to reach and what that influencer’s audience looks like to ensure that these groups overlap. Features to consider may be psychographic, demographic, or preferred channel, or buyer lifecycle stage. For example, if your brand wants to target users on TikTok, you will want to select an influencer that has a large audience on TikTok and has proficient skills on the platform. Alignment on this aspect of building the campaign is key!
- Determine Your Budget
It is important to understand how much money you have in your budget to carry out an influencer marketing campaign. This will likely determine the parameters of your campaign including which creators you can work with based on their rates, how much product you can provide them with, and how much and what kind of content that you expect them to produce. Your budget will also help you to determine whether you are paying an influencer commission, a flat rate, or simply a gifted product. Some influencers will accept gifted products in exchange for content, but these will likely be smaller creators with less of a following. Most influencers will expect some sort of flat rate payment to promote your products.
- Select a Type of Campaign
The next step is to choose what kind of campaign the influencer will be doing. This includes creating sponsored content, mentions on social media, discount codes, or guest posting. Ultimately, the type of campaign that you choose will depend on your brand’s goals and target audience’s preferences.
- Determine Which Social Media Platform You Will Use
When building an influencer campaign, one of the last steps is to choose which social media platform to use. This will all depend on what platforms best align with your brand and goals for the campaign.
- Decide Which Influencers to Use
Once you have made a clear outline of what you would like your campaign to look like, it is time to find influencers that are on brand with your business that would like to work with you. When finding an influencer that is on brand for your business, you should look at factors like who their followers are, what kind of content they typically post, and what social media platform they do best on. For example, if you are looking to promote beauty products, you should find an influencer who regularly posts makeup tutorials and has an audience that is interested in learning about make-up and wants to find recommendations for products.
- Track the Key Performance Indexes (KPI) of the Campaign
Once you have selected an influencer, they have created their content, and the content has gone live, it is time to track the success of the campaign. Depending on the goals for your campaign, you may want to track different metrics such as traffic driven to the website, engagement on different platforms, or conversions. These metrics can help you gauge the success of the campaign by determining the return on investment and help you assess whether this is a partnership that you should continue to pursue in the future.
Influencer marketing can be an excellent tool if implemented correctly. By following these seven simple steps, you can successfully build an influencer marketing strategy that aligns with the goals of your brand. Looking for a FREE review of your books? Contact Profit Meadow Bookkeeping today.