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Having selected and contacted a suitable influencer, the next step is to design and agree on the campaign. As this process is central to the collaboration, certain difficulties can arise. Your objective as a brand is to get your message across as clearly as possible throughout your Influencer marketing strategy – and we’re going to help you do that with our complete guide to your influencer marketing strategy.
At the same time, the influencer doesn’t want to lose their individual tone or uniqueness. To aid the process, the most important thing is to have a very clear idea of what you want for your brand out of this campaign, then plan to make it happen. That way, you will be able to make concise proposals to the influencer when discussing the type of content that will be produced.
This is important because their content will inspire your followership it post similar content with your products – something that will establish a User Generated Content strategy for your brand. For example, Unisa, an international shoe brand, demonstrates the direct benefits a brand receives when they reward their online community with recognition through their 16.03% increase of conversion rate.
But a lot of it starts with your influencers and how well you communicate with them.
One of the most relevant results from influencer studies is that the majority of influencers consider it very valuable to have brand collaboration when it comes to creating a message. Thus, it is important to give them clear guidelines about the type of communication you’re looking to achieve.
Provide them with useful details, which they wouldn’t find from other sources – such as brand trivia and product history, as well as professional resources like product photos or even the chance to call on a team of production staff. By no means, however, does this mean that the influencer should simply post a message that has been created by the brand. The message needs to be the fruit of a collaborative process.
Working as a team involves taking the best that each contributor has to offer in order to end up with a solid end product. The influencer knows their public (which is also your public) and knows how to approach them; you know your brand, your product and the benefits that it offers. Make the most of this knowledge pairing.
In a 2018 study by Launchmetrics, 63% of influencers listed “valuable content for my brand” as their number one motivation for working with a brand. As you can see, influencers value the support that comes with content collaboration.
Content creation is a stressful practice these days, and everyone wants new things to post. This is where you have a leg-up as a brand. You’re offering them something new, and, if you’re creative, you can offer them something irresistible – for you both. The collaboration, then, is above all a matter of developing a win-win situation where both you and the influencer will benefit on a professional level.
As with any other strategy, the first issue for your influencer marketing strategy is to clearly understand what you want to achieve. Your aim might range from something small such as getting a certain number of likes on a photo to something much bigger like reaching a specified number of daily sales. Other examples of campaign objectives could be: garner loyalty in new customers, generate buzz around your brand, achieve sales conversion rates, establish a relationship with the public, improve B2B ties, increase the number of installations of your app, get a certain number of users posting on your hashtag, to name but a few.
This first step will define the whole influencer marketing strategy, meaning that it’s crucial to get things as clear as possible before the planning stage. Try to set out realistic, quantitative aims that will be measurable over time – that way you can take that information and analyze it in the future. (Meaning your campaigns just keep getting better!)
As outlined in the previous section, the entire strategy will unfold from the central campaign objective. Once you’ve clarified what you wish to achieve, the rest of the strategy will develop from it.
One of the most important factors to take into account is the budget for your campaign. First and foremost, you’ll need to determine how much you’re going to invest before calculating how much the return will be. Remember that the costs can include diverse expenses such as research, product samples, special promotions for the public and the cost of the strategy-planning itself. 60% of professionals in the same study by Launchmetrics on influencers have confirmed that their influencer marketing budgets will grow in the next year.
What about yours? Is your budget growing? Does your campaign have many messages or just one? Does it need one big-name influencer or lots of smaller-scale ones at the same time? Do you have ample time to plan the campaign content or do you need to act right now?
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. In the short run, this practice can lead to disappointing results like an inadequate message. However on some occasions it can result in an instant hit, especially when timing and spontaneity are taken advantage of.
A different, generally more effective way of doing things is to plan a campaign that will be sustainable over time. A perfect example of this can be seen in many fashion campaigns. In this sphere, what tends to give better results is to outline a campaign many months before launch, including all seasons and collections for the upcoming year, anticipating its focus.
But what kind of content are you going to request from your influencers? Event hosting? Promotion on social media? Affiliate links? Sponsored posts?
85% of influencers have reported sponsored content as the most requested influencer service. But this ultimately comes down to what you’re looking to achieve. Don’t just do it because you hear it works – how does it work and for what purpose? This will get you actual results rather than just the right to say that you executed an influencer marketing strategy.
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.
Here you decide what each post says and how the content will evolve during the campaign. This will put to test the ability of the brand and the influencer to work as a team, creating effective messages which fit the brand’s objectives and are also natural as part of the influencer’s feed. This is the stumbling block which needs to be emphasized the most when collaborating with influencers, though there are also other details to consider.
While the consumer has learned to ignore messages in traditional media or experience banner blindness online, influencer marketing strategy is an area that is not overloaded with offers and logos. This means that a message in this sphere does not necessarily have to be the most creative or eye-catching. Rather, it needs to be suitable with the influencer’s profile, to provide something that users will want to talk about and share.
To reach this stage, everything else needs to have been set out and decided. So what now?
Don’t even think about sitting back and leaving things up to the influencer while you just wait to see the results. According to Neoreach.com, the brand needs to do a detailed tracking of the campaign’s evolution in order to get figures that will later help you with measurement and assessment.
You’ll need to prepare spreadsheets where you can enter all of the tracking data. You could also use specialized programs for this purpose (click here for a list of the Top Five according to Techradar). Or if you are unable to dedicate the necessary attention to the tracking process, the best thing may be to hire a professional team who will perform the task for you.
You’ll also need to track the actions of the campaign and user reactions, taking screenshots of everything. (Trust me, you’ll want these later!)
This is an essential step for any campaign. It is the phase that will show if all the effort has paid off and what aspects could be improved upon. Doing a campaign without a precise measurement of results is like throwing away half the work involved. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) advises that there are two stages of measurement:
For Launch and Hustle, the five key factors to consider are:
Once you have all the final figures, you’ll need to work out the ratio obtained. This will be based on the initial reach that you determined and your original objectives, that way you can determine whether the chosen influencer was the most effective for both your brand and for the starting aims of the campaign. Remember to always pay attention to the reactions that your campaign generated. An example of a tool which can help with this is Traackr.
Practice makes the master!
In an article from Inverted Marketing, there is an outline of three ways in which Influencer Marketing will change in the future.
But that’s not all, as Inverted Marketing says, once brands realize the impact that small-scale influencers can have on the way our message reaches the public, we will learn to appreciate the true worth of natural interactions. We will see the value that everyday people can add to a brand when they choose to make it a part of their daily lives. Once that moment arrives, influencer marketing will have become an automatic system, which regularly rewards individuals for online sharing of their favorite brands, regardless of the size of their audience.
Thanks for joining us in our run-through of Instagram influencer marketing. If you have any questions or would like to share your own experiences in this area, write it in our comment section!
Looking for more Instagram tips? Head to our complete guide to Instagram Marketing, where you’ll find everything you need to know about promoting your products on this crucial platform.
