If you are an entrepreneur or a marketer who is always on the lookout to reach new audiences, partnering with influencers, in that case, is a great way to start it.
It is an incredible strategy to boost sales which are backed by a survey report from Twitter that shows that nearly 49% of active profilers rely on product recommendations from the influencers.
Target markets are getting younger and more connected online, which makes it easy for influencers to help businesses and start-ups to connect with their consumers directly online.
According to a few trend analysts at Twitter, companies that used influencers and their very own brand for recognition saw a 5.2x increase in purchases from the consumers.
This means that there are many benefits to influencer marketing. One only has to learn how to tap into it to cash it in through various influencer marketing strategies.
But not many know how to approach or hire influencers for their brand and usually end up talking gibberish in endless loops of email threads with their PR managers.
It can get tricky to narrow down your goals on how to communicate and get what you want from them, but first, you have to decide on what you actually want from them.
You would then need to find the type of influencer that could relate with you the most and is likely to be believable with your product and then finally decided on the kind of influencer marketing strategies to use with them to reach the target market.
To help you with this, we have created a guide for you to ensure that you get to find the right influencers and use the best influencer marketing strategies with them.
Steps to Create Influential Strategy
Let’s get started firstly with how to create and implement influencer marketing strategies with a list of tactical steps you need to take:
- Establish Your Goals
Before you even approach influencers, you need to know precisely what you want them to do for you. Do you want to increase brand awareness or direct engagement with your products?Do you want to give a cleaner structure to your lead generation funnel, or do you want to increase loyalty and goodwill from your existing audience?
Pretty sure, all these questions would get selected to define goals for your influencer marketing strategies but instead of hoarding all the things together and ending up confused; you can instead trace your way back from the result you want to define the steps needed for the first goal of your strategy.
Using this goal once set, it will be your guiding light in defining the metrics of the strategy’s success and help monitor your campaigns.
Also, Read: Top 10 Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business
- 2. Identify and Set Your Audience
Classifying your audience and adequately categorizing them can decide on the effectiveness and success of your influencer marketing strategies.Depending upon the targeted personas or ideal buyers according to your business, you should group your consumers by their demographics, buyer lifecycle stag, psychographics or preferred channel.
Once you decide on the goals, this step becomes easier to determine.
- 3. Campaign Selection
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There are hundreds of ways to help you define a campaign for your influencer marketing strategies to work.
However, the campaign that you choose to promote your brand through heavily depends on your goals and targeted consumers. You can try out:
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- Guest posts
- Branded blog posts
- Brand Mentions
- Giveaways
- Events
- Takeovers
- Free Products or Services
- Challenge Your Influencer
- Competitions
- Discount codes
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For example, many bloggers and vloggers usually do product reviews and giveaways from their content producing websites.
Small and medium enterprises can try to approach them and send them free samples for product reviews to tap into their followers with discount codes, free services, etc.
If you want to think big, then you can straight away tie-up with Amazon, Flipkart, Primark, H&M, etc., depending upon your niche and make more prominent influencer marketing strategies through it if you have a bigger budget.
Once you decide on the campaign type, create the most compelling content – something that is easy to get shared by your influencer to help them reach their audience.
The message or content should fit well with the audience of the influencers so that they can push your brand out to their audience more conveniently.
We have listed nine useful influencer marketing strategies after this checklist to get a more in-depth look into how to dissect the success of such campaigns.
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4. Find Suiting Brand Influencers
You can’t reach out to random people through an influencer marketing platform to promote your campaign. It will end up not giving you the values and results you are looking for then.
The partnership with an influencer will become extremely impersonal and transactional, meaning that you are only interested in the influencer’s audience count and the influencer is only keen on the promotion just for the sake of doing.
That is not the right way to execute influencer marketing strategies through such superficial relations. So then, what is influencer marketing? It is an ideal partnership with an influencer who gets to be your brand influencer or ambassador.
That way, the relationship between you and influencer will get to come first, instantly prioritizing the person and not his/her followers. The message will then get to resonate in a much better way with the audience of the influencer.
To find the perfect influencer through which you can reap the best value of influencer marketing, search for relevant hashtags that are related to your business or products.
Go through Instagram’s suggestions of users based on profiles you are likely to follow. Or, you can check out the competitors of the influencers themselves to get ideas.
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5. Promote and Track Your Success
After accomplishing all the above points, all you have to do is promote the new partnership you just made with your influencer! Push out engaging content about the campaign on your business channels and generate some buzz online.
Also, it is essential that you track the performance of this newfound partnership – monitor the traffic, conversions, engagement and other such metrics that you defined to measure the success.
There are better chances of getting high ROI from various types of influencer marketing strategies. Still, it is also essential to check how the content used by influencers and the content used by you performs online.
9 Influencer Marketing Strategies to Know
Take a look at these nine influencer marketing strategies that you can study further to amplify your brand’s presence.
1. Introduce Your Products in the Market via Influencers
Big and famous brands have been colluding with celebrities for decades to launch new products. However, collaborating influencer marketing strategies with influencers can give you much better results as compared to stars with your product launches.
Now, you must be thinking, why is that? It is because celebrities usually have a massive audience of followers, but they are very diverse.
Hence, their endorsements turn out to be less credible as they are not effective if your product as a single niche.
More importantly, consumers nowadays have evolved to understand that they are only endorsing products and not personally using them because they are paid to do so.
On the other hand, an influencer marketing agency or even independent influencers are usually looked at as subject matter experts in their niche.
Also, the followers of these influencers are people who have a strong interest in that particular niche which is why they are following them.
So promotions and branding done by them are likely to be heard by your target audiences resulting in higher chances of conversions.
In fact,
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- 30% of people are more likely to purchase a product that has been endorsed by a non-celebrity influencer than a celebrity, and 70% of millennials prefer non-celebrity bloggers for endorsements. (Source)
- Influencer advertisements are one of the best tactics to get people to trust your products.
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So what are the influencer marketing strategies that you can learn from these influencers? Make sure to collaborate with such non-celebrity influencers for your product launches to make them successful in the long run.
2. Find Influencers Who Loves Your Brand & Make a Proposal to Them
If an influencer is already engaging with you without any sponsorship, then it means that they like your brand.
It may also say that they already have vested interest in your target audience and are likely to receive the message well even if you approach them for promotions.
Usually, such a chance always helps you to act on your influencer marketing strategies to generate a better campaign ROI since most of the work like defining the audience, searching the right influencers, etc., are already accomplished.
All you have to do is generate content enough engaging for the audience. And you can take the help of the influencers themself to help you shape your content strategy.
Since they would be sharing the content with their audience, they would know how to spot trends and better engagement with their audience.
Hence they can help guide you in creating tailored content for the target audience.
So how do you find out which influencers are already talking about your brand? By keeping a tab on who is tagging your business name in their posts.
You can even search out for your branded hashtags on social media sites and watch out for the mentions from the influencers. Use social media listening tools like BuzzSumo, HootSuite, Mention, etc. to find out who is talking about your brand.
3. Influencer Marketing Strategies Revolving Around Influencers
Marketing for your brand can involve several strategies throughout the developing phase, but did you know you can incorporate influencer marketing strategies in any stage of your business cycle? It certainly looks that way.
Google Trends recently showed a marked increase in influencer marketing campaigns and a steady decrease in print advertising searches in the past year.
So it is safe to assume that involving marketing influencers somehow with your brand is only going to bring an upward growth line.
Hence, you should associate influencers throughout your marketing strategy to improve ROI. This influencer marketing strategy is likely to boost your promotional initiatives.
4. Brainstorm with Influencers to Create Engaging Content
Influencers are not only going to be the face to your product but also market the content that influencers create about YOUR product.
Bloggers, tweethearts are talented individuals with a niche in followers who can generate content and persuade their masses with it magically towards your brand.
Hence engaging creativity and originality from the influencers will only save you and your team a lot of effort and time which would otherwise go wasted in brainstorming and into coming up something creative for your influencer marketing strategies.
So, what is the influencer marketing strategy that you’re mainly exercising here? freedom of creativity to the influencers.
You are providing ample creative and interactive freedom to your influencers to come with the best content, which is a proven tactic.
A recent study by Crowdtap found that almost 77% of the influencers are likely to partner with a company brand more than once if they give creative freedom to generate content.
5. Tailor Campaigns with Each Individual Influencer to Distribute the Content
The level of formality received by your campaign will depend to some degree on the nature of your relationship with the influencers that agree to endorse you.
If you have signed up to an agency or a platform and got exposed to influencers from there, then you will clearly get to set up specific campaigns with your influencers in order to work out your influencer marketing strategies.
In such cases, you will probably agree on the content that the influencers will produce (whether you or the influencers create it) and how they will present the material.
You will possibly arrange for them to make several posts and videos about specific topics, on certain scheduled days.
You will have agreed on a payment, either through the agency or the platform you contacted them with or directly in discussions with the influencers themselves.
If you have built up your influencer approaches more informally, you might not get to operate dedicated campaigns.
It may turn out to look and be more of a case of you generating the content, and trying to help the influencers to share it.
Often this will be for free as they will choose to share your content because of its quality, not for financial remuneration.
If you have made a good enough organic connection with an influencer somehow, then you may be able to approach them and request them for participating in a more formal campaign, for an agreed fee.
This may be in financial terms, or it may be for a free product sample. In this case, you and the influencer can barter about who gives the content for them to share.
Also, Read: 7 Must Implement Digital Marketing Trends for 2020
6. Think Long-term – Be Friends with Them
Image Source: Social Media Today
An effective and efficient partnership is exceptionally crucial to driving the best results. And finding the right people to be your brand ambassadors, in the long run, is a successful influencer marketing strategy.
Many famous brands have been allying with the same influencers on all their campaigns. Major corporations don’t treat such unions as one-time events of transactions.
Of course, a collaboration sticks better for the long-term only if the influencer’s interests and niche are parallel with the brand.
So focus on building relationships with your influencers which can be very similar to customer relationship management (CRM).
But the friendly relationship with influencers is termed as influencer relationship management (IRM), and just like CRM, there are even tools to manage the IRM.
Growing your relationships with influencers can turn out to be one of the most effective influencer marketing strategies for your brand because long-term partnerships can help you get more people to trust your brand and products.
You can also concoct with influencers for affiliate marketing and coupon codes to help them in their promotions.
Also, Read: Differences Between Affiliate Marketing and Referral Marketing
7. Grab Opportunities with Micro-Influencers
Are you aware of a category of influencers who have a lesser number of followers but with significantly engaging content that makes them leaders somehow? Such influencers are called micro-influencers, and according to a study by Experticity, about 82% of people are likely to listen to a micro-influencer’s recommendations.
Micro-influencers act more like the head of a massive social group that has a specific niche; hence they are capable of building stronger connections with their audiences if they come up with your product to its people.
This, in turn, enables their followers to get more hooked up and engaged to the recommendations from them.
Working with micro-influencers can be one of the excellent influencer marketing strategies to help you run a successful campaign. On the other hand, micro-influencers are cost-effective too, unlike celebrity influencers or even celebrities themself.
In fact, 84% of micro-influencers posted worldwide sponsored posts that were charged between $100-$500 per Instagram post, which means it could make a good impact on the budget with the same boosting results on the campaign.
Hence, leveraging micro-influencer partnerships are one of the promising influencer marketing strategies to engage with your targeted audience efficiently.
8. Keep Track of Current Affairs of Your Niche
You may have selected your influencers based on their knowledge about their niche that matches your niche.
Hence, you should also keep track of other content that they share to check if they are cutting any edge in your niche.
If you are to share your content with them, then it is also useful to see what else do they show to their followers. Make sure your content fits in their bigger picture – their persona.
So studying what your influencers talk with their followers allows you to find more creative opportunities in improvising your influencer marketing strategies. You can find out new trends to remain relevant to your target audience from the influencer’s content.
Hence, don’t shy away from revising your already planned content calendar if you come with some creative and better topics that can genuinely interest your audience.
You can take direct help from the influencers to guide you with general areas of your interest and focus. As a result, you will get to create content that people might end up seeing as innovative, rather than merely ‘I feel you’ or ‘me-too’ material.
Once your campaign is initiated, keep a close eye on how it advances. Research on the type of comments made concerning your shared content, take notes of questions asked and problems referred to help you keep revising your content calendar throughout the campaign.
Change is only inevitable, so are the interests of people of the internet. Hence, keep reviewing your influencer marketing strategies as new trends come along.
9. Supervise and Monitor Your Campaigns
If you wish to grow your company with influencer marketing campaigns, then we believe you also need to use the right tool to monitor it. There are many reasons too for as to why you need the tools to monitor your campaigns.
One of them is that 89% of marketers say that studying ROI from influencer marketing is comparable with other marketing channels. (Source)
So why not?
There are so many online tools available to help you overcome the difficulty of monitoring influencer marketing campaigns.
For instance, TapInfluence can give you an overview of your campaign’s ROI. There is NeoReach, Grin, Socialpeeks and many more that can also help you with finding the right influencers (since it is a time-consuming task) along with regular monitoring campaigns work with you.
Such tools aid you in giving detailed information about influencers and guide you better to find the ones that align with your niche.
So it is essential to adopt practical tools and platforms if you’re serious about your influencer marketing strategies.
Final Thoughts
So maybe you may have been thinking of banking upon influencer marketing strategies just like your competitors are doing, then we suggest you certainly shouldn’t be left behind with it.
The strategies that we discussed in this guide will give you better insights into starting, implementing, executing and monitoring your coming future campaigns.
The main takeaway from this is that to make sure you select the right influencers for your brand, approach them with the right goals and focused audience to build relationships with them for the long-term.
Also, saving time, money and energy while working with appropriate influencer tools and platforms can guarantee success to your campaigns.
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