How to Develop an Influencer Marketing Strategy
With the use of social media influencers on the rise, influencer marketing has become an option for more than just larger companies who can afford to hire big-shot celebrities to market their products. Smaller businesses with the desire to grow are tapping into influencer marketing, and finding great success!
With this type of digital marketing saturating the business world, you may be wondering how you can start dipping your toes into influencer marketing as well. Below we will discuss four steps you can take to develop an influencer marketing strategy for your brand!
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing in New Orleans, and consists of endorsements, product reviews, or product mentions from social media influencers. Typically, companies will look for a social media influencer who has a dedicated social following, and come across as experts in their niche. The reason why influencer marketing can prove to be successful is because there is often a trust already built between an influencer and their followers, and any recommendations from them can give credibility to your brand in their audience’s eyes.
Developing an Influencer Marketing Strategy
Just like any other digital marketing tactic, developing an influencer marketing strategy will require intentional targeting and planning! Follow these four simple steps to get started!
- Find the Right Influencers
First, choose which platform you want to focus on. Once you choose your platform, you will want to do your research. Do some social listening and figure out which groups of people are talking about your brand, or your competitors, and start paying attention to influencers they are following. You will want to choose an influencer whose content aligns with your brand’s mission and goals.
Note that depending on the influencer’s “status”, compensation may vary. For example, if you decide to partner with a micro-influencer, with 10k followers or less, many of them will accept a free product in exchange for a promotional video or product review. On the other hand, if you are looking to partner with celebrities that have a massive following, you will need to compensate them on a larger scale, and may even need to go through their agency. Which brings us to our next step…
- Determine Your Budget and Management Strategy
Once you’ve found the right influencers to partner with, you can create your budget. Don’t forget to factor in the time you spend planning, executing and reviewing your influencer strategy! Determining your budget can also help you decide if partnering with that specific influencer will give you the ROI you are looking for.
Since influencers are human and not an automated ad strategy, you will also want to make sure that you stay involved in the campaign by monitoring the partnership posts and following up. Remember that it’s ok to admit if a certain campaign approach or influencer strategy didn’t work for your brand, and will actually save you from wasting your budget spending down the road on strategies that don’t have a significant enough ROI.
- Set Goals and Create a Consistent Message
Influencer marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness and increase sales. While these are wonderful, broad goals, start your influencer marketing strategy by setting more specific goals that support your brand’s needs. For example, maybe you are looking to increase the number of younger-generation customers you have, or maybe you want to use your influencers to get the word out about your brand’s values.
Whatever your goals may be, come up with a strategic way to ask for content from your influencers that will help you reach those specific goals. While you don’t want to stifle the influencer’s creativity or style, the more specific your “content guidelines” are for your influencers, the more you will stay on target with your goals.
- Contact Your Preferred Influencers
Depending on whether your influencer is a celebrity or a micro-influencer will determine how you should contact them. Celebrities often have a link to a website that denotes brand partnerships, while micro-influencers will respond to direct messages on their profile, or may even provide an email so you can send a more formal message.
Remember, we live in a world full of spam and fake accounts, so you will want your message to be worded professionally, while also being authentic. You may want to say something along the lines of, “We love the content you post already, and would love to partner with you”, followed by a clear explanation of the partnership opportunity, compensation, and expectations. Don’t forget to include your name, the name of your business, and a link to your website or a brand catalog so that the influencer can see that you’re a real company.
Influencer marketing can help get your company in front of a new audience, strengthen your reputation, and build brand awareness quickly! Make sure you set predetermined dates to measure the progress of your influencer campaign and ROI so that you can make adjustments in the future and get the most out of your time and money!