Influencer marketing has grown in popularity over the years. People are now more active on social media than ever. So, brands are considering influencer marketing as a viable strategy to reach out to the masses.
Around 90% of customers claim that user-generated content has a great influence on their buying decisions. People seek social proof before making a purchase and influencer recommendations usually outweigh the ones received from a layman.
That explains why we’re seeing a continuous surge in the influencer marketing trend. Nonetheless, creating an influencer marketing strategy and navigating its performance is easier said than done.
Here are 7 tips for creating an effective influencer marketing strategy.
1. Know Your Customer
Knowing your customers is the key to creating an effective influencer marketing strategy. It’s essential to get acquainted with the needs and preferences of your target audience. This helps you tap into the right market segment and capture quality leads.
Your customers’ interests, preferences, buying patterns, and other key insights help you design a strategy that delivers results. To create an effective influencer marketing strategy, you need to identify your audience and explore the social media platforms it’s active on.
This helps you partner with the right influencers. Moreover, you have to ensure that the interests of your audience resonate with what excites the followers of the influencer onboarded. Customer insights can make it all possible and help you make informed decisions.
2. Know Your Brand
It’s essential that you partner with influencers whose personality is in accordance with your brand persona. Knowing what your brand stands for helps you find influencers that are best suited to convey your message to the audience.
Research is the key here. You have to be familiar with your brand identity first. For example, the ideal choice for a brand that sells bread grooming products is beard influencers.
3. Set the Marketing Budget
Remuneration for influencers may vary depending on their type and respective industry dynamics. Influencers can be classified into 5 categories: mega, macro, mid-tier, micro, and nano influencers.
The cost of partnership is likely to increase as you go up the influencer hierarchy. So, the best practice to adopt here is creating a budget and sticking to it. This makes it easy for you to set the desired ROI for your influencer marketing campaigns.
If you’re looking to onboard multiple influencers, you can consider partnering with an influencer marketing agency. This would be a bit more budget-friendly approach compared to you reaching out to a large pool of influencers for individual affiliations.
4. Find the Right Influencers
Around 49% of customers trust influencer recommendations. This makes influencer marketing a viable strategy. However, one of the critical factors determining its success is the selection of the best-suited influencer for the campaign.
Finding the right influencers can be tough. This is an intricate process. Influencers don’t just convey your message to the audience, they represent your brand. Your reputation is literally at stake here.
The best practice is to target a single social media platform when getting started. This makes it easier for you to explore fitting options and speeds up the selection process.
You also need to explore an influencer’s fan base. For this, explore the content they publish and how the audience reacts to it. This is to know whether or not followers of an influencer you wish to onboard match the characteristics of your target audience.
Once you’ve perfected a process and found the right influencer for the chosen social media platform. Replicate it for other platforms and expand your targeting.
5. Have a Content Strategy
Content is king. Around 87% of marketing visionaries value content above all else and consider it as the core of their marketing strategy. Just like any other marketing strategy, content plays a key role when carrying out influencer marketing campaigns.
Your content should resonate with your niche. This boosts engagement and helps you attract leads that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
Content shared by influencers should not be like a mainstream sales pitch. You have to ensure that it’s conversational and has a personal narrative. Moreover, your message should be tailored to the needs and preferences of your audience.
You would often acknowledge disagreements between influencers and brands Influencer marketing restricts the creative freedom of both parties involved. The company better understands its brand persona and the influencers are more familiar with their audience.
Influencer partnerships are often short-lived with creative freedom being the bone of contention. It’s like a never-ending tug-of-war between brands and influencers. By having a content strategy, you can give influencers all the creative freedom they desire. Just make sure that the content shared doesn’t adversely affect your brand.
6. Set Goals
There are two core metrics that determine the performance of your influencer marketing strategy, reach and prospects. The nature of your business and industry dynamics also play a key role here. But, generally, influencer marketing campaigns facilitate brands to generate traffic and boost their reach.
By factoring in your customer demographics and vision, it’s essential that you set realistic objectives for your influencer marketing campaign. Whether you’re targeting a broad audience or a small niche, your goals help you dictate the expected outcome and the return on investment of a respective campaign.
7. Track Your Performance
To gauge the success of your influencer marketing strategy, it’s essential that you pair it with measurable KPIs. To calculate the ROI of your partnerships, you need actionable insights to make informed decisions.
You need to come up with a systematic process that helps you decide whether a particular influencer marketing campaign is worth continuing.
Which platform brought you the most traction? Which partnership has been the most successful so far? Does your current influencer marketing strategy need any changes? Only data can help you answer aforesaid questions and enable you to scale your affiliate marketing program.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The 7 tips for creating an effective influencer marketing strategy. The implications of the recommendations may vary from one use case to another. So, try them out and see which ones work best for you.
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Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.