5 Ways to Create an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy

Influencer Marketing is no longer a rising tactic but has cemented its place as an important aspect of marketing campaigns. It is crucial to leverage an influencer’s popularity to reach a more targeted audience

So, what are the most important things to be mindful of while devising an influencer marketing strategy?

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Here are five ways to boost your Influencer Marketing Strategy:

1. Identify your Audience and Influencer: The first and foremost thing is to identify your brand’s target audience. Consider your demographics and niche first.

Delve into questions like who they are, what they care about, where are they most active? You can do audience research using data analytics and audience-research tools to build your audience persona. This will give you a clear picture of your target audience.

With your target group in mind, define an influencer profile that is aligned with demographics you are looking at. You have to keep in mind, the following questions while choosing an influencer:

• Does your campaign content fit with the influencer ideology?
• Does this influencer embody and speak to the demographic you are looking at?
• Will they be able to reach your audience on channels/platforms your audience spends their time on?
• Do they appear to be authentic?

Nowadays, micro-influencers have a more intimate relationship with their communities as they are more passionate, tightly bound to close-knit communities and are more relatable.

Take, e.g. Shoe-brand Sperry who started to work with more than 100 micro-influencers on Instagram to create engaging content for its followers (in late 2016). The brand identified its’ fans who were already sharing photos of its products and invited them to develop visual content for its Instagram account.

At this stage, be careful of fake influencers and bots. Some people/brands tend to purchase followers and engagements to make a quick buck. Try to vet your prospective influencers’ account by browsing their content, checking out their engagement-to-follower ratios, and reviewing the comments to see if there are real conversations as opposed to bots.

2. Establish Relationships: It is important to understand your influencer(s) first and build a relationship with them. Get to know them online or offline, comment on their content, share their work, add value to it if you can ask them to sample your products, mention them in your posts, provide backlinks to their pages, etc.

Both their audience, as well as yours will be able to notice your relationship with an influencer, which will lend more credibility and greater authority to your brand. More on this, here.

Authenticity is also crucial if you want your influencer relationships to be respected by fans. As Aaron Brooks, Co-Founder and CEO of Vamp says, "to create an effective influencer marketing strategy, brands need to ensure they remain relevant by consistently connecting with customers in a more meaningful and personal way and many businesses are turning to experiential stunts to satisfy this need. Pop up shops, freebie experiences and ‘surprise and delight’ stunts are becoming commonplace. But the stakes are high and brands are aware of their limitations. Savvy consumers don’t want to be marketed to, they want to make brand connections on their own terms. They’re also becoming increasingly concerned with authenticity. In their 2017 Consumer Content Report, Satkla found an overwhelming 90% of Millennials say that brand authenticity is important - and authenticity cannot be faked." 

3. Set Specific Goals: For your influencer marketing strategy to work you have to associate clear, measurable goals. Goals could be related to increase brand awareness, customer retention, attracting new targets, etc. Some common metrics include Website views, referral visitors, reach/impressions (branding), likes, comments and shares, sign-ups, downloads, etc.

Once you have identified KPI(s), eg. increasing brand awareness through website-views or social mentions, etc., it will be easy for the influencer to curate content accordingly. Also, it would be easier to track how well a particular influencer’s strategy is working.

Holly Pavlika, SVP of Marketing and Content Influencer at Collective Bias also suggests using AI to improve campaign performance. 
 

4. Resonate: According to Think with Google, 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers relate more to YouTube creators as compared to celebrities and 40% of them feel their favorite creators understand them better than their friends.

This is an indication that influencers are more relatable to the audience. Shane Barker on his blog says, “Instead of a celebrity posing with a product, the audience is more likely to be motivated by seeing an influencer using the product, reviewing it, showcasing how it can be used, etc.”

Create content that resonates well with your customer and reaches out to influencers who can re-purpose this content to attract your audience. While involving an influencer, ensure your message and influencer’s character and interests are always aligned.

e.g., Glossier, a Manhattan-based beauty start-up reached out to regular women (and some micro-influencers) to promote their cosmetics. “What's very motivating to us is this idea of every single woman being an influencer," Glossier CEO Emily Weiss told Quartz. No wonder, they acquired a cult status and were named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2017.
 

5. Collaborate: Yes, you have to clearly define goals for your influencer campaign, but it is also important to give influencers the creative freedom to be able to do justice to the message they send across. Create skilled content for them and let them present it in their style to their audience. Make them a part of the conversation when you plan the campaign.

As they share a common language with their community and understand their subscribers well, they can inspire their followers to take action.

e.g., DJ Khaled enjoys a loyal fan following on Snapchat with his snaps garnering over 3 million views. Khaled regularly anchors Snapchat takeovers where he handles the responsibility of brands’ corporate Snapchat account for a brief period. Stride Gum promoted its “Mad Intense Gum” campaign on Snapchat collaborating with Khaled where he took over their account to engage with his followers for a fun-filled day.

Care to share some other innovative ways for marketers to connect deeply with their audience and plan successful Influencer campaigns? Write in! 

Updated on 17th May 2018