Matt Schmidt, Burial Insurance Pro
One piece of advice I’d recommend to other business owners and marketing experts is to think small. Meaning considering focusing on smaller platforms, compared to jumping on Google to run targeted ads.
Most likely, you could work with relevant ‘groups’ on Facebook and LinkedIn that are relevant to your niches. Or turn to Reddit. You’d be really surprised how many threads you can create with the right influencer that can reach your target audience.
In our experience, the types of leads generated from these types of platforms are a much higher quality compared to ones received from generic ads using an influencer.
Justin Herring, YEAH! Local
1. Establish Your Objectives and Target Market
Without well-defined objectives and a defined target audience, an influencer marketing campaign is nearly guaranteed to fail. To develop an effective campaign, you must have a clear understanding of your objectives and who you will target.
If you want to generate leads, you might ask influencers to post a link to your brand, product, or service. You can evaluate your ROI by calculating the cost per lead based on the number of leads produced from their link.
When defining your target audience, it’s critical to examine a variety of things. Consider their age, demographics, interests, geographic area, and other factors to ensure that your advertising reaches the correct individuals. This can also help you identify the ideal influencer for your company because you may look for influencers with similar interests among their followers.
2. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
Rather than aiming for an influencer with the most followers, seek one with a high-quality engaged following that shares your target audience’s interests.
You should identify influencers who can have a real impact on the audience you’re trying to reach. When it comes to choosing influencers to work with, it’s not about ‘who has the biggest following.’ Instead, look for influencers who have highly engaged audiences, since they are the ones that have a significant impact on their fans.
Quality over quantity also applies to the number of influencers you wish to engage and promote your company with. Working with a few influencers who have highly engaged audiences and whose interests are aligned with your brand is far preferable to working with tens or hundreds of influencers who have no affinity for your brand and whose audiences are not highly engaged.
Patrick Garde, ExaWeb Corporation
Personalized & Private Outreach
Build a relationship with a potential content creator partner by taking it slowly. You may interact with their posts either by liking one of their content or commenting on their posts when appropriate. Your goal is not to appear you’re doing a hard sell.
Start a DM or direct message once you’re ready to propose a collaboration. If their email address is publicly available, you can also try it. My suggestion is not to send a generic DM or a mass email.
If possible, personalize each DM or email to add a personal touch. Although it may take longer, the content creator will appreciate it, and you will have a higher chance of closing a deal.
As much as possible, give out all the information you can about your brand. Align your goals and expectations about the campaign. Don’t forget to highlight how the influencer will benefit aside from the compensation.
Nestor Vazquez, SEO MEXICO
Instead of focusing on the quantity of content, focus on quality.
Rather than relying on the largest follower count, go for influencers with a ‘high-quality engaged audience that matches your target audience’s interests.
You should partner with influencers who can truly make a difference in the lives of your target audience. When it comes to deciding who you’ll work with, don’t be concerned about who has the greatest following; focus on influencers with highly engaged audiences instead. When creating content, think about what your audience wants to see.
Before you begin working with influencers, take some time to develop a content strategy that aligns with the interests of your target audience. This will help ensure that the content produced as part of your influencer marketing campaign is relevant and engaging for your followers.
Steve Brownlie, Reach Creator
Finding the right people is integral to successful influencer marketing. No brand is going to succeed by simply selecting influencers at random and hoping they’ll be a positive advocate or ambassador for their company. Due diligence is essential, you want influencers who can really speak for your brand and their work history and social media profile will play a role in whether this is possible.
Relevancy is often more important than reach, find those influencers who perfectly fit your niche and don’t worry if their follower count isn’t huge. Getting your product or service out there in relevant markets is more likely to generate qualified leads.
It’s also important to remember that influencers are creatives and giving them the freedom to develop their own content strategy for your business is usually a better idea than providing scripts or having a set view of how you expect your brand to be marketed. If you try to impose rules and regulations, the relationship may break down. Let their creativity do the talking and your brand will shine.
Brandon Gail, BackToFrontShow
In my experience you have to be really smart with choosing the right social media platform for your brand or the brand that you’re promoting. For example, let’s say you’re promoting a fashion/beauty brand, you’re much more likely to get good results from Instagram/Youtube than Twitch.
A good way to go about researching this is looking at your competitors. Check out their social media handles and see if they’re getting any traction on their posts, check their pages out. Then see if they have influencers marketing for them, if you notice that they are really going big on this strategy for a long period of time, that is a good indicator that you should go through with it too.
Garit Boothe, Garit Boothe Digital
In my experience, the most important thing about influencer marketing is prioritizing it. You need a budget. You need someone to be a dedicated account manager or liaison with your influencers.
Having a budget and a person dedicated to it is half the battle for most organizations.
When considering influencers to work with, you should consider two factors. First, are they in your niche? Are they a good fit for your brand? If you’re an energy drink company, you don’t want to approach influencers who talk about eating organic and vegan foods. That’s not a good fit!
Second, make sure that their follower and engagement numbers are real. Social media influencers buy likes and subscribers to artificially boost their numbers. So you’ll want to use software tools to verify how many of their followers are real people, and how engaged their real audience is.
The final step is measuring the campaign. How do you know if it’s working? It’s great if you can give them a unique tracking link. It’s even better if you can provide a unique landing page for each influencer just for their visitors.
As with all marketing campaigns, “test and invest”. You only know what works after trying it.
Ray Lim, I-credit, Singapore moneylender
The Influencer Marketing industry is thriving as more and more marketers are realizing the importance of influencer marketing.
While not every company will be able to afford expensive celebrity endorsements, there are still many ways to effectively utilize influencers.
Do your research
Before you start working with any influencers, it’s important to do your research and make sure they are a good fit for your brand.
Look at their social media accounts and see if their values align with your company’s.
You should also consider their engagement rate and make sure they have a large enough following to reach your target audience.
Set clear goals
When you’re creating an influencer marketing campaign, you need to set clear goals from the start.
Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website? Boost sales?
Once you know what your goals are, you can better choose which influencers to work with and what type of content to create.
Give influencers creative freedom
While it’s important to have some guidelines for your influencer marketing campaign, you should also give influencers some creative freedom.
They know their audience best and what type of content will resonate with them.
Allowing them to be creative will help them produce better content and results for your campaign.
Kartik Ahuja, GrowthScribe
If you want to create a social buzz about your product or business or brand, influencer marketing should be your go-to option.
It has an edge over traditional marketing because of how quickly and effectively it spreads.
So, if you want to see stronger business growth, reach out to the influencers and ask them for help.
Follow these 3 super important tips to create an impactful & memorable influencer marketing campaign:
1. DM the movers and shakers in your industry
This is the first step to building a campaign. So warm up your arms and get ready to start clicking.
Start DMing a batch of 100-150 influencers at a time. With experience, I’ll say around 40 to 50% will revert back.
Depending on the number of influencers you want to onboard, start DMing and build your army of influencers on the way.
2. Put a productized offer on table
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of influencer marketing, first, set a budget for your marketing campaign.
Second, decide on what you want to offer them – it has to be a win-win situation for the both of you. The thing that you are willing to offer should feel valuable to them.
Whether that’s money, free products, or a combination of both — it completely depends on you.
3. No referral code. Just a coupon code
Ask every influencer onboard to share the coupon code about your product via posts, stories, messages, reels, tweets, and all the other ways possible.
The major thing is, this coupon code shouldn’t feel like a referral code.
Example: “Discount10” — it doesn’t look like a referral code and it is scalable. Whereas “Alice10OFF” looks like a referral code.
Shaurya Jain, Attention Always
The best tip I can think of is this: Choose to work with micro influencers rather than big influencers.
Here’s why? You can create a great value for your brand by working with smaller influencers who have smaller but dedicated audiences. These micro-influencers are most likely to have engaged audiences who listen to everything the influencer has to say. This results in the highest possible engagement that makes influencer marketing extremely targeted and effective. If your goal is to generate brand awareness, micro-influencers are the key.
Also, they’re most likely to talk about your product after receiving a free sample. So, micro-influencers are more budget-friendly too.
Research backs this up. Accounts with less than 100,000 followers reached five times more people and generated 5x the amount of engagement than with accounts that had more than 100,000 followers.
