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An influencer marketing strategy is like a movie night in.
You’ve got your snacks, your favorite film, and your favorite person to cuddle up with on the couch.
But what if you don’t have any of those things?
Then you’re stuck with a bad movie, no snacks, and no one to cuddle up with.
Like any good movie night, you need to plan for your influencer marketing strategy.
This means having clearly defined goals, target audience, and tactics. Without these things, your campaign is likely to flop.
And sure, designing an influencer marketing strategy that drives results requires knowledge and dedication.
It can be challenging initially, but you can do it after reading this guide.
We’ll tell you how to leverage influencer marketing to your advantage, pick the right content creators, and build a successful campaign.
Keep reading below.
6 Tips to Succeed with Influencers:
Wrap Up:
The days of traditional advertising are over. Thanks to social media, consumers now have the power to easily discover products and services through word-of-mouth recommendations from their favorite social media influencers.
Side note: Social media is rapidly replacing standard search engines. Many studies show that, for example, TikTok is the new Google.
Enter influencer marketing.
An influencer marketing strategy utilizes social media personalities with significant followings, also known as influencers, to promote and endorse a brand or product.
And just like any marketing initiative, it requires careful planning and precise execution to be successful. That can be achieved by planning strategy with a marketing calendar.
But if you do it right, you can reap all the benefits below:
Influencer marketing has been shown to:
When it comes to influencer marketing goals, 86% of marketers set brand awareness as their main purpose. 74% want to reach new or targeted markets. And they do achieve those goals because 80% of shoppers have purchased something following an influencer’s recommendation.
Studies show that a trustworthy, authentic influencer can enhance brand credibility. The catch? Your company has to deliver the promised products and live up to the standard it created. Besides, marketers claim that influencer-generated content receives 8x more engagement than conventional branded content.
Social media influencers offer insights into the minds of your audience that you can use to adapt your product and your communications strategy. Besides, influencers will also have more conversations about your product than you can do because they’re so engaged with their audience.
And those two factors combined lead to a tighter relationship between you and your target audience.
In the example below, Eddie Motta is shown as one of Dr. Zenovia’s brand ambassadors:
Dr. Zenovia always partners with micro and nano – influencers that can have more genuine conversations with their followers. Eddie Motta is one of them, as you can notice from the comments to this post:
Notice the genuine comment, Eddie’s authentic reply from his own experience, and how he tagged the Dr. Zenovia brand in this conversation.
The company immediately responded, and that’s how influencers can create a direct bond between brands and people.
Side note: A more personal reply from Dr. Zenovia would have been better, so remember to do that in your conversations.
Studies and experience show that influencers can build brand loyalty. But if that content creator’s audience stops believing in them, your relationship with those people will take a hit too.
Social proof and needing more time to research are among the main reasons for cart abandonment. Conversely, an effective influencer marketing strategy can solve those issues; content creators are trustworthy and genuinely connect with their followers.
That’s how they can help you build that social proof and offer people the research they need in advance.
Every $1 invested in your influencer marketing budget brings you a $4 return. That’s a massive 400% ROI. And it also explains why 90% of marketers believe in the power of influencer marketing.
Want to reap those advantages? Learn to create an influencer marketing strategy from the ground up.
Setting your goals correctly is the first step of every influencer marketing campaign. If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, you won’t be able to set the other stages of your strategy.
Your intentions are the backbone of your entire strategy. Besides, these goals define your campaign’s metrics; you know the variables that help you monitor your campaign and measure its success. You can brainstorm with strategic planning consultants to guarantee your objectives are clear and achievable, ensuring a well-defined path to success.
Possible goals include:
inBeat’s Deux par Deux campaign featured product seeding to momfluencers to reach a broader audience.
Of course, you shouldn’t limit yourself to these goals. You can focus on creating more engagement, product launches, link building, etc. Practically, the world is your oyster.
Remember: Regardless of the goals you’re setting, you should always break them into smaller, attainable objectives. If you want to talk strategy, you can always schedule a free call with our influencer marketing agency, and we’ll assist you happily.
You should be very clear about who you’re speaking to. You can’t hook your potential customers without understanding your audience’s interests and needs.
Once you research and grasp those things, you’ll have to speak their language.
That means you’ll know which types of content will motivate them best to meet your campaign’s marketing goals.
Take what Carter Sullivan did for Mogo. This young woman speaks articulately about her financial problems and how this app helped her solve them. She not only addresses an entire generation (Gen-Z) but also represents it.
An example of inBeat influencer content: a YouTube campaign with Mogo.ca
That’s another thing you’ll want to consider:
Don’t just throw your messages into the vast black hole of social media. Instead, create a buyer persona based on demographic and psychographic factors.
As a result, you’ll reach these people’s hearts and minds to:
Sifting through hundreds of influencers can seem daunting. We get it. That’s why we’ve created a free influencer database so that more marketers can find the right content creators.
But that’s not the point.
The point is understanding what makes someone a potential influencer. Content creators:
The biggest mistakes you can make at this point are to:
Apart from that, the right influencers:
How do you choose the right influencers?
This visual from Later shows how engagement rates drop when the follower count increases.
Here are free tools to verify the quality of your influencers:
And here are the variables you should consider:
You need to set the campaign type according to your goals. For example:
Other variables that help you set a successful campaign type are:
Setting this campaign type will help you:
Successful influencer marketing campaigns leverage the strategies below:
Once you know the type of influencer marketing campaign you want to run, choosing the right messages is essential.
At this point, you have to think about whether:
In the first scenario, you’ll have more control over the creative process, but the content your influencers publish may sound too salesy.
The second alternative means relinquishing some control for more natural-sounding social media posts.
Pro tip: In this case, you can use our Creator Studio to partner with the top 1% of influencers on social media that create authentic user-generated-like content.
Each audience is on a different (mix of) social channels. You and your content creators have to be where those people congregate.
For some, this is Instagram. For others, it would be TikTok or YouTube.
Why is that important?
Because the content will look differently depending on the channel:
Tracking your campaign performance and measuring its results is paramount.
If you haven’t done an influencer marketing campaign before, know there’s a hidden trap you have to be wary of:
Fame.
When you see your brand’s name on Instagram Stories or sung by famous TikTok influencers, it can feel dizzying. Still, you shouldn’t lose track of what truly matters:
The numbers.
Despite the initial hype, these numbers tell the real story. That’s why we’ve urged you to set attainable goals and create a thorough strategy to reach them.
You’ll want to compare the results you’ve achieved on these metrics below:
As you can see, these numbers are precise and easy to monitor. You should track this data for all your influencer marketing campaigns and never omit them from your strategy.
This data tells you:
Pro tip: Influencer tracking software is a powerful tool for easy reporting.
If you want to collaborate with influencers, you must follow the tips below:
What can you give them in return for their help? Consider:
You need an influencer agreement to make everything as clear as possible:
Take the time to get to know your content creators. Whether you’ll work with them in the long-term or just on a one-time project, remember:
Influencer relationships are everything in this world.
If you do not build that closeness, your content creator won’t be able to convey your intentions to your shared audience.
And you’ll get a glorified ad instead of compelling content with a high potential of becoming viral.
Here’s how to strengthen that relationship:
Influencer partnerships are still business transactions, so act accordingly. Yes, you need to build that relationship, but professionally.
Your content creators aren’t your besties; they are your business partners and/or employees. So, treat them as such.
Make sure your interactions help with/lead to:
We have already discussed some examples of influencer marketing campaigns we at inBeat built above. Let’s see what the competition is doing, shall we?
You may not have heard about Punto Criollo before, but they’re pretty famous in Miami. This restaurant retails filled pastries and Venezuelan dishes.
Their influencer marketing strategy relies on collaborating with central figures in Latin culture.
It can be as simple as:
Pro tip: Notice the authentic-sounding text on the right; this type of promotion works especially well with content creators like Damian Pastrana, who don’t usually recommend brands or products.
What to learn from this campaign:
Shortform is an app that gives people access to short summaries of non-fiction books. The premise behind this app/ website is the “ultralearning” technique that helps people learn faster by delivering concentrated information to them.
So instead of reading a 400-page book in eight hours, Shortform gives you the essence in eight minutes.
And who better to help them do it than this Scott Tatum, nomad, hiker, explorer, and founder of @ucanoutdoors. Scott has built his entire Instagram account around his “self-care savage up” friendly reminders.
And those reminders are exactly like Shortform’s summaries.
In just a few seconds, Scott will remind you to ditch toxic influences, put yourself first, and start living the life you want.
That’s why he is the ideal influencer (or among the ideal ones, anyway) to represent Shortform:
What to learn from this campaign:
Specialisterne USA is an organization that helps companies hire neurodiverse employees and build an inclusive work environment.
Nano – influencer Jaime A. Heidel is an Autistic Communication Translator that helps neurodivergent and neurotypical people understand each other better.
So what is the influencer strategy in this case?
The results are multi-fold:
What to learn from this campaign:
If you have read so far, you now understand how an effective influencer marketing strategy can help you and how you can build a campaign from the ground up.
Remember that it’s essential to establish your campaign goals and pick the right influencers.
The rest will follow if you stick to the tips in this article and enforce the lessons from the examples we reviewed.
Need help to start?
Try inBeat for free, or book a strategy call to start working on that campaign today.
