When 90% of marketing agencies, brands, and professionals say they believe influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing, it’s worth talking about some best practices that brands can use to implement or improve their campaigns. Below, we’ll cover 10 fundamental tips that can help boost your efforts.
1. Define What a Successful Influencer Campaign Is
Before you begin any type of marketing campaign, it’s vital to set goals. These goals can start out broad, such as “attract more followers” or “grow awareness with the 18-25 age demographic, and then you’ll drill down into specific metrics to measure success. This is even more important for an influencer marketing campaign, since you’re likely tying their compensation to these goals.
The most common measure of influencer marketing success is conversions/ sales, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
Pro Tip
The metrics that matter to your team will be specific to your brand and also depend on what the influencer excels at (building hype, launching conversations, driving conversions through subscriptions or one-time sales, etc).
You should also take into account which social media platforms you’re using for influencer marketing. Over 67% of marketers report using Instagram for influencer marketing, but there’s also been a huge increase in TikTok influencer marketing as well, according to the State of Influencer Marketing 2021 Benchmark Report.
Some possible metrics you could explore for your campaigns include:
- Number of views/impressions
- Number of followers or subscribers
- Number of leads generated
- Number of orders
- Average order price
- Traffic to your website from social media
- Comments and social sentiment (such as positive emojis, tagging friends, comment enthusiasm, branded hashtag use, or compliments about the content itself)
2. Have a Clear Audience in Mind
Identifying a target audience for the campaign is another way to ensure you see success in your influencer efforts. You’ll want to identify the demographic, whether it’s a broad group or or lesser known niche, before hiring an influencer. This will help you choose someone who’s deeply connected with the audience while also being appropriate for the industry and channels that you’re targeting.
Pro Tip
When researching your audience, it’s helpful to separate your research into two categories: demographic insights and psychographic insights.
Demographic information includes age, gender, family situation, ethnic background, careers, and locations. Psychographic information looks at what your target audience values, what type of lifestyle they have, how they behave online, which special features they find appealing, etc.
Some tools that can help you organize all of this information and help you research your audience further include:
- SparkToro: An online tool that can help you identify what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about.
- Popular Pays influencer platform: An all-in-one platform to help you organize and execute your influencer campaign every step of the way, from discovering and communicating with influencers to managing and analyzing your campaign.
- Upfluence: An influencer marketing platform that provides a full suite of influencer tools including advanced data on audience demographics.
- Heepsy: A platform that provides advanced reports to analyze the demographics and authenticity of each influencer’s audience, with a database of over 11 million influencers.
3. Invest in Micro-Influencers
Whether you’re part of a large or small business, working with different types of influencers and different follower sizes can help your overall success. Often, brands may think about celebrities and macro-influencers as the only option, but micro-influencers — which typically have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers — can be extremely beneficial to certain campaigns.
Pro Tip
Here are some reasons why working with micro-influencers can boost your overall influencer strategy:
- They see higher audience engagement rates than average because they have built trust and personal relationships with their followers.
- They have access to niche communities.
- They can be more cost-effective for smaller budgets.
- They can be more accessible, easy to find, and open to feedback compared to macro-, mega- and celebrity influencers.
- They’re typically more willing to work with emerging or smaller brands.
Check out these examples of brands successfully partnering with micro-influencers.
4. Utilize Organic Content in Conjunction With Sponsored Content
When utilizing sponsored posts, it’s important to think about using an influencer’s own audience via organic content rather than promoting it to a wider potential customer base. It often feels more natural to their audience and can yield better results, as their audience already has a high degree of trust in them.
Pro Tip
It’s important to remember that some social channels are actually designed to perform better with non-sponsored content, which will make an influencer’s community-building skills even more valuable. Organic content tends to work well on social media sites like:
- TikTok
- Twitch
Additionally, when posting organic content, keep these best practices in mind to boost exposure even more:
- Be consistent. Post regularly at the times when your audience is online, active, and engaging with content like yours (videos, GIFs, long-form blogs, etc).
- Focus on value. Give people a reason to follow and share your posts. Think about entertainment value, pearls of wisdom or motivation, or the opportunity to connect with a community.
- Tailor your content. A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t all that effective for influencer campaigns because followers crave genuine opinions and authenticity. Learn the best practices for each individual social media platform and take advantage of the influencer’s know-how.
5. Know the Differences Between B2B Influencers and D2C Influencer Marketing
The success of your influencer program starts with understanding which type of influencer will be best for your brand. B2B and D2C influencers bring different skills to the table and may have different expectations about working with your team.
In a nutshell, B2B influencers are usually experts working in a particular niche industry, or with a specific product. They often partner with a single company in their industry, or a few at most. D2C influencers tend to have more generalized knowledge and aren’t as exclusive with their partnerships, which means they may receive more offers from brands in various industries.
Pro Tip
Here are some factors you should be aware of when you’re weighing a partnership with a B2B or D2C influencer:
B2B Influencers
- B2B influencer marketing can take longer to execute given all the steps necessary to identify and activate the right influencer for your brand.
- B2B influencer marketing can be more difficult to measure due to the complexity of some B2B purchase processes and finding potential customers.
- B2B influencers lean more heavily on LinkedIn, Twitter, bloggers, and contributed articles and white papers.
D2C Influencers
- D2C influencers are often just as expensive as their B2B counterparts, but they tend to have shorter campaign run times and can see faster successes.
- Working with D2C influencers means considering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) restrictions more carefully, since many influencers may unknowingly weave branded content into their personal feeds without proper disclosure.
- D2C influencers are more likely to include dedicated Instagram influencers or have most of their followers on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or YouTube.
6. Make Influencers Want to Work With You
It can be challenging to get good influencers to work with new brands if they know very little about your company. You’ll need to do outreach and provide them solid reasons to choose you when you don’t have the luxury of being a huge, exciting brand.
Pro Tip
Some ways you can entice influencers to work with (and return to work with) your brand include:
- Establishing a long-term relationship by following and subscribing to their content
- Engaging with the influencer publicly on social media (commenting, sharing, tagging, etc.)
- Giving influencers creative freedom during campaigns
- Paying your influencers well and being open to negotiation
- Asking what their own goals are and discussing how your brand can help achieve them
- Gifting your influencers free products or swag
- Offering opportunities for longer-term engagements
7. Participate in Cross-Account Social Media Content
Another way to ensure a successful influencer campaign is to engage with influencers on social media as your brand. You can maximize the effectiveness of this by shouting them out when you see them doing something cool, commenting on their posts, and sharing influencer content that is industry-related but perhaps not about your product.
Additionally, create quality content yourself that lists prominent, exciting influencers, promote it on relevant channels, and make sure they’re tagged in it so they feel the love too. See if you can get into a consistent back and forth with potential partners or brand ambassadors.
Pro Tip
Organically engaging with influencers in a non-sponsored format can take some creativity. You can try some of these tactics:
- Share their posts on your brand’s social channels when it aligns with your brand’s values or industry and tag them.
- Send direct messages to influencers you admire through your brand’s account to congratulate them on achievements or impressive campaigns.
- Comment as your brand on their posts on a consistent basis while prioritizing genuine praise or recognition.
8. Create a Running List of Influencers You’d Like to Work With
On a similar note, you don’t want to wait around until you’re thinking of launching an influencer campaign to start searching for influencers. Have a list of noteworthy influencers and content creators in your industry or brand community circles that you can draw from when you’re ready. Follow our previous tips to strike up and nurture these relationships.
This practice gives you plenty of backup options in case one falls through. It also allows you to keep an eye on their posts to see if their content is evolving in a direction you’re still interested in.
Pro Tip
Monitoring influencers can feel a bit tedious but it’s extremely important. You’d hate to be in the position of signing contracts only to realize the influencer posted something a few years ago that doesn’t align with your brand values anymore.
Here are some examples of how to monitor the potential partners on your list:
- Check who they’re following (individuals, businesses, political groups, etc.)
- Check in on how they interact with commenters, followers, friends, rivals, etc.
- Get familiar with their feed over time
- Keep an eye on news publications, magazines, hashtags, etc.
9. Have Realistic Expectations
With influencer marketing, it can be challenging to set expectations, but it’s important to think realistically about the impact an influencer can have in the time frame you’re setting. To gauge the performance or return on investment (ROI) you should expect, take a look at industry benchmarks or campaigns on a similar scale. Also, review any performance data you have from any other influencer marketing campaigns. This will help curb any unrealistic expectations you and your team might accidentally have.
Pro Tip
Find a provider of industry benchmarks to look at each quarter to compare your influencer campaign metrics. Mavrck’s Influencer Marketing Benchmarks report is a good start. This report is complimentary as long as you have a company email address to share. It’s especially helpful because it breaks benchmarks down by social channel.
10. Track Your Influencer Performance and ROI
Marketers are always looking for good ways to tie campaign costs and qualitative signs — like shares, comment sentiments, or social proof — to concrete results. In fact, 67% of marketers attempt to measure the ROI from their influencer marketing campaigns, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. As we covered earlier, the most common method to measure ROI is by tracking conversions or sales.
The key here is to have the tools you need to accurately monitor progress toward your goals, whatever they are, so you can make data-driven decisions throughout the campaign (and in the future).
Pro Tip
When it comes to measuring ROI, you’ll want to identify key performance indicators (KPIs). Some categories of KPIs include:
- Conversion and sales KPIs
- Visibility and amplification KPIs
- Earned media value (for unpaid influencer posts)
- Content backlinks
Other things to think about when measuring the ROI of an influencer campaign include your administrative costs and the individual impact of each influencer.
Utilize These Top Tips With Popular Pays for Your Next Influencer Marketing Campaign
Putting all of the tips and marketing tactics covered in this article together can help you find the best influencer for your brand, as well as ensure your campaign is a success. If you’re looking for an agile marketing platform to help streamline each stage of the process, check out Popular Pays today.