An effective influencer marketing strategy forms part of a larger marketing strategy that is crucial to any business. Without a solid marketing strategy, your business could potentially fail.
Effective marketing strategies aren’t just something you come up with on a whim.
There isn’t one magical formula that you execute that will produce the desired results in your cauldron.
It requires research and analysis. A process that will prove that the marketing strategy you decide on will generate the best impact on your business needs.
Choosing the right marketing strategy will ensure that you will not only generate sales but also develop strong brand awareness for your business. You want to score big when you execute your marketing strategy.
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Eric Dahan is the founder of Open Influence, a social media influencer agency. He has some excellent advice on influencer marketing.
Listen to the interview below to learn more:
How to Assess What Marketing Strategy Is Right for Your Business?
Drafting a marketing plan is important for any business. It will help you stay focused on your business’ needs, without distractions.
Here are some tips to help you determine what will work best for your business:
1. Evaluate your industry
Most businesses will do a SWOT analysis to understand where their business is currently at and how you can move the business forward. For instance, you assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of your business.
Source: CoSchedule
2. Figure out your marketing goal
It could be goals such as increasing sales, acquiring new customers, improving brand awareness, launching a new product, or increasing traffic to your website.
3. Determine who your target audience is
Think about your intended audience. What are their demographics? Using a target audience profile helps you narrow in on your exact intended audience.
4. Decide on a marketing budget
A common rule of thumb is that your marketing budget shouldn’t exceed 5-10% of your revenue.
Make sure you consider potential costs and allocate them to specific faucets such as social media, online ads, video, email, and influencer marketing/affiliate marketing.
After you determine the process that is required to decide on a marketing strategy, it’s time to come up with a marketing plan.
Typically, a marketing plan considers these elements:
- Overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals
- Understand the current marketing position of your business
- A timeline indicating when tasks for your marketing strategy will be completed
- KPI’s you’ll be tracking
- Your business’s target market and customer needs
Once you’ve created a marketing plan and you understand the importance of marketing to your business, you need to decide on which marketing strategies will work best for you.
Look into which marketing strategies will have the biggest influence on your brand’s industry.
What Is Influencer Marketing?
“People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.”
Seth Godin
Consumers will go out of their way to block out ads and make it more difficult for brands to keep up. Influencer marketing bridges that gap and allows for the relations and stories to come to life.
So what exactly is influencer marketing?
In the simplest form, influencer marketing is meshing celebrity endorsements with a content-driven marketing campaign. It is a collaboration between brands and influencers.
Just because many brands do influencer marketing, it doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the best choice for your business.
Influencer marketing is about gaining exposure to your brand using niche influencers in marketing campaigns.
Just like every other type of marketing, influencer marketing requires a thorough analysis to see if it will benefit your company.
Can an influencer help me to promote a giveaway?
Yes! A giveaway or contest can be an ideal opportunity for an influencer to engage with their followers. Giveaways are viral, and viral content is exactly what influencers need.
Partnering with an influencer to promote your giveaway can be mutually beneficial. Giveaways boost followers, especially if a giveaway has bonus actions that ask users to ‘refer a friend’.
Pro Tip: Select a prize that will be appealing to the influencer’s following. Don’t choose something that is of no interest to them as they will feel that the influencer is pushing a giveaway onto them.
Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Deciding on Implementing an Influencer Strategy
- What purpose will incorporating influencers in my marketing serve my business?
- Does my brand have the capacity to be able to incorporate new audiences?
- Is my brand equipped with the tools to engage these new audiences in the long term?
- Will these new audiences benefit my brand? In which ways?
- What campaigns will I be able to produce to ensure the success of my influencer marketing strategy?
The Big Question: Is Influencer Marketing Effective?
Only 1% of millennials trust advertisements.
33% of millennials trust blogs and rely on them to make purchasing decisions.
44% of millennials prefer authenticity to content. They must trust the company before buying anything.
62% want to engage with brands on social media.
It’s clear that the consumers of your companies products prefer knowing the brand over being advertised a bunch of products.
Having an influencer strategy not only connects you with new audiences but also has the capacity to engage a new loyal audience to your brand.
The influencers already have the loyalty of their followers. As a brand, you don’t need to waste resources to develop that trust since the influencers already have that connection with their audience.
You are essentially taking advantage of their loyalty to the influencer, and benefiting from a potentially loyal customer audience. You are easily able to form a connection with people who are most likely to connect with your brand. Therefore, the influencer can be seen as the one who connects your brand with its audience.
Some critical data points that will help inform you of how effective influencer marketing are as follows:
- 80% of marketers say that influencer marketing is effective
- 89% of marketers say that the return on investment for influencer marketing ROI is just as good or even better than other marketing strategies
It’s clear that the general marketing industry recognizes the positives that influencer marketing has on businesses. According to the data, it’s much more likely that influencer marketing will be beneficial for your brand than not.
So how exactly does your business benefit?
Influencer marketing builds brand awareness, exposure, and authority for your business. Above all, it connects your brand with new audiences.
How to Build an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy
Influencer marketing isn’t just about pouring money into influencers so that they can say positive things about your business, with the hope that they will have an impact on your brand.
Just like any other marketing strategy, planning is essential. Before you even get into the specifics, you need to come up with a general marketing plan for your influencer strategy.
Here is a marketing plan template with great graphic design that will help you guide your marketing strategy. It includes:
- Proposed strategy and plan summary
- Email campaign tactics
- Target demographics
- Campaign budget
You can also use a social media plan template to help with the campaign you will be producing.
Some important things to help with what should be included are:
- Metrics of your current social presence
- Your ideal customer
- Social media mission statement
- Key success metrics
- Social media management tools
- Tracking, analyzing, and optimizing plan
Some important tips to consider for your campaigns:
- Picking the right influencers: do your research ahead of time
- Sending email request/dm request
- Building relationships: have influencers connect with your marketing team so that they build strong bonds and friendships (Consider making use of an HR management software to facilitate the workflow between your marketing team and your influencers)
- Measuring success: figure out what has worked in your strategy and how effective it was for your business.
Finding the Right Influencers
It’s crucial that you take the time to properly research an influencer before you can even approach them. An influencer with tons of followers on Instagram or Facebook might initially seem like the ideal person to match with. However, you can still experience many difficulties during your partnership.
Some examples of potential issues include:
- Influencer’s followers do not have an interest in your brand
- The influencer is not known for using your products
- The influencer has plenty of followers with little engagement. There are not enough comments, likes, or shares on posts
Researching Influencers
Research can be as simple as going through your influencer’s social media profile. Ask yourself:
- Are their posts relevant to my brand? Look at their posts and picture your product in those posts. Then ask yourself if those posts will benefit your brand.
- Are their posts engaging? It’s common for social media profiles to have a lot of subscribers, but with minimum reach on their posts. Go through the comments on the posts to see if they are positive. You might not want to partner up with someone who constantly receives negative comments. Your brand will be linked to these comments.
- Is the influencer known for using similar products to yours? If an influencer promotes a website or product that they are not known for using, their fans will pick up on this immediately. This can impact negatively on them and your brand.
Conclusions
Make sure you start early. Therefore, complete your research way ahead of your actual campaign.
However, you should keep in mind to not go after influencers solely for their big audiences. In other words, make sure that their own personal branding connects with your businesses’ branding. You want their followers to generate a specific action.
Most importantly, have fun with your influencer marketing. Remember that it’s a creative space, be unique in the way you approach your campaigns.
Don’t be afraid to connect with your influencers and get their opinions as well. In addition to promoting your brand, they are also experienced in the world of social media and may potentially have insights your team may never think of.
Influencer marketing is effective with the right implementation. Make sure it is well planned beforehand.
Have you ever used an influencer to market your brand? Which influencer marketing strategies did you find the most effective? Let us know in the comments.
Rada Abdo is a Content Marketer at Venngage. She enjoys travelling, posting fashion pics on instagram, and reading about serial killers. Connect with her on instagram: @_rads
Jack Paxton is the co-founder of VYPER, a marketing tool that helps brands build email lists, social followings, and revenue using viral giveaways, referral, and reward programs. After millions of dollars spent testing different marketing strategies at his marketing agency. He then also co-founded Hyax a fast, conversion & design-focused course and funnel builder for creators.
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