Have you seen Emily in Paris? It’s a trending series on Netflix.
The Netflix series shows how Emily’s selfies, pictures and videos on social media helped generate brand awareness and increase conversions for brands. It’s so popular that Emily has become a meme sensation in Malaysia. We had:
With the right Influencer Marketing strategy, businesses can gain impactful awareness and conversions too, just like Emily in Paris.
If you’re planning an Influencer Marketing strategy, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide below to help you achieve a higher success rate for your campaign.
Interested to learn more? Read on.
Influencer Marketing is about collaborating with online influencers to market and promote your products or services.
Unlike celebrities, an online influencer could be anyone ranging from: Instagram models, Facebook influencers, Youtubers, Twitter personalities, and bloggers.
Imagine the return of investments (ROI) you’ll receive if your Influencer Marketing strategy hits the jackpot. By collaborating with popular social media influencers in your niche, your business will achieve a higher brand awareness in the marketplace.
Have you already integrated Influencer Marketing into your Brand Strategy? If you haven’t, then you’re in the right place. Read on.
The rise of social media has significantly changed the way businesses promote their products over the years.
Today, your customers are turning to their favourite Instagram models, YouTubers, and Twitter personalities for advice and recommendations when making purchasing decisions.
An Influencer Marketing strategy is an effective tactic because it helps to increase your website traffic, brand awareness, and drives your brand message to your target audience.
Social media influencers and bloggers are advocates of your brand. They are important because they help to build trust and bridge the gap between you and your target audience.
Developing a rock-solid Influencer Marketing strategy is crucial to the success of your campaign. Here, we’ve listed some recommended steps to take your campaign to the next-level:
Here are some common campaign objectives that most business strive to achieve when using Influencer Marketing in their business:
Before reaching out to them, make it a practice to research their industry and niche. Essentially, you want a list of influencers who can relate to your target audience and demographics. So, take time to learn about their interests and audience first.
Make sure that your potential influencers are persons relevant to your niche, expertise, and industry. It is unprofessional to pitch to any random influencer online. In fact, the worst mistake you can make is pitching to an irrelevant influencer who is not within your niche or industry.
To speed up your research process, you can also use Influencer Marketing tools to shortlist a handful of online influencers related to your field. Some of our favourite tools are: Buzzsumo, Followerwonk, Awario, Klear, and Alexa’s Competitor Backlink Checker.
Consider these factors as you shortlist your potential influencers:
An example of such engagements are the number of social shares and comments from their followers. These factors are really good indicators to determine how influential they truly are.
An inactive influencer will not help you achieve your brand awareness goals as effectively as other influencers who are more active on social media.
Taking the initiatives above will help you get recognised and noticed by them as it shows you are genuinely interested in their content. This puts you a step ahead of other businesses who are also in competition to hire the same influencer.
As you strengthen the relationship, make it your aim to nurture a long-term relationship with the influencer. Developing such a relationship is highly beneficial, especially when you need their help to promote your business or any new product launches in the future.
If you haven’t already come up with a campaign name, you should do so in this email. Be sure to also include a link in your email regarding your sales promotion, especially if your marketing objective is to increase sales.
When writing the email, be mindful of your tone of voice. Make sure that it is in alignment with your Brand Personality. For instance, if your brand voice is more casual than serious, try to avoid sounding too serious when writing the email. Or if your brand voice is usually more respectful than sassy, then be sure that the same tone of voice is reflected in your email.
Whilst you want to avoid pestering them, it is certainly worth your time to send one or two follow-up messages. Emails and messages can get lost, overlooked, or even deleted when their inbox is full.
Your follow-up message should remind the influencer of the contents in your previous email, the value you can offer them, and what exactly you would like them to promote about your business.
If the influencer still does not respond to your follow-up messages, move on to other influencers who are interested in your business. There is a sea of influencers on social media today, and it isn’t hard to find another one to replace those who ignored or rejected you.
Here are some useful performance metrics you should pay attention to when tracking your results: the number of impressions, clicks, brand mentions, follower growth, and whether there was an increase in your brand’s engagement.
To be efficient, you could also use some of our favourite tools that will quickly measure and analyse your campaign’s performance: Sprout Social, Crowdfire, Hootsuite, Social Bakers and Instagram Insights.
The success of a campaign is determined based on whether or not you’ve achieved your goals and objectives set out in #Step 1 of this article. With that said, your Influencer Marketing campaign is completed once you’ve finished this final step.
Be direct and concise when pitching to an influencer. Avoid rambling in your pitch. When crafting your emails or messages, pay attention to the tone of voice of your message. Do not come across as demanding, but write as if you are offering them an exclusive opportunity.
Like all campaigns, if you do not conduct thorough research, there will be flaws and loopholes in your Influencer Marketing strategy.
To avoid such mistakes, thoroughly scroll through the influencer’s posts and review the comments section. Avoid pitching to influencers whose posts are drowning in negative comments from their followers. Collaborating with such influencers will only tarnish your brand’s reputation.
Like all campaigns, it is essential to measure your Influencer Marketing results. Failing to do so will leave you wondering whether the campaign has benefited your business or not.
To recap, here’s a summary of the steps when doing Influencer Outreach:
We hope this article has provided you with more knowledge and insights to help you improve your Influencer Marketing strategy.
If you’re still feeling uncertain about how to carry out an Influencer Marketing campaign, you can reach out to Brand360 for a chat, or send us a message to request for more case studies on Influencer Marketing.