8 Steps For Your First Influencer Marketing Campaign
If you’ve heard of influencer marketing recently, but aren’t quite sure where to start, this could be a great time to do some research. In times of crisis, it can be useful to think about new ways to increase your brand’s visibility.
Why would your business want to try influencer marketing? Influencer marketing can be a great strategy to help grow your brand. Being recommended or mentioned by trusted online creators will help you get seen by new audiences, create new customers, and if done right, help your brand come across more authentic, human, and trustworthy.
There are many niches and sizes of influencers to fit your brand. Whether you’re a new brand, or more established, Micro-influencers are an authentic and cost-efficient way to promote your business for your first campaign.
To help you get started, we’ve put together 10 key steps to follow.
1. Define your audience
As with all marketing campaigns, the first step is defining who you want to target and influence. This could be the same group as your other marketing campaigns, or a new sub-set. For example, if you’re a B2C brand in the supplement sector, maybe instead of your typical fitness junkie, with this campaign you could look to target more health and wellness focused customers.
2. Set goals
What do you want to achieve with an influencer marketing campaign? Do you want to increase your brand awareness? or do you want to drive more sales? Remember that you will need repeated campaigns to see results, so keep your KPI numbers realistic.
3. Define your budget/offering
What will you offer influencers in exchange for their content? Define a suitable budget based on their following and engagement, as well as whether you intend to gift your product/service, or any discounts for their followers.
4. Profile your ideal influencer
Hopefully by now you have a clear idea of your dream influencer. Keep in mind that a macro influencer is likely to reach more people, but a micro or nano influencer will come across as more authentic and have a more engaged audience.
5. Make a shortlist
Draw up a list of 30 – 50 potential individuals to work with. Keep an eye out for fake accounts, by checking whether comments on their posts are real, the status of their engagement rate and whether they received a sudden spike in followers. The latter could suggest having purchased fake or ‘bot’ followers, and can be checked out on websites like Influencer Marketing Hub’s checker. It’s also worth checking the quality of comments as well.
6. Outreach and negotiate
Make first contact with your influencer shortlist, laying out very clearly the terms of your proposal: who your brand is, what you’re offering, timeline,expected content, hashtags and tags. It’s likely that the influencer will try to negotiate, but make sure you are clear on what is not compromisable. Don’t forget to draw up a short contract to sign.
7. Re-post the content
When your campaigns are running, make sure to give them more visibility by re-posting the content on your social channels. This will help boost the campaign and also give you something to share!
8. Wrap it up
After the campaign is over, thank your collaborators and ask for the analytics. Hopefully, you will have gained some potential long-term partnerships and increased your brand’s awareness.
If all of this sounds overwhelming, there are many tools to help simplify the process. Platforms like Collabstr handle all of the outreach, vetting, and negotiating for you. They also provide analytics for every influencer and track campaign results. All you need to do is post your collab and choose the influencers that you want to work with.
