What is Influencer Marketing Strategy?
Influencer Marketing Strategy is simply partnering your brand with social media influencers to promote your products and services. Social media influencers are engaged with large numbers of followers regarding their expertise, experiences, knowledge, and unique point of view. Influencer marketing strategy is growing rapidly, the growth is attributed to the increasing popularity of short video platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. The existence of the pandemic plays as the catalyst for rising social media consumption, especially for social media ads. In 2022, the influencer market is projected to reach $16.4 billion industry. Utilizing influencer marketing strategies can make your company a big difference from the competition.
Tips on creating an influencer marketing strategy
Identify your goals
Setting goals is an essential part of your marketing strategy. Goals support your campaign with an overall purpose. It directs you to every decision you make, from creating your marketing plan to selecting influencers. However, it’s not as simple as you might think to set goals. Sometimes, companies choose their target or goal too broad, so they aren’t sure how to reach it exactly. And sometimes, companies may select goals that aren’t even possible to achieve. Utilizing SMART Goals might be a critical step in your goal-setting process, it can also provide various benefits to your influencer marketing strategy. SMART relates to specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
First of all, you should audit your company website’s traffic and presence on social media. You need to understand what are the weaknesses and strengths of your brand. Then, identify the areas for improvement and growth opportunities. Second, make your goals specific. Think about questions for example, What do you want to accomplish? Why is a specific goal important? Who is involved and what resources are involved? Third, incorporate a team to help you brainstorm the tasks of your SMART goals. Fourth, create a timeline for each task that your team identified. Manage the tasks so that you will be able to complete them on time. Finally, make sure to use the milestones to monitor your progress and track your goals.
Map the influencer landscape
After you identify your target audience and goals, you want to connect the influencers that are suitable to your target market. This will ensure you target the best influencers who will have the most influence on your target audience, which helps you to maximize the results of your goals. Ensuring you have the right influencer for your marketing campaign is the key to your success. Researching through influencers that are suitable for your brands and products, will help you understand various influencers’ opinions and content they have on their followers on social media. You need to make sure to spot the social media platform that your ideal audience frequents. And decide on whether you prefer engaging with well-known celebrities or micro-influencers. Then, build a list of influencers to assist you in further reaching out.
Building an influencer marketing plan
Conducting a marketing plan by setting up an influencer management strategy, timeline, and budget for your campaign. Recognize and understand the market and competition, state your company’s mission and vision, and include your target customer and goals. In addition, decide on the marketing strategies that you want to use. A well-researched marketing plan will promote you to not only understand your business, and align your marketing goals with your overall business goals, but also ensure everyone in your company is on the same page and drives out better decisions for your campaign.
Reach out to selected influencers
Once your marketing plan and influencer lists are set, approaching your influencers using the right method is important, as it helps you to make a great first impression. Understand the influencers before reaching out to them based on the research you did, and start by appreciating their work before you mention your partnership intention. You also need to highlight what you’re offering to them in turn of their effort clearly and make your message brief but with everything that is relevant. Remember to be respectful and leave space for further discussion and negotiation. Don’t hesitate to send a follow-up message/email if they don’t reply to your first message, as well as, include a call-to-action so they know exactly what to do next.
Monitor and track your results
As you have done all the steps for your marketing campaign, from goal-setting to picking the right influencer for your brand. Now it’s time to monitor your results and the ROI. Setting identifiable influencer marketing KPIs will make your tracking process easier. You can use identifiers such as a hashtag, an affiliate discount code, or tracking links, which assist you to monitor direct results from influencer campaigns. Comparing your actual ROI to your objective. If you find the results pleasing, then you can continue to build on them. But if you find your results aren’t as good as you want, you can improve and adjust your plans and strategies for your next campaign. Whether your results are good or bad, measuring your results is extremely important for your overall success.
Conclusion
There aren’t perfect ways or exact steps to help you develop an influencer marketing strategy for your business. As marketing strategies vary upon different types of businesses, you need to build different influencer marketing campaigns for different aspects of your business as well. Select some tips above to help you develop the marketing strategies that you think are important for your company and progress. However, if you have difficulties finding the right influencers for your campaign or building influencer marketing strategies that suit your brand, reach out to us!
