Make Your Influencer Campaign Sparkle

All influencer marketing campaigns are not created equally. Some perform exceptionally well in reaching the target audience, attracting new customers, building brand awareness, and improving purchase consideration. Others end up as an also-ran. We have been developing, managing, and delivering successful influencer campaigns for many years with up to 3x ERR along with impressive qualitative results. In this article, I present proven strategies to help build effective influencer marketing programs.

Begin With the End in Mind

What is the desired outcome of your influencer marketing campaign? Is it to reach more people and create awareness, build engagement, drive traffic to the website, get notable mentions and brand affiliates, or increase sales? Write down your desired results as the KPIs to measure influencer marketing campaign. Caveat – do not load your campaign with several messages and KPIs to measure. Best-performing influencer campaigns communicate a single brand message and measure a few KPIs only.

Research Your Audience

Know your target audience demographics well. Also find out their media consumption habits, interests, and behavior. It helps select relevant social media platforms and influencers for bulls-eye targeting.

In our experience from working with 1000s of influencers and a variety of brands, reaching a diverse follower base and being inclusive yields the best campaign outcomes.

Find out the Suitable Platforms

Find out the social media platforms that your target audience frequents and choose the ones that are best suited for delivering your message. I am listing the popular social platforms below with brief facts about them for a quick overview.

Instagram is great for sharing photos or videos and offers decent targeting and content analytics. Ad spending in the influencer segment is projected to reach USD 531 m in 2023.

TikTok best fits the bill for reaching Millennials and Gen-Z through reels and short videos. It is the fastest-growing social platform.

LinkedIn is suited for reaching entrepreneurs or professionals with B2B promotions.

YouTube is best for longer, information-dissemination videos.

Facebook is good for using a mix of photo, video, or text content and for reaching older cohorts. Facebook may have reached the top of the S curve.

We recommend going deep by selecting and focusing on one social media platform, building frequency on it, and try being a dominant player in your category on that platform.

Build Collaborations and Influencer Partnerships

After setting up the influencers’ campaign goals, knowing your target audience, and selecting the platform, comes the heavy lifting, that is, developing the brief, then researching, finding, contracting, onboarding, shipping, and logistics, building partnerships with relevant influencers and getting the content that’s aligned with brand communications. The challenge is to find and work with relevant influencers and get sponsored content that resonates with their followers. Know the platforms the influencers have more followers and engagement on and if that is the best channel to reach your audience. How much influence do they have on their followers? Find influencers with followers with the required interests, age groups, and the desired location. Consider if you want the rights to use their images on other owned or paid platforms. Negotiate the fees likewise. Determine Influencer Media Value (IMV) to offer fair value for their content.

Collaborate with the influencers who are excited to use and promote your products or services. The ones who are aligned and believe in the idea. And all engagements are not of the same quality. Look for quality engagement. Get analytics. Comments like nice, thumbs-up, and wow don’t cut it. The IMV and the content quality help pick the best influencers for a campaign at a fair price.

Monitor and Measure Campaign

Approve content before influencers post it. Ensure brand message and feel are communicated well. However, don’t make it look like cookie-cutter content that shouts advertisement. Remember it’s not an ad. It’s story-telling via UGC/IGC (influencer-generated content).

People follow influencers because they like their style and content. Let influencers convey the brand message in their style. The purpose of running influencer campaigns is to reach the target audience via the voices they trust.

Monitor campaign KPIs from the start to ensure it is on track to deliver the desired outcomes. Adjust and finance high-performing influencer partnerships to meet campaign goals.

Running an effective influencer marketing campaign is challenging and time-consuming. Savvy brands, e-commerce companies, and scale-ups work with influencer marketing agencies to deliver results and growth. Experienced influencer marketing agencies help set up realistic, measurable goals, choose the platform that is suited for the audience, develop briefs, search, shortlist and onboard relevant influencers, and collaborate with them to create and deliver content that resonates.