When it comes to marketing, you don’t have to do everything alone. Consider calling in a few “influencers” for assistance — people who have a large following and can influence the habits of people in a specific audience or industry. The most popular influencers typically have either a large social media following or a niche audience that frequently engages with their content.
The idea of an influencer marketing strategy is for your brand to form a partnership with an influencer who will expose your content to their audience. This will give your company’s visibility a huge boost and expose your brand or business to an audience that is not only large and engaging but also one you would not usually be able to reach by yourself.
If you want to craft an effective communications plan for your own influencer marketing campaign, consider the following steps.
Start by determining your goals.
Build your marketing strategy around a specific objective. Whether you want to increase sales or bring in new leads, it's important to identify your main goals and KPIs at the beginning of the campaign to accurately measure success. Most of all, you must answer how, exactly, an influencer campaign will help you accomplish your goals.
Know your audience.
Your focus should be on creating targeted content that captures the interest of your users. Deep dive into who exactly you want to target through with your influencer marketing campaign and put together personas to better understand your consumer. This will inform the right channels and influencers for your brand.
Identify the right influencers.
After assessing the target audience of your brand or business, create a list of potential influencers, and identify those who are most relevant to your brand, have the highest reach or engagement potential, and are within your budget. Influencers should be selected by channel as well as relevancy and popularity.
Keep your campaign on brand.
It's important that the influencers you partner with are in line with your brand. As representatives of your brand to the world, their personalities and identities should be aligned with your brand. Influencers have the ability to create conversations and start trends, so make sure their messaging matches your brand image and is compatible with your brand's voice.
Measure results.
Work with the influencers you partner with to quantify campaign success. Have them provide results and key metrics such as impressions, post likes, post saves, post shares, and click-through-rate to understand how successful the campaign is. There are also various software tools that track campaign results automatically brands can use depending on their budget.