Tips for Influencer Marketing: How to Get it Right

Stephen McCance March 25, 2019

The rise of social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly changed the way consumers interact with brands online. This, in turn, has made way for a new medium of marketing. Brands have partnered with so-called ‘influencers’ (an individual who has the power to influence their audience), to help attract interest from their loyal, established fan base.

 

Top Tips for Influencer Marketing:

 

Set Goals
As with any marketing campaign, you should set out clear goals of what you’d like to achieve. This will also help you select the right influencers to partner with. Ask yourself the following questions:

 

  • What demographic are we trying to reach?
  • What’s our brand message?
  • What would we like our audience to do as a result of the campaign?

 

It seems obvious, but many brands go into a campaign without well-thought out ideas, wasting time, money and resources. Once you’ve established this, you can then think about your goals for the campaign. This could be anything from increasing your sales of a product by ‘x’ amount, or even increasing your following base on a social networking site.

 

Keep it Relevant

Teaming up with the wrong influencer can be detrimental to your brand. One of the top tips for influencer marketing is ensuring you’re choosing the most relevant influencers for your brand. After all, an influence has their own brand too. They may be a beauty blogger, fashion enthusiast or food lover. Just because an influencer has hundreds of thousands of followers, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be well suited to your brand. Their audience may not be who you’re trying to target.

 

Value Engagement Over Followers

It’s becoming increasingly popular to target micro-influencers. A micro-influencer is typically someone who has 1,000-10,000 followers. It’s believed that, unlike those with millions of followers, their fanbase is more loyal – and therefore more willing to buy into what they are advertising. A micro-influencer is also likely to have higher engagement with what they post, meaning in some cases more people may see the product than if you were to partner with a celebrity influencer.

 

Aim to Create Long Term Partnerships

Influencers want to be as genuine as possible to their followers. Usually, they’ll only partner with a brand if it’s a product or service they truly believe in and use. It makes sense to work with one influencer who is then recognised as associated with your brand. This type of influencer is often referred to as a ‘brand ambassador’. If you’re exposing your product to their audience subtly over a long period of time, they’re more likely to remember your brand. This is one of the biggest tips for influencer marketing.

 

Track Results

Marketing is only effective when you track or monitor the results. One of the best ways to track the success of your campaign is through a code that you’ll provide the influencer. They’ll then include this in the caption when they post. This code will be exclusive to them, and it will allow you to track how many of their followers buy your product because of them. However, such codes may be passed around the internet, and might not be used by their actual followers.

An alternative method is to provide each influencer with a trackable, tagged URL that they’ll then share with their audience – likely to be in their bio as Instagram doesn’t permit clickable URL’s in a caption. This means that you can track the users journey and see which influencer is driving the most traffic to the site.

 

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