What do you think the customary people have access to and are most influenced by? Social media of course. People may not have time to look at the large billboards displayed on the roads or to watch ads on television, but they do have access to their mobile phones all day. Therefore, the best way to entice your customers to your products is by approaching them through something as common as social media. Social marketing or social media marketing is a great source of attracting potential customers to your product or establishing brand awareness.
Social media marketing is a very broader umbrella shadowing influencer marketing under it. If you are planning to expand your business empire to infinite limits, you need to surpass the trivial methods and reach on to new methods of marketing.
And if you are looking forward to implementing influencer marketing for your brand or products, here are some simple but important tips that you can follow to reach the goal you want to achieve.
1. Define your Goals
You need to define your goals in the first place every time you’re going for influencer marketing for your brand awareness or marketing your products. Defining your goals can be done by following the three steps mentioned below:
- Figure out what’s your purpose of going for Influencer Marketing:
Set a purpose why you want to go to a particular influencer. Set your initial targets like increasing the reach of your company, or getting income by selling off your products.
- Understand and figure out your target audience
The most important part of selecting a perfect marketing influencer involves the selection of a perfect audience for your campaign. Every influencer has its own type of followers, so it is better to get in contact with influencers influencing your required audience.
- Foresee the end goal that you want to achieve through your campaign
After analyzing your and setting your target audience, ask yourself the ultimate result you can gain from that particular influencer. If the answers you get are satisfactory and you think that you can get the desired results, go for the marketing influencer you are considering.
2. Set up your Budget
The first and foremost thing to do before going for any campaign is to recognize our marketing cost. Just like other advertising campaigns, the costs also vary here depending upon the followership, engagement, and size of a particular influencer’s channel or blog.
Some influencers may also charge more or less based on the type of content they produce and their audience’s engagement rate. As per influence.co, influencer’s rates increase as their size (and audience) increases.
Though Instagram marketing isn’t costly as you’re able to negotiate and fix a good rate with an influencer unlike traditional advertising, you must set your marketing budget and make plans accordingly.
3. Figure out which type of marketing campaign you want to use
You need to figure out and decide which type of marketing campaign you’re looking forward to implementing for your brand or product.
There are a few popular campaigns that you can ask your influencer to run on his platform. The rates may also vary for each campaign depending upon many factors, mainly the type of campaign. Other factors include which strategy is being used by the influencer and your demand as well.
Some types of marketing campaigns are:
Product Review:
This campaign is run by providing a product of our brand to the ideal influencer and asking them to review it. This can either be done through an Instagram story or a post/video based on what you’d desire.
The influencer reviews your product and gives his opinion and a CTA (Call-to-action) at the end. You can also set a specific discount on the product getting reviewed by your ideal influencer by providing him a PROMO CODE or some other CTA.
Sponsored Post:
This type of campaign is run by paying the influencer to market your product through sponsored or on-demand content. The influencer showcases your product in his posts or stories or directly markets it, based on your desire.
Branded Content:
This is the type of campaign that is run by you but supported by an influencer. You create and publish the content about your brand or product featuring your ideal influencer in it. The influencer may also share this on his Instagram channel to make them watch the branded content. This type of campaign is used for brand awareness or attracting a new audience to the existing brand.
Ambassadorship or Brand Representative Campaign:
This campaign is used for acquiring a large audience for our brand or product. An Influencer plays the role of a brand ambassador or brand representative. His audience automatically gravitates towards the brand he is representing which helps in driving more traffic and engagement. You can also set up a discount link or PROMO CODE that will serve as a Call To Action for the audience.
Contests and Challenges:
Nothing is more engagement driving than the contest campaigns. This is for the fact that the audience easily gets driven by any challenge or a contest announced by an influencer on his channel. Create a contest and ask the influencer to share it with his audience. Set some lucrative rewards in it. The rest will be done by the audience itself.
This type of campaign is also used for driving the audience to a new brand and boosting the retention rate and engagement as well.
4. Choose the Perfect Fit for your Brand
If you are trying to expand your makeup products, you cannot let a gamer advertise them. Therefore, the selection of a perfect fit for your brand is one of the most important decisions that need to be made after considering the following points:
- Spend significant time researching for your ideal influencer
You cannot jump directly to the page or website of an influencer for marketing your brand. You must do some research and make a list of influencers who are most famous for performing their task efficiently.
- Search for the influencer that perfectly fits with your brand
Influencer marketing is very common these days. Many professional and non-professional people are handling this business these days, so be vigilant while choosing the perfect influencer for your aim. After making list of influencers that are most popular these days and have a large audience linked with them, look for the influencer who is most appropriate for your task.
- Pick someone who has expertise/previous experience in your industry/brand niche
An electronic expert cannot sell makeup items appropriately. Similarly, a beauty expert knows nothing about machinery, so the experience of the influencer holds prime importance in the publicity of your brand. It is better to pick someone who is experienced in the field of your brand.
- Search for the influencer whose followers are the right target audience for your brand
Followers of a gamer will not be interested in buying makeup, or followers of makeup artists will not be interested in computers, so consider scrutinizing the audience of the influencer before hiring.
- Search for budget-friendly one while looking for international influencer
If you are searching internationally, try your best to find out an influencer whose rates align with your budget and acquire your target audience at the same time to make your campaign successful. It is not wise to hire an international influencer who has a larger audience but whose rates are out of your budget. So look for an influencer, who has your pocket-friendly budget.
5. Track your Success Rate
It is of utmost importance to track your success rate during establishing social media marketing campaigns. Tracking the success rate is usually done for those campaigns that are generally not focused on brand awareness but on conversions and sales specifically. The biggest challenge after getting done with marketing and running campaigns is how a brand can track its success rate in this type of marketing. However, it is equally important to measure our ROI (Return Of Investment) to analyze whether the campaign went successful or not.
Although the businesses track it through other factors like traffic, conversions, and sales, you can also set up a conversion tracking system. This is achieved by designing an affiliate link for your campaign and marketing the whole thing through that link to easily track conversions.
You can find many affiliate link-building tools on the web which do the job. Search for the term “Campaign URL Builder tool” and you will find a bunch of them. Use the one which suits your campaign the best.
However, here is a list of some of the Campaign URL Builder tools;
- Campaign URL Builder by Google Analytics Dev-Tools
- Campaign URL Builder by Tilda
- URL Builder by Facebook
- Online UTM Tracking Code Builder
- Campaign URL Builder by GoSquared
- Utmbuilder.net
- URL Builder by matomo
The process of building a campaign tracking URL is pretty simple. Most of the campaign URL builders ask for the following information about the campaign to generate a tracking link;
- Campaign (like, Sales, promotion, etc.)
- Website URL
- Campaign Source (like Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
- Campaign Medium (like email, social media, etc.)
- Campaign Headline (or Call To Action)
- UTM Term (or keywords for your paid campaign)
FAQs
4 commonly asked questions about influencer marketing and their answers are as follows:
- What is the basic cost of influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing does not have fixed rates as every influencer has their own rates depending upon their requirements and audience.
- How to start working with an influencer?
You may contact the influencer directly or hire a third party to handle the paperwork for you. It depends upon your budget and time whether you can afford the expenses of a third party or whether you have enough time to handle the research and paperwork stuff on your own.
- Is micro-influencer a good option for influencer marketing?
Micro-influencer may not have a large fan following but their content is saturated. So hiring a micro-influencer who can engage even 1000 people is better than an ordinary influencer who has a larger number of followers but cannot engage more customers for your product.
- Are celebrity marketing and influencer marketing same?
No, celebrity marketing and influencer marketing are two different things. Celebrity marketing involves celebrities but in influencer marketing, common people i.e. influencers are involved.
- Who is a social influencer?
A social influencer or social media influencer is someone who has a good reputation and followership on any of the popular social media platforms. A social influencer can have a good audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Influencer Marketing is totally dependable on social influencers having a significant amount of fan following on any of these platforms to target or direct towards anything they’re to market.
References:
https://business.twitter.com/en/blog/5-tips-more-effective-influencer-marketing.html
https://www.hopperhq.com/blog/instagram-influencer-marketing/
https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/guide-to-instagram-influencer-marketing-2/
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