Recently, influencer marketing has shown great results, so brands are increasingly working with influencers to promote their products and services in an effective way that helps them reach a large percentage of their audience, because when the audience sees an ad on television for a product or a service, they probably don’t actually use it in real life. On the contrary, when it comes to an influencer, it looks more real. But how can you make use of influencer marketing to achieve your goals?
1. Set Your Objectives Accurately
To have a strong base that makes you sure that you are going in the right direction while working on influencer marketing, you should define your main objectives, which are:
- Your goals and needs (Brand awareness, service awareness, social responsibility, etc).
- The target audience (A, B, C, etc).
- The social media platforms you will use (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, etc).
- The formats of the produced content (Videos, photos, posts, Gifs, etc).
2. Choose The Ideal Influencers
After setting your objectives specifically, it’s time to search for the best influencers to work with, taking into consideration that the influencers who have a huge number of followers are not always the perfect fit, because it’s all about the quality, not the quantity. In the same regard, choosing the right influencers depends on many factors, and you can put the influencer on your shortlist if he/she has the following:
- Previous experience in the brand’s industry.
- Good number of followers that belong to your target audience.
- Enough level of creativity while executing campaigns.
- Profile statistics that will propel the campaign forward and characters you can create long-term relationships with. (High engagement rate, wide reach, good attitude, etc).
3. Create Unique Ideas
Because content is the compass that directs your campaign, whether in the right or wrong direction, it is recommended to brainstorm with the influencer to work on creative ideas with unique execution that distinguish your campaign from similar ones in the same field, and you can give your influencer’s campaign good potential by including some of the following benefits to the influencer’s audience:
- Giveaways
- Discounts
- Free gifts
- Competitions
4. Build An Identity Without Restrictions
It’s advised not to control every single detail in the campaign, so that the influencer can feel free to imagine and create creatively, and because he/she knows what his/her audience will admire most and what will encourage them to respond to your call to action. On the other hand, that may lead to in the air campaign, especially if you are working with multi-influencers, and to solve this dilemma easily, we suggest using one unified version for these elements in all posts:
- Hashtags and mentions.
- Slogan expresses the campaign’s main goal.
- Color palette for all the artworks inspired by the brand’s visual identity.
- The same branding guidelines, such as logos.
5. Don’t Miss Tracking & Evaluating
Tracking your campaign’s performance is a must to make the needed adjustments if it achieved positive results, to increase them, or to work on the required changes if it didn’t work well.
If your campaign went viral, achieving a huge number of impressions, views, likes, shares, comments, and engagements, congratulations! You’ve succeeded, and if it didn’t meet the brand’s expectations, hard luck! But in the two cases, there’s an important step left, which is “analyzing”. The campaign’s statistics will help you in the upcoming campaigns by:
- Making you aware of the effective factors to use them again.
- Helping you know your mistakes and bad decisions to avoid them later.
- Creating predictions and suggestions regarding similar fields and target audience.
- Giving you solid experience in monitoring influencer marketing campaigns.
