How to launch a successful influencer campaign?
The new version of word-of-mouth marketing is Influencer marketing. Influencer marketing helps the brands to provide recommendations and referrals through social media influencers which acts like a big personality for the common people whom they trust and follow.
It is important for brands to collaborate with the right influencers to launch a successful influencer marketing campaign. But this comes with many different doubts like,
- How much will it cost?
- How to connect with the right influencers?
- How to create content in collaboration with the influencer?
- Does it help to increase sales?
Building an Influencer Marketing Campaign starts with your organization and you, hence one should always begin by defining their goals and what you want to achieve.
The common goals to focus on can be to increase brand awareness and strengthen the brand, build a strong social media presence and engagement or improve the conversions (purchases, subscriptions, or others).
In this article, we will provide you with 4 steps to launch an influencer campaign.
1) Defining the budget for your influencer campaign:
Whether you are a small business or an enterprise or even an independent business owner, keep a track of your expenses with help to you understand whether the campaign met your goals or not.
If you are new to influencer marketing, we suggest you start small in the beginning to see whether influencer marketing is the right fit for your business or not.
Let’s say your product costs $15 and the shipping cost is $8, with this you can determine the budget per influencer is $23. And since you will be working less no. of influencers in the beginning let say 10 influencers, In this case, your total influencer campaign will cost min. $230.
2) How to connect with the right influencers?
In the 20’s it has become very easy to find an influencer. There are many Influencer Marketing platforms as Influence4You where brands can easily find the influencers in their niche and access the overview of their social media accounts like no. of followers, average no. of engagement, and likes on a post. The brands can also get hidden information like fake followers, fake accounts, valid influencers, and others by using some well-built influencer marketing platforms.
On the Influence4You platform, we integrated HypeAuditor, the world’s best software to detect fake followers and fake accounts, below you can find an influencer profile with the graduation of quality.
Influencer Datasheet by Influence4You
The best part of these Influencer marketing platforms is that it gives you an option to choose a plan which suits your budget.
An influencer marketing platform will help you to manage all the steps of an influencer campaign easily from the selection of the influencers to the pricing plans.
The steps to create your influencer campaign are mentioned below:
- Decide about remuneration or not of the influencers: Depending on the size of the influencers, the country, the social network, you have to determine if it’s necessary to remunerate or not.; an influencer agency can give you advice.
- The creation of the brief: The brief will give all the details of the collaborations to the influencers. We suggest you let the influencers use their creativity but you can specify some mandatory parts such as not to talk about competitors, to present the product or to emphasize on a promotion or offers (if any), the date of publication, and others. Here you can also target a social network in particular or create an influencer campaign over several social networks.
- The selection of the influencers of your campaign: Now that you have your campaign online, you will receive applications from influencers, it’s a very important step to select the good ones. The platform will give you all the data as shown in the image below including the rankings we gave to the influencers.
The Influencer Marketing Platforms provide you with various plans from where you can choose influencers based on the following:-
- Nano/ Micro-Influencers: The influencers that have less than 1K – 20K followers, but as it’s always said that a group of few people is always the best, hence sometimes these 10K can be the only genuine followers.
- Macro Influencers: These influencers have followers in the range of 100K – 1M. These influencers have a good engagement rate and can help the brands with their ROI.
- Mega Influencers: These influencers have 1M+ followers. It will help the brands get more reach by positive impact.
Note: Star Influencers like famous sportsperson, celebrities, or other famous personalities are not on these platforms because they manage the contracts directly with agents or Influencer Marketing Agencies.
So, If you want to collaborate with Star Influencers you will need to consider the budget. The best way is to contact an influencer agency because they know the market, the budget and have connections with all the star influencers and the best influencer, which can help and guide you according to need.
Using an Influencer Marketing Platform makes it easier for brands to look at the given data and identify the right fit of influencers for their business with whom they can collaborate at their convenience; but in the end, it all depends on the country the maximum followers come from, their engagement and their interest in your brands. Sometimes it also depends on the influencer, their experience, and their connection with their followers.
- Send the products and promo code to the Influencers: After you select the right influencer, you need to send your product and a promo code (if any) with the Influencer. In this step, it’s important to track your expenses and follow if everything is working well.
- Validation of the publications: Once the product and/or promo code is received by the influencer he/she creates the publication (social media post or story) which you can validate by checking the quality of the publication and whether he/she has respected the all points mentioned in the brief, if not, you can ask to modify or change it.
- Give rating to the influencer: The final step is mandatory on an Influencer Marketing Platform is to give a rating to the influencer at the end of the campaign. This final step is useful for your next campaigns but also for the platform that will check the quality of the influencers registered.
3) How to create content in collaboration with the influencer?
- Plan the type of content you want an influencer to create like, creating a video and/or a post
- You can ask the influencer to emphasize the product features or your latest offers or others.
- Also, give an influencer the freedom to use their creativity, because you chose them because you liked their work in the first place and also they know how to talk to their community and engage them. Hence trust is important when collaborating, though you can ask them to change/modify a few after a week or so.
- Discuss on which social media you want to promote (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, or others) and also the type of post (feed post, reels post, story post, video, simply blog content, or others).
- Also, discuss how you want the CTA to appear which will help you to increase ROI.
- Decide how you want to get mentioned by the influencers (brand name on the post, #hashtag, @mention, website URL)
- Create the timeline (for eg: date of the first post and similar).
To help you, get inspiration for your content by downloading our free eBook: 87 ideas for your influencer campaigns.
4) Does an influencer campaign help to increase conversions (purchase, subscriptions, or others)?
How will you know that your influencer actually brought you the ROI? The best way is to use the UTM link and ask the influencer to enter this link in the post caption.
It’s the best way to track the performance of the campaigns and content.
But alternatively, you can make a special discount code for the influencer and the influencer can ask his audience to use it at checkout, by doing this you can see how many people used this code and you can see how many customers you got from the influencers.
It will work the best when you are collaborating with many influencers and it will be easier for you to track how many customers each influencer brought in.
Note: The UTM link and/or the discount code should be unique for each influencer. Also, the Influence4You platform creates unique code for you or allows you to share them easily.
To go further, you can read our article on how to measure the influencer marketing campaign.
To conclude
Once your influencer campaign is over, measure your results against your initial goal. At this point, you can see whether you work with these influencers again and continue the collaboration.
You might also notice that the influencer campaign didn’t bring you many results as you have thought of. So in this case, try working with different influencers and try various types of content.
Some businesses best suit influencer marketing and some better suit paid Ads. In the end, it all differs from business to business because not all businesses are the same.
So if you notice that influencer marketing isn’t working for you, then just make sure that you are staying updated with digital marketing to find the winning strategies.
To get started with Influencer marketing you can begin with Influencer Platform which will provide you with key insights and support on your way.
You can also watch the video on how to use our platform:
And if you want to collaborate with big or star influencers, don’t forget to get advice from an influencer agency!
Now you know how to launch an influencer campaign! Don’t hesitate to contact us.
