An influencer campaign can connect you with new audiences, drive traffic to your website and give you more opportunities to sell your products or services. If you haven’t tried influencer marketing, yet it could be because you’re unsure of how to go about it. Here are some tips on how to find an influencer that’s right for your business and create a winning campaign. 

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is basically social media marketing endorsed by an individual who is viewed as an expert in a particular niche and has a dedicated social following. Their followers trust them and so a recommendation from them serves as convincing social proof and the exposure helps a brand to connect with a target audience in a more natural, meaningful way. 

In 2019, one of the influencer marketing trends has been the shift from tactical to relational marketing campaigns with many more brands tapping into influencer marketing to achieve their goals. Adweek predicts that investments in influencers will reach $10 billion by 2020. 

According to a CivicScience survey, 1/5th of consumers in America made a purchase recommended by influencers in 2019. Americans aged 25 or younger are the most likely to purchase something if it is recommended by an influencer or blogger but the impact of influencers extends to every age group, not just younger generations. 

With a well-planned influencer marketing strategy that ties in with an e-commerce strategy, the influencer role in e-commerce sales can be immense. 

1. Research and strategic planning

Like any other type of campaign, a successful influencer marketing campaign needs to be thoroughly researched and planned. 

• Decide on your goals and message: Elevating brand awareness and increasing sales are broad goals. You need to dig deeper into what your brand needs. Do you want to expand into a new user group with a new product? Do you want to increase your customer base by targeting younger customers? 

• Consider your budget: Setting the budget for your campaign will dictate how many influencers you can partner with and their tier of influence.

• Define what audience you’re trying to reach: If you know your audience, it is easier to identify the people they follow. Julian Moran, a marketer at Best Essay, who also markets for the best paper writing service, says that it helps to create audience personas to make sure you understand who you want to reach and then create matching influencer personas to help you make the right choices. 

• Choose the right platform: If you’re first starting out, choose one platform to focus on first. Demographics vary on each platform and the industry you’re in will also help determine the platform you use.

2. Decide on a type of influencer marketing

You may be able to inspire influencers to share your message on their own, pay them to promote your brand or develop a strategy that uses both. Here are some strategies to consider:

• Give away free products or services in exchange for a mention or a review. 
• Co-create content with influencers to feature on their websites. 
• Pay for your content to be featured on the social channels of influencers. 
• Run a contest and have influencers share it with their followers. 
• Allow influencers control over your social media accounts for a specific period. 
• Give influencers unique discount codes they can promote to their audiences.

The strategy you choose is largely dependent on what you believe will work best for your brand. 

3. Find potential influencers

There are many different types of influencers and a tool such as Influence.co can help you to identify them. You can also use Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool to find other websites with similar audiences to yours. BuzzSumo, Deep Social and Klout are also useful. 

Don’t make the mistake of only looking at the number of followers. Reach is meaningless if the followers have no interest in your offer. For example, if you’re marketing to students who are looking for an essay service or dissertations services, you would want to work with an influencer that resonates with a student audience. 

Intrepid Travel worked with vegan influencers to launch its vegan tours because they had highly relevant audiences the company could engage in an authentic way. 

Look for influencers who produce the type of content that engages and resonates with an audience. If there’s a really good match between and influencer and your brand, it enhances the authenticity of your campaign. 

Micro-influencers with smaller audiences often have more engaged followers, according to Tapinfluence. 

4. Connect with influencers 

If you want to work with micro-influencers, reaching out directly with a personal message is a good place to start. More established influencers usually list contact information for inquiries and may also link to a website that shows brand partnerships. 

An influencer is more likely to want to work with you if you provide as much information as possible about your brand and what you hope to accomplish with your campaign. Be clear about how the influencer can benefit too. 

5. Create an influencer agreement

After connecting with influencers, you need to set up some guidelines and expectations for your collaboration. For example, you will need to define who has the rights to the content after the completion of a campaign. 

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission takes disclosure seriously. Influencers have to identify sponsored posts and you should make sure you build disclosure guidelines into your agreements. 

6. Share campaign creative guidelines

Influencers work hard to build their followings and won’t accept deals that make their brand seem inconsistent or that require them to push out content that appears too salesy. 

Some brands allow influencers create content and others require final creative approval that may include various revisions. It doesn’t matter as long as communication is open and honest. Sometimes being less rigid in your guidelines makes the experience more enjoyable for influencers and more successful. 

Include specifics in any creative guidelines, such as the number and type of posts you expect from the influencer, and the dates for when content should go live. 

7. Review campaign results

Plan to track the data of your influencer marketing campaigns as you need to see what works and what doesn’t. This data will guide your next campaign so you can repeat any successes and discard what doesn’t produce results. 

“There are various metrics you can track such as brand and audience building metrics, engagement and customer loyalty metrics as well as sales metrics,” says Lisa Benson from the content analysis manager from best paper writing service reviews.

Conclusion

Research and planning will help you to run successful influencer marketing campaigns. You will be able to find the right influencers who have the audiences most likely to engage with your brand. You will be able to set your budget, approach them in the right way and analyze the results of your campaigns. Following these strategies will enable you to get the most out of your partnerships with influencers.

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Tiffany Harper is a talented writer from New York (USA), an extremely active woman, and a real leader. She began her career as a journalist and proceeded as a writer and editor. Now she works as the special content consultant with college essay writers, assignment help, as the blog manager with Australian assignment help and term paper writing service. From time to time she provides some help with assignment to the content writers, mostly in self-motivation and self-growth areas. Feel free to contact her on Twitter.