Improve Your Influencer Marketing Strategy By Following These Tips
As a brand providing a product or service, you want to implement authentic strategies that reach audiences and pique potential customers' interests in what you have to offer. Influencer marketing is a technique that employs the use of social media influencers with loyal followers to promote a particular product or service. Influencer marketing strategies allow brands to garner great exposure by subtly leveraging the credibility of an established social media figure to serve as a spokesperson for the brand.
The caveat? Executing an influencer marketing strategy, despite how popular your product or service is, can be challenging. So, how can you ensure a successful approach?
Is Influencer Marketing Right For Your Brand?
Many brands will want to implement influencer marketing. However, not every brand should. So how can you tell if influencer marketing is right for you? This strategy is especially effective if:
- Your brand has an eCommerce or customer-oriented presence
- Your products are easily accessible and can be shipped quickly
- Your brand is active on social media
- People are already talking about your brand
What types of brands might not benefit from social media influencers?
- Drugs/Pharma
- Business to business services,
- Alcohol (due to FTC guidelines around verifying followers' ages).
Identify The Right Influencers
When searching for influencers to partner with, here are the most important things to remember. It's essential that the influencer(s) reflect the values of your brand, have the appropriate audiences that align with your brand, and produce the type of content that elevates your brand.
Create Buyer Personas
The first step to identifying appropriate influencers is to create buyer personas or profiles of the target audience you hope to attract and reach utilizing your influencers. Buyer personas consider the background, demographics, and intent of your customer base -- the people most likely to purchase products or services from your brand.
Once your audience characteristics are identified, you can begin to search for influencers whose followers and content fit these specific guidelines. Say you have a lifestyle beauty brand. Look for influencers who typically post makeup tutorials or beauty product reviews on their social media pages. These influencers have followers who are already interested in this specific type of content, increasing the likelihood that your brand will gain exposure to the right people in the right markets.
Choose the Right Types of Influencers
It is also essential to consider the size of the influencers your brand chooses as partners. If you are a nationally-known and well-received brand, using a macro influencer may be best for garnering awareness. Macro influencers typically gain popularity via the internet. These people, usually with 100,000 to 1M followers, are great for product exposure because they have large followings.
If you're looking to reach a smaller, niche audience, micro influencers make the best partners. Micro influencers are often well-versed in one or two areas of expertise. These influencers typically have 1,000 to 100,000 followers who are genuinely interested in what the influencer has to promote. Micro influencers are perfect for product endorsement because their content is often specific to a particular industry (e.g., beauty, health & wellness, active). Your brand will be able to connect with audiences who are interested in a specific topic. Their followers typically turn to them for their opinions on current events, products, and the like.
Identify Fake Influencers
Now that you've identified influencers that work for your brand, it's time to vet your choices. Considering the authenticity of your partnered influencers is a must, especially if you want to reach the right people. Vetting can happen in several different ways.
First, consider the ratio of followers to following. For instance, if your influencer is following more people than the number of people following them, it's a red flag. This ratio may be an indication that your influencer is only gaining followers because of whom they are following, not because their content interests people.
Second, consider engagement rates. Analytical tools can also help to determine the engagement rates of your influencers. These are calculated to determine which followers are engaging with (liking, commenting, etc.) each photo or post. The higher the engagement rate, the more likely people are interested in the content being produced by the influencer, increasing the likelihood of your brand being seen by real followers.
Third, determine if an influencer's followers are real. With so many options to "buy" followers, analytical tools become critical. These tools can display metrics that show the percentage of authentic and organic followers. Better yet? Analytics can also reveal the percentage of fake accounts that are following an influencer.
Sprout Social offers a more detailed and in-depth blog about identifying fake influencers and the impact they could have on your business.
Provide The Right Tools For Your Influencers
Your campaign kickoff is ready to begin, but you'll need to provide your influencers with the right tools to set them up for success. Coupons and discount codes are effective methods for tracking the number of customers redirected to your brand's webpage from each influencer partner.
Offering influencers the opportunity to earn commission on products sold is also a great way to incentivize influencers to partner with your brand.
Give your influencers opportunities to involve themselves with the community and listen to any suggestions they may have to make your influencer marketing strategy even more successful.
What's Next?
Once influencers post, brands should then repost content made by influencer partners. Not only is this a great way to repurpose content in a unique and personalized approach, it also helps to build credibility for your brand.
So go ahead and use the above tips to create the perfect influencer marketing strategy. We promise they're effective. As experts in influencer management and strategy, the people at Team Serendipit are the go-to professionals! Find out how we can help your business with all your influencer marketing and branding needs.
Written by: Anna B, PR Account Coordinator
