Influencer marketing has shown marketers that it’s a marketing strategy that can generate tremendous results – if executed correctly. If you learn how to use it properly it can prove to provide laser targeted marketing to reach the people who are truly relevant to your brand.
And that is the punchline: influencer marketing is a tremendous marketing tool, but only if executed correctly. Like any tool, it’s only effective if you know how to use it.
Marketers can’t expect that their influencer marketing campaign reaches its full potential if it’s not set up properly and if they don’t know how to execute properly.
If you want to make sure that you are getting as much out of your influencer marketing budget as possible and are generating the highest ROI you can, then, these 5 Golden Tips for Effective Influencer Marketing can help you get started on improving your campaigns.
1. Identifying suitable influencers
Identifying suitable influencers is one of the biggest challenges marketers are facing because this decision will have a big impact on how your influencer marketing campaign is performing. At the same time, it is the single most important part of an influencer campaign.
But because there are so many users on social media and a ton of influencers, it’s difficult to identify the most suitable and relevant influencers for your campaign.
The influencer is the person who will run your marketing campaign and do all the heavy lifting in the campaign. The influencer will work as an ambassador for your brand, spreading your brand’s message to its followers.
Here comes the big challenge.
There are a ton of things that marketers must take into consideration when choosing influencers to partner with.
Learn all about this in detail in: How to find the most suitable influencers.
Because the influencer will be promoting your brand’s message, you have to find an influencer who would genuinely use your products. You need to make sure they are a perfect match for your brand. Because otherwise, their followers will sense it and the promotion won’t be perceived as authentic and genuine. The influencer might also lose credibility and trust.
A common word that influencers who are marketing products they never use (or would use) gets to hear is: sell out.
You don’t want to be the company that is the reason these accusations are born.
Focus on using influencers who will be a positive ambassador for your brand. Preferably, the influencer should be a person that is within your target audience because only then will the campaign come from the influencer’s heart.
Finding the right influencers have for long been another challenge marketers are facing because there are so many factors that have to be taken into consideration when looking for them.
This is where influencer directories can come in handy. There are a ton of influencer directories out there, but they work as search engines/tools to help you filter and find the most suitable influencers for your campaigns. Many directories help you search through thousands of influencers based on your criteria to make sure your influencer suits your brand perfectly. Other services, like our own, Veloce Influencer list, lets you outsource the job to us, and we will find the influencers for you.
If you use the advice in the article about finding influencers, you can also learn how to do all of that yourself.
2. Analyze your results
Your influencer marketing campaign will generate some kind of results.
This point is really self-explanatory. Like with all marketing efforts, you want to evaluate the results to understand what works, what doesn’t, and ultimately how you can improve. By understanding the performance of your campaigns, you can consistently make slight adjustments in your future campaigns.
Influencer marketing is tricky but after a while of result analyzing, you’ll understand the market better and can avoid things that aren’t effective while implementing things that are generating the best results into future campaigns.
The key to a successful influencer marketing campaign is constantly tweaking and improving your strategy. And this can only be done if you are aware of the results your campaigns are generating. If you aren’t measuring, how can you possibly understand what works and what doesn’t?
To learn in detail how to measure the results of influencer marketing campaigns, read how to measure the ROI of influencer marketing.
3. Don’t only focus on follower count
This is a common mistake that a lot of marketers do, and it’s easy to understand why.
Most people think that the more followers an influencer has, the better. Right?
Well, possibly but not necessarily.
When choosing influencers, you have to take a number of different factors into consideration as well. One of the most important factors is engagement.
Time and time over, it has been proven that influencers with fewer followers can actually generate better results than those with massive followings thanks to their high engagement.
Another thing that is more important than follower amount is context and audience targeting.
Some things you can take a look at when trying to decide on engagement and impact an influencer have, take a look at the like rate. Usually, as pages grow, the engagement rate tends to decrease. If it’s a large page, everything above 1% like/follow rate is good. If it’s a smaller page, 10% is very good.
You can also take a look at the comments they are receiving. Is the influencer impacting people or are they only receiving a bunch of comments saying “nice”?
These kinds of things are small yet important parts of a successful influencer marketing campaign that can help you achieve greater results.
Engagement rates and the type of engagement posts receive will determine if an influencer’s followers will respond to what you’re marketing. A massive following isn’t as important as ensuring that the influencer is reaching your brand’s target market.
Don’t believe that follower count equals influence, because it ceraintly does not have to. There are so many other factors that are far more important than how many followers they have, so learn to look at these factors first.
4. Trust your influencer
Yet another common mistake which brands often commit is trying to be in charge of everything in the influencer marketing campaign.
The influencers have most often been working with their page consistently for years and have been able to get to know their audience very well.
This means that they are very well aware of what kind of content their followers want to see and what kind of content is a big no-no.
The chances are that you as a brand on the other hand just recently discovered the influencer which means you have very little knowledge about the influencer’s audience.
This is why trusting your influencer is extremely important during an influencer marketing campaign.
If the influencer wants to create the content, let them because they know what they need to do to generate the best results.
The risk is that if you are going to write captions and create the post, it will be sensed as too promotive by the influencer’s followers but most importantly, it will be very clear that those words aren’t coming from the influencer.
What you shouldn’t do however is avoid reviewing the content that the influencer is going to share. Before they post it, just make sure that it goes well with your brand and that it won’t be bad publicity.
Shortly summarized: trust the influencer but review the content.
5. Don’t ignore micro-influencers
Micro-influencers are starting to gain traction. Previously, brands were only focusing on celebrities with humungous followings, thinking that it was the best thing.
The big fish are often charging ridiculous amounts of money. For example, Selena Gomez is reported to charge brands $550,000 per post on Instagram.
As mentioned previously, followers aren’t everything and it’s clear that more brands are becoming aware of that as micro-influencers are gaining popularity.
If you have a small budget, it can be better to choose several micro-influencers instead of one huge influencer that will charge your entire influencer marketing budget for one post.
Because micro-influencers have very high engagement and a following that is looking up to the influencer and is genuinely interested in what they have to say, you can actually generate better results by using several micro-influencers than one enormous influencer.
