5 Questions to Ask Before Working With Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is not easy. There is an incredible amount of puzzle pieces that have to be put into place in order for a successful influencer marketing campaign – yet many brands seem to succeed.
You probably know about the benefits of influencer marketing, so there’s no point in me writing a full page on it. All that’s necessary is lining up some statistics because these speak louder than anything else.
- Influencer marketing content delivers 11 times higher ROI than traditional forms of advertising, such as banner ads
- 49% of people report that they listen to influencer recommendations when making purchase decisions.
- 40% of people say they’ve purchased an item after seeing it being used by an influencer on social media.
While these statistics loudly speak of the power of influencer marketing, there are many things you need to have in mind and take into consideration when running an influencer marketing campaign, because otherwise, you won’t be able to replicate the statistics shown above.
The first step to a successful influencer marketing campaign, however, is planning. These 5 questions help you ask and get answers to important questions, that ultimately will lead you to success, before an influencer campaign.
Presented below are the top 5 questions to ask when planning and running an influencer campaign.
5 Questions to Ask Before Working With Influencer Marketing
1. What are your goals of the campaign?
Having goals is essential for any type of marketing efforts. By having clear goals, you’ll be able to evaluate if you have reached them
By having clear goals, you’ll be able to evaluate if you have reached them and if the campaign was successful or not.
When setting goals, you need to make them specific and measurable.
Influencer marketing has the power to help you achieve a lot of things – from increasing brand awareness to driving sales, but if you don’t set goals, you’ll have a hard time planning the structure of the campaign, simply because you have no clear idea of what you want to achieve.
Here are some of the most common goals of influencer marketing:
- Drive website traffic
- Increase sales
- Get newsletter sign ups
- Increase brand awareness
Of course, measuring metrics such as brand awareness is a difficult task, so if that is your goal with the campaign, you need an effective way to measure the results.
This brings us to the next point.
2. How will you measure the results?
Setting your goals is important, and being able to evaluate the results of the campaign is equally so.
But how do you measure results of an influencer campaign?
In fact, 78% of marketers identified measuring results as the biggest challenge of influencer marketing.
But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, there are many approaches you can take to measure the ROI of influencer marketing. Many marketers use the obvious indications such as post likes, comments, and website traffic to measure success, but apart from that, there are many more approaches you can take. Read about them in the article below.
Related: How to measure ROI of an influencer marketing campaign
3. Which influencer should you work with?
This is one of the most important, if not the most important question to ask. That is simply because it has a huge effect on how your influencer campaign performs.
If you work with influencers who have a lot of followers but very low engagement, you probably won’t get a lot of results.
If you work with influencers who market your product even though they aren’t in your industry, you probably won’t get a lot of results.
If you work with an influencer who doesn’t have any real influence over people, you probably won’t get a lot of results.
As you can see, there are many things that affect how your campaign performs – and a lot of it has to do with the influencer.
Therefore, it’s extremely important to choose an influencer who resonate well with your brand, have an engaged following, truly impacts their followers, and shares killer content.
Finding influencers who meet all of these criteria is difficult but certainly not impossible. The best way to find influencers is to use an influencer directory.
With our influencer directory Veloce Network, you can filter through over 3K influencers with the help of several important criteria to find influencers who are perfect for your brand – and help you achieve the highest ROI possible.
When working with influencers, you need to be careful so that you don’t fall into the trap of working with an influencer who have bought fake followers.
With Veloce Network, this isn’t a problem, but on other influencer directories – it is!
Here’s why:
All influencers in our directory are hand-picked and controlled so that they meet strict criteria. All influencers must have a high engagement, and fake followers are not allowed.
Why? Simply because it is those two things that ruin the results of influencer marketing campaigns the most.
Get a free tailored demo list of influencers here.
4. What will the campaign structure look like?
A mistake many brands make is not giving enough space for the influencer. They want to write the caption, create the content and tell the influencer what to do. This is not a recipe for success.
When the influencer share content created by the brand, with a caption also created by the brand, people will instantly be able to tell that those words don’t come from the influencer – leading to instantly decreased credibility.
First of all, you don’t want to be the brand who is the reason that the influencer lost trust and credibility, and secondly, you will get much better results if you use another approach.
Who do you think knows their audience best: the influencer or the brand? That’s right. The influencer of course.
Therefore, as a brand, you need to listen to the influencer about what they think because they are the ones who know what type of content will generate the best results.
For a successful campaign, it’s important that the brand gives the influencer trust to do their own thing, but at the same time have conversations with them regularly in order to stay updated about their plans. Even though the influencer knows best, it’s certainly good to ask them to send the post and caption they were planning to post for confirmation so that the post resonates well with your brand.
5. How much should you pay?
“How much should I pay?” and “Can I send a product” is two of the most common questions when it comes influencer partnerships.
And that those questions are being asked is understandable.
Because at the moment, there is no index you can follow to know exactly how much you should pay for an influencer post, down to the dollar.
There are so many factors that play a role in how much a post cost, thus making it really hard for marketers to know what is cheap and what is expensive.
A common question is also if the brand can send products to the influencer, and the answer is that it depends. Most influencers are more than happy to receive a product, but it’s almost only the micro-influencers who satisfy with only the product as a payment in exchange for a post. The larger influencers see the product sample as a way to get to know the product they are marketing better and as a bonus. Nothing that changes the price of their post.
But of course, it depends on the value of the product.
The top things that decide the price of an influencer endorsement posts are the following:
- Followers
- Engagement
- Quality of the content
- Credibility and trust
Read the full guide on influencer marketing pricing to get a better understanding of how much you should pay for a post.
