7 Tips to Awesome Influencer Marketing

7 Tips to Awesome Influencer Marketing

One of our all time favorite ways to leverage social media for your business is through influencer marketing. 92% of consumers trust an influencer more than a brand (source). We’ll let that sink in for a minute.

Let’s define an influencer:

• An influencer is an individual who has the power to affect purchase decisions of others because of his/her authority, knowledge, position or relationship with his/her audience.
• An individual who has a following in a particular niche, which they actively engage with. The size of the following depends on the size of the niche.

An influencer can be an incredibly powerful asset for your brand, not just in social media, but in your overall broader communication efforts. It’s important to remember the 3 A’s when you are getting into influencer marketing: audience, aesthetic and authenticity. You want influencers that can deliver on all three of those in a way that suits your brand, product or business.

Here are our 7 tips to executing an awesome influencer marketing campaign for your brand.

1. Know what result you are looking for. Do you need to drive users to a specific link? You’ll want to make sure you have bloggers with good traffic and high click through rates (ask for their media kit). Do you need to showcase your product in a beautiful, fresh way? You’ll want to get Instagram influencers that can take great photos and who has a high engagement rate. Do you need a compelling story told about your brand or product? Make sure you like the influencer’s writing style.
2. Know your budget. Budget determines everything: how many influencers you will work with, the quality of influencer, the number of posts. If you average $500-$2,000 per post (depending on your niche), you’ll have a head start on figuring out how big your list needs to be.
3. Tier your list. Let’s say you want to work with 10 influencers. Have your list of top 10, then tier down from there and have at least 20 back up influencers (a list of 30 total). Remember, follower count isn’t everything. You also want to make sure your influencers’ have engaged communities. Ensure that their blog posts have comments/shares, their Instagram posts have comments/likes, etc.
4. Negotiate. Reach out to your top ten all at the same time. Find out what they charge and you’ll be able to see how your budget comes together. Negotiate the budget and the terms – make sure you get permission to use their content if need be. For example, make sure you can use the post for a promoted post on your channels if you needed to, or use their recipe on your website for a set amount of time.
5. Give your influencers loose guidelines & creative freedom. Show some examples about what you want to see and then let the influencer run with it. You picked these influencers because of their audience, aesthetic and ability to create something authentic for your brand. Let them be themselves and create something authentic for their audience.
6. Be clear about expectations. Make sure your influencer knows what you expect in terms of keywords in the captions (try not to over do it), features of your product discussed, hashtags, account tagging, URLs, etc. Also, be especially clear on the expectation of posting on certain dates.
7. Amplify influencers’ posts. You will have gotten permission to use the influencers’ content how you wanted to in the negotiation phase. Make sure you share their content to your social channels, blog, website, etc. Remember, you can share the pieces of content more than once or twice!