How To Create Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy For Your Startup

With the latest developments in technology, advertising campaigns have changed a lot. TV, written media, newspapers and magazines became modest ways to do marketing and PR. Social media is the new era. Many businesses use social media as their advertising tool. Hence, latest trend: “Influencer Marketing” has gained attention a lot. See also: “Why Micro-Influencer Marketing Is More Adventageous for Startups?”

Ok! Now lets see the issue in more detail..*

First question that we need to know: What is Influencer Marketing?

In fact, influencer marketing start with word of mouth recommendations of products and services. People on social media start to take advices from their friends and this take the attention of marketing strategists that it would be used as a marketing strategy. And then they start to use known people mostly celebrities to promote their product as a natural recommendation, not like advertisement on TV. However, because of high budgets and increase of ad-likes promotions from celebrities, it start to seen as a disadvantegous thing to do. Where micro-influencers come to the scene. Their niche based profiles with their engaged followers and trust based communiciation with them makes influencer marketing to increase the relevancy of promotions. So when they recommend something, it directly goes to the right target audience.

Second question that we need to consider: Is this strategy worth your time and energy?

A resent study indicates that 94% of the marketers said influencer marketing was an effective strategy. According to MediaPost, people who are between 18–34 years of age take advices from an influencer. Thus, it is not suprising that influencer marketing has gained lots ot attention especially in 2017.

Well! the most important question is coming: How to create a succesful influencer marketing strategy for your startup?

There are several steps that you should follow:

1.Decide on your goals

If you don’t know what do you want to do about your brand, there is no meaning for searching influencers to promote it. So, you should determine your goal before getting into research. For instance, you might want to boost awareness of your brand or introduce it to a new audience. After you decide what do you want to do then you should go furher. Also, the road to successful influencer marketing goes from identifying your target audience, setting your budget and establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Hence, you can use your budget more effectively, choose the most suitable influencers for your brand and measure your results more accurately.

2. Choose the right social media channels

Every social media channel has its own values and stories. So, choosing the right one for your campaign is the most important thing. You should choose your channel regarding your target audience. The engagement will not be the same with every channel. Instagram and Youtube are the most preferred platforms which you can use wisely for your campaigns.

3. Identify the right influencer

When you are working with Influencers remember that they are not just people who are giving advices, they will represent your brand also. Before deciding which one that you want to work with, you should ask yourself: “Is this person best fit for my brand?”. According to your target audience which represents your goal, you can choose the influencers that you want to work on. For example, if you have fashion based business and want to introduce it to a proper audience, you can choose a fashion blogger or instagramer with 10,000 followers around. Work with 5 of them and see the engagement results. Using more than one influencer is also important for engangement. Don’t worry ;) Influencer marketing requires lower budget than other marketing strategies. So you can work easily with more than one influencer.

4. Choosing an Influencer

Finding an Influencer is one of the tough thing to do. Not just to find but also you should communicate with them without any intterruption of communication. You can find them by checking social media and following the relevant channels but reaching them like this will be difficult. On the other hand there are several influencer marketing tools which will give you the opportunity to find them.

5. Think about your publishing schedule

In order to have a more effective campaign, you should arrange all your marketing schedules accordingly. Developing your marketing strategy with influencer marketing will give you more effective outcomes.

6. Optimizing the content

Don’t forget to share your influencer’s post to gain more engagement. This will also show support and trust to them resulting in their efforts to reach more people to intoduce your brand.

7. Measure your results

And of course don’t forget to measure your results. Remember I said in the beginning that you should identify your KPIs, so you can check how those changed after the campaign and compare the results with other marketing strategies.

Well, I think thats more or less enough. By following these instructions one by one, you can be successful in creating an influencer marketing campaign and help your brand to gain more awareness in a natural way.