5 Influencer Marketing Best Practices

Influencer marketing can be complicated — especially if you’re new at it. We wanted to outline some best practices for you to use when getting ready for your next influencer marketing campaign.

Review an Influencer’s Analytics In Advance

Before partnering with an influencer you want to make sure that their following is genuine and they can have an impact with their followers.

This has become harder to do since Instagram removed likes but you can do the eye test and go through their comments and look at how many views their videos get in relation to the amount of followers they have. Influencer and entrepreneur Farokh Sarmad (Goodlife Media) says if you add up the different metrics available (followers, views, comments, etc.) and you use common sense, you can usually get a good idea of how authentic someone’s following is. If something feels off to you, you’re probably right. Click here to learn more from Farokh about vetting influencers.

Another way you can do this is through our platform SocialRank. With SocialRank, we have access to backend data from Instagram and Twitter that we provide to you to allow you to make educated decisions with the influencers you choose to partner with.

Set Goals for Your Campaign in Advance

Before you even start contacting influencers, figure out what the goal of your campaign is.

• Do you want to increase visits to your website?
• Do you want to increase awareness of your brand/product? Do you want that awareness to come from a specific geographic location?
• Do you want an increase in purchases?
• Do you want to get high quality content to use on your social media channels from content creators?

Ask yourself these questions. The desired outcome you hope to achieve will impact which creators you decide to reach out to collaborate with.

Once you’ve identified your desired outcome from a high-level, you’ll want to go one level deeper.

• How much of an increase do you want in web traffic?
• How many impressions (awareness) are hoping to get?
• How many purchases do you want to happen as a result of this campaign?
• How much content are you hoping to get as a result of this campaign?

This will help you to determine the effectiveness of the campaign. If you are operating without an end goal, how will you be able to determine whether it was a success or not?

Give Creative Freedom to the Influencer

It makes complete sense wanting to remain in control of the content being created when promoting your brand. While there is a place for you to influence the creative to some degree, you’ll want to provide as much creative freedom to the influencers as possible.

These content creators have likely spent years cultivating an audience that follows them for them. When someone follows you on social media, they are essentially saying that they like your content and are signing up to get more of it.

When you ask an influencer to post creative and copy that you made — you are asking them to post content that their followers didn’t sign up for. Give these creators the flexibility to craft the content and the messaging in a way that feels authentic to them. The more authentic a sponsored post feels, the more likely it is to convert.

You can and should provide some insight to the creator on what your product is, some talking points and your goals with the campaign to help guide them in creating the content but you shouldn’t provide creative and copy for them to use. Provide the talking points and then let them create — after all, they are creators!

Always ask to review the content prior to it being posted to ensure your brand is being represented in the best way possible but don’t try to make them change it to look like it was made by your brand.

Partner with Influencers That Have Aligned Values to Your Brand

While the amount of creative freedom given to influencers is an important variable in whether a campaign is successful or not, this still requires you to put a fair amount of trust in these creators.

With that in mind, partner with influencers who have aligned values to your brand. Any easy way to do this is to create an avatar of who you want your end user to be. You can use this avatar in two different ways:

1. Find influencers who match your avatar. Who better to promote your product than someone who is your desired end user?
2. Find influencers who are of interest to your end user. For example, say you sell phone cases and your end user is 18–28 year old males. What are their interests? Tech & gaming. Knowing that information, you can look for tech and gaming influencers whose primary audience is 18–28 year old males.

By following your avatar to help you identify who you partner with, you will find influencers who have similar values to you and your company. Continuing the earlier example of a cell phone case company with a target market of 18–28 year old males who are interested in tech and gaming — partnering with a celebrity chef to promote your product likely won’t yield the best results. Your company’s values won’t be in alignment with his or hers.

Partnering with creators who have aligned values to your company allows them to speak about your product in a more authentic way to your ideal customer.

Review the Performance of the Campaign

If you’ve taken the effort and done the work to identify what the goals of your campaign are, it will all be a waste of time if you don’t review the performance once it is done. Now how you do this will vary depending on the objective of your campaign but here are a couple of quick ways you can review success:

• If you wanted to increase web traffic, review it in your Google Analytics or website analytics dashboard for the duration of the campaign. Compare it to your traffic from before the campaign and see what the change was like.
• If you wanted to see an increase in sales, review your sales before, during and after the campaign to see how much it changed. If you want to track sales from each creator individually, you can provide them with a discount code to share with their followers.
• If you wanted to see an increase in awareness, ask each influencer to provide you with a screenshot of their post analytics. This post will have the engagement and impressions each post got. Allowing you to gauge the reach and awareness generated.
• If you wanted more content to use on your channels, review how much new content you got from the campaign and how long it will last in your content calendar.

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You don’t have to do any of these best practices in order to influencer marketing but they will certainly help to have a more successful campaign. Another great way to ensure you’ll have a successful campaign is to use our platform SocialRank. It allows you to find influencers easily, you can organize your followers or your competitors followers and sort them by engagement rate, follower count, value, and so much more. Click here to learn more.