How to do influencer marketing for your brand?
Well, are you a brand who is interested in starting influencer marketing for your products and services? Then you have come to the right place to find the solution to your problem. In this blog, I’m going to discuss the basics of influencer marketing and how you should get started to leverage the maximum out of your first influencer marketing campaign on social media, blogs, videos and more.
I’ve broken this blog into small queries related to influencer marketing 101, so you can find out answers to your questions. Let’s kick off with what do we mean by influencer marketing!
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing in general terms is understood as doing brand endorsements on social media and other platforms by influencers or other brands who are subject matter experts in their niche and can help you promote your business and its operations.
We do come across a lot of famous celebrities and influencers on our social media feed on a daily basis who are promoting various products from food items to healthcare and even luxury brands.
Influencer marketing is not limited to posting things on social media only. Influencer marketing is not bound to images and videos. From subtle brand promotions in movies to content platforms (NEWS), influencer marketing is everywhere!
Define Goals and Brand Message
When you know what is influencer marketing, you are ready to run your first influencer marketing campaign in the market. But, before getting started or finding the right influencer, you need to make sure that your goals are defined.
Defining goals for influencer marketing is not easy. An influencer marketing campaign would not only give your brand an authoritative presence in the market, but it would also make sure that a correct brand message is sent to the masses, brand awareness and trust-building for your brand also goes higher.
Defining goals for your campaign includes which channels would suit your target audience, which influencer niche you are targeting to run your campaign with, what kind of brand message you want to share with the target audience, who would create content for your brand message, how influencer would interact with your promotional message, which kind of offer you are going to make to your target audience and many more questions needs to be solved before you go ahead.
Along with setting goals, your brand has to get ready to manage the audience you are going to get on your website, social media pages or any other form of engagement offline. Once your target customer comes to your defined medium, you have to make sure that you provide engaging content and a healthy customer support atmosphere for them to get the conversion for your good.
Building reputation would also come in your brand message preparation. The influencer you choose for your brand might tell their audience the good things about your brand, but what if your reputation is not set properly in the market? Work on your market reputation as well before jumping into influencer marketing.
Various Types of Influencers
There are many types of influencers available for every brand. We can divide influencers into many categories. But for the most basic understanding, we can break them down into two main categories.
- Influencers by Size
- Nano influencers
- Micro-influencers
- Macro influencers
- Celebrity influencers / Mega Influencer Tier
Nano influencers are the group of creators who have their follower counts between 1000 to 10K. What makes them stand apart from the big creators is their quality of being less known to people. According to Sapna Maheswari, author at New York Times shares — when a nano influencer recommends a product or service, it is seen as sincere and real review shared by your friend.
As the name suggests, micro-influencers are the ones who influence the smaller bunch of people on any platform. However, a smaller number of followers does not mean that their influence is less or they would not be able to provide a good message of your brand. Many times, micro-influencers have better engagement rates and can drive more business compared to big influencers.
The macro-influencers with the follower count of 500K — 1M are the big players. These influencers may have social media as their sole source of income or could be athletes, fashion designers, actors, musicians, food bloggers, etc.
Lastly, the celebrities or the mega tier are more likely to have a bigger number of followers and wider audience interest. Sometimes the campaign can receive a lot of engagement and a brand would get a lot of recognition and brand awareness; though, the conversion and sales might stay under a suspicion blanket!
2. Influencers by Niche
- Healthcare and fitness
- Esports and gaming
- Fashion and beauty
- Travel and lifestyle
- Streamers and educators
- More…
With respect to the products and services you offer in the market, you can choose the best suitable category for your influencer marketing campaign. After selecting the size of the influencer and budget for your campaign, selecting a niche influencer is very important.
Although, it is not necessary that an influencer with your product niche only would be able to get your product better campaign. Sometimes merging your brand message with a variety of niches would help you get more engagement and sales.
How to Find Perfect Influencers
Finding influencers is not a hard job. However, finding the right influencers is tricky.
You can manually go on each of the platforms of your choice and search for names and keywords that you are interested in running your campaigns. But there are various factors like demographics, influencer reach to consider for a successful influencer marketing programme.
The most important part of this entire process is, you need to know which influencers are genuinely getting good engagement and have a good reputation in the market. Many influencers have a lot of followers. Though, when it comes to engagement rates and organic impressions, they fail to deliver good results for your brand.
Thus, the process of selecting the right influencers for your campaign becomes hectic for brands. Platforms like Spreadd can help you find the most effective influencers for your brand by providing data of their previous campaigns, actual reach and engagement rates.
To build that trusted brand awareness and authority in the audience, these matrices are really important to follow and work upon.
By researching the basics, you can gain better performance of your first campaign. Also, while finding the right influencers for your brand, do not forget to ask them questions like who would create the content for your campaign, how they will use your brand message, how their previous experience was with similar brands and in how much time they will deliver the campaign.
Payment and content embargo also play important roles in influencer marketing campaigns, we will discuss them in our coming blogs.
ROI Calculation
For any campaign, large or small, measuring results and ROI is very important! Brands and marketers always face a situation where they end up miscalculating project ROI and actual results from their campaigns.
With proper influencer marketing tools and platforms, ROI calculation can become easy. Most of the platforms miss out the statistics about your campaign and giving actual results with insights. Finding and adopting better influencer marketing platforms would help you to grow your business with influencer marketing.
The payoff from your investment from influencer marketing compared to paid advertising should go higher. Then only it would be better to opt for influencer marketing. Also, not necessarily you measure your ROI in influencer marketing with monetary benefits only! Brand awareness, page visits, visibility in the market and others are also some aspects to focus upon.
Conclusion
If you are new and just getting started with the influencer marketing campaign, be calm and do some research before giving away your investment to any random influencer with more followers online.
Get some powerful insights right and make plans in advance to get the most out of your influencer marketing campaign!
Happy branding to you!
