5 Steps to Launch Influencer Marketing in Your Company
While the majority speak of the importance of influencer marketing, and that the trend is growing, most do not know how to work with it. It is more difficult than launching an advertisement on Facebook, but it can give excellent results. In addition to profit, it increases brand awareness and recognition, and encourages more trust. It’s difficult to cover the whole of influencer marketing in one article, but the principles of working with bloggers are about the same, from Twitch to TikTok.
Especially if you are a small business founder, it’s better to understand how it works and how much time it takes, and to delegate later.
So, here are five important steps to launch influencer marketing in your company.
1. Define your campaign goal and budget
That is the first step. First, decide what you want to receive after the campaign. Most often, entrepreneurs want everything at once, but you need to know if you want to increase brand awareness, increase sales, or present a new product. Moreover, you should decide on a budget. You can start with different budgets, but in my experience, it is desirable to have at least a few thousand dollars for tests. Anything less than that just does not make sense. The Facebook algorithm quickly learns and optimizes, but this does not happen with bloggers, and you need more money and bloggers to test the influencer marketing.
2. Select influencers
One of the most difficult things is to find suitable bloggers for advertising. Here, I can say that in general, it’s all about testing, and it is difficult to predict in advance, even if you an expert in influencer marketing. The basic advice is to take any account analytics service (almost all have free trials), check bloggers for engagement rate (low engagement is not always bad if the price for a post is cheap), find contacts, and find out the cost of advertising. Collect this information into a single spreadsheet. Check bloggers for fake followers, comments, and likes. This is easy to check, but some bloggers still manage to cheat a large number of brands. More importantly, check to see if the blogger could damage your brand’s reputation in any way. If a blogger makes controversial remarks or does pranks, then maybe you should not advertise a sensitive brand with them.
3. Plan your marketing campaign
Using simple formulas, calculate the average cost per thousand likes or views, and compare bloggers for this indicator. You will immediately be able to calculate the average price, and identify those bloggers whose ads are cheaper or overpriced.
Typically, celebrities have much higher prices. At the first stage, they definitely will not suit you, if you are not a huge brand. For a test campaign, I recommend buying posts from 10–20 micro-influencers. Choose the best time for advertising, based on the time when a blogger’s followers are most active. For example, if a blogger’s most active time is 7 pm, but you are trading product for which the markets close at 6 pm, then most likely 7 pm will not work for
you. Find something that suits both of you. Make links with UTM-tags for all bloggers to track each one’s performance.
4. Advertise and analyze
Analyze your first campaign especially thoroughly. Ask bloggers to send you screenshots with coverage (if it is an Instagram account), and add information about the number of likes, views, and comments. Respond to user comments on behalf of brands, and get involved. Measure the entire sales funnel, starting from the cost of one contact, like, view, or comment, click on the link, and purchases of the product. Add all this to the same spreadsheet where you collected all the bloggers. Evaluate the effectiveness of each blogger individually, and the entire marketing campaign.
5. Evaluate the campaign and plan further actions
You tried working with influencers by yourself, and gained an understanding of how it works. Now, decide whether you need influencer marketing at this stage, and whether it is suitable for your company. Often, a couple of thousand dollars is not enough to understand that, but you can assess whether it is worth the attention, energy, and resources.
From my experience, I sometimes spent tens of thousands of dollars and many months before I found an approach that worked perfectly, and performed several times better than other media buying channels.
The main point is to not delay. It’s possible to do all this within a month, in parallel with your main duties. Do not miss trends. For sure, influencer marketing may not work for everyone, or it may not be so effective. However, it’s better to check it personally than to understand that you missed out on something in a few years’ time.
The more different hypotheses you test, the more experience you have, and the higher your chance of success.
