Influencer Assignment
For a submitted assignment about Influencer Targeting and Engagement, you are tasked with crafting an Influencer Engagement campaign for either a company/organization you work for or a company/organization of your choosing. Using the content from our influencer and community engagement lectures in classes 5 and 6, design an influencer engagement campaign. You should follow the outlined steps from our lecture in Class 6:
- What is (are) the business objective(s) for your influencer engagement campaign? Brand awareness? Lead generation? Etc.
- Research and Identify Influencers: What are the ideal influencers/communities you want to target? Why? Define the communities and content (types of media, content, keywords, etc) that are relevant to your brand and the influencers you are trying to reach. Research influencers based on the communities you want to target and rank them according to level of influence, reach and audience engagement. (A List, B list, C List, etc).
During this process, I encourage you to either do the research manually, as I described during class, or use the free trial version of a tool we discussed in class (or any that you find on your own). I do not want you to ever spend money for this class — so even if you sign up for a free trial, please do make sure that you are aware of the terms of any free trial for the influencer softwares and make sure that you either don’t provide credit card information for billing or cancel before the trial is up, so that you don’t get charged for investigative use of the software. It’s not mandatory for this assignment that you sign up for a trial for any software/tool but I do think that doing so is a good exercise in evaluating tools and learning what’s available for use in real life influencer campaigns.
3. Create the Pitch: Craft an e-mail pitch letter to a specific influencer (can be a real person or someone made up for the purposes of this assignment). Describe why you chose this specific influencer and explain what your specific pitch is (product review, access to an exclusive event, contest/giveaway, etc). What, ultimately, do you want the targeted influencer to do (what type of earned media are you trying to achieve?) Write an article/blog post? Share on social media? Become a brand ambassador? Do a video endorsement? Be creative in your approach and your explanation of desired results.
Check out these resources for more guidance on crafting your pitch:
4) Maintain an active, mutually beneficial relationship: What tactics/tools would you use to maintain a relationship with influencers/content partners over time? How would you manage the relationship/track your interactions with influencers? What metrics would you track and use to identify the most impactful influencers (influencer reach, website views, etc.)?
