Do you know that influencer marketing budgets are on the rise? A study by Linqia found that 39% of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budget, following the staggering potential it possesses compared to other marketing strategies.
You might find this hard to believe, but influencer marketing has been around since the late 1800s but only recently became a crucial strategy in digital marketing.
But to get it right, to hit the bullseye, you need to be intentional about your goals and set up metrics to measure performance. That way, you know your campaign was a success or a flop.
This piece will guide you in creating effective advertising campaigns with influencers. And most importantly, share a tip to help you maintain and build a great working relationship with your influencers for the long haul.
Let's get started!
1. Identify Relevant KPIs Before Starting
While influencer marketing remains the undisputable marketing strategy of the 21st century, it is crucial to know how to measure the success of a campaign. For that, you need key performance indicators (KPIs).
With these KPIs, you can track your progress, measure success, and also help you stay on track with your influencer marketing campaign.
For example, an eCommerce company will be more concerned about the number of sales. A SaaS company, they will be more interested in the number of new registrations. However, a big company like Coca-Cola will focus more on reach since its aim is brand awareness.
2. Understanding Your Target Audience
If you need to know your target audience, you can get an idea by analyzing your competitors' audience, including the influencers they work with. You can use many tools, such as Facebook audience insights, Google analytics, and similarweb, for analyzing website audiences.
For instance, with Facebook audience insight, you can select a business category, audience, geography, gender, and age. While there are many tools to figure out who your target audience is on social media, you can start by creating an avatar you want to serve.
Why? Because you need to know who you're targeting with your campaigns which you probably spent weeks building to avoid ending up with minimal impact. The good part is you don't need fancy or expensive software when all the data you need is in your social media account.
3. Choosing A Suitable Social Media For Your Campaign
If you're pretty new to influencer marketing, you're likely to wonder about the best social media platform to start from. Should you dive into Instagram or TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube? Of course, the one you go for depends on your goals. For instance:
Instagram is great for brand awareness, with many nano and micro-influencers reach, traffic to the site, and followers. The different content format also allows you to reach your audience differently.
On the other hand, YouTube is best for pulling traffic to your site, including new installations. While TikTok is king when it comes to reach, music promotion, new followers, and launching viral mechanics.
The only downside is that TikTok doesn't allow you to integrate links to your content, but it is an incredible medium to go viral and create brand awareness.
4. Choosing The Right Influencers
Not all influencers are created equal. For example, nano-influencers boost over 20k followers, with micro-influencers with up to 100k followers. While macro-influencers are at the top of the food chain, with over 1M followers.
But don't be fooled by all these boggling figures, as these are mere numbers that rarely translate to sales or reach. When it comes to influencer marketing, bigger is not always better; instead, you should focus primarily on engagement, which is where nano and micro-influencers shine the most. An influencer with an engagement rate of 2% or more is ideal.
You can start with a small budget and test out the influencers from audiences related to your product. If, for example, you wanted to promote a cosmetic product, the categories of influencers that will be best for your campaigns will be beauty, fashion, family, and lifestyle influencers.
5. Essential Tools To Help You Work With Influencers
Some tools can come in handy to get the most out of your marketing campaigns, such as HypeAuditor, which helps you find out which Instagram influencers have the most engaged and quality followers.
Other influencer tools that are worth trying include:
- Influencer.co
- Adrecord
- Society Icon
- Linktree
- Hubspot
- Upfluence
And most importantly, Gigapay - a payment solution that helps you pay your influencers instantly after an incredible job. As a result, you can maintain and develop a long-lasting relationship with your influencer.
That is why most of the marketing companies and agencies in Sweden use Gigapay to pay their influencers without worrying about where they are or if they have a company or not, with taxes and social benefits declared.
