Influencer marketing has been rising in popularity for several years now, especially with larger “high-budget” brands. We’ve all seen Kylie Jenner promoting Puma and Cristiano Ronaldo endorsing Clear Shampoo on social media.
However, more recently, several successful influencer marketing examples have encouraged a wide range of much smaller brands to dip their toes into influencer marketing.
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What is Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing where brands give endorsements and/or products to individuals who have large online audiences for them to showcase and share with their followers.
These individuals with high followerships are known as influencers. Influencers are individuals who’ve built a significant online following, typically in a particular niche, where their followers trust them for their recommendations.
Why is Influencer Marketing on the Rise
Influencer marketing continues to grow in popularity, with increasing numbers of brands relying on influencer collaborations to promote their marketing campaigns. This is partly because studies have shown that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, and 70% trust the experiences of their peers.
The right influencer can bring up to 200% more profit to your campaigns. One way to guarantee that you are getting the most from your campaigns is to make sure you are using the right influencer marketing tools.
This includes basic tools like search engines and influencer databases, but it also means using more advanced influencer marketing tools such as audit, tracking, and reporting tools. The right AI tools to transform B2B marketing can help you find relevant influencers, form partnerships, and implement successful campaigns.
The Best Strategies for Influencer Marketing
These tips will help you achieve your goals and ensure a satisfactory campaign for both parties. Let’s dive right into it!
1. Let the Influencer Make Content Freely
One thing brands should keep in mind is that influencer marketing works because influencers have an authentic connection with their followers. This authenticity is what makes the audience listen to recommendations delivered by them.
This is why you should allow creative freedom when they are creating sponsored posts. This way, posts will be ensured to fit with the tone and direction of the creator’s profile.
2. Track Your Metrics
The only way to know if your campaign is working is to track its metrics. This will allow you to know what’s working and what isn’t and make changes in your next campaign to improve results.
On the one hand, determine which content works better with your audience with the help of your influencers. Take note of the factors that made your campaigns successful.
On the other hand, we recommend you work with measurement tools specifically for influencer marketing and social media to create a clearer picture of your ROI, or return on investment.
3. Define Your Influencer Marketing Budget
And how can you do that? Check out the factors that contribute to making the budget for influencer marketing: Start with the influencer’s reach and the channel the content will be posted on.
Also, determine how many posts you want and the kind of post. Estimate how long it will take to create the content and any agency payments that may be included. Keep in mind that the most expensive form of content on Instagram is an IGTV, followed by a reel, and then a feed post.
Instagram stories, on the other hand, are the cheapest type of content, and they tend to be very effective as the audience can tap into links and call to action on the same story, which results in very organic action.
4. Check Out Past Collaborations and the Content
When you are choosing your influencer, it is highly recommended to look at previous campaigns they have done instead of simply focusing on their number of followers or engagement rate.
Check out how they promoted products or services for other companies, and make sure that the content involved aligns with your own. This way, you will ensure the campaign will be relevant and effective, in addition to the popularity of the influencers. And finally, check out their content to find an influencer with certain expertise in your industry.
That is, look for influencers who are not just social media pros but pros in a real area of expertise. An expert will bring credibility to the campaign, whereas a generic Instagram star that advertises about anything may not be that reliable for the audience.
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Influencer Marketing Tools
Here are some influencer marketing tools you should know about:
1. Search Engine
A search engine is perhaps the most basic of all the influencer marketing tools we are going to discuss today. This tool can help you on your first step into the world of influencer marketing: finding the right influencers for your product or brand. An influencer search engine is a tool that helps you find influencers on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
2. IRM (Influencer Relationship Management)
A way to centralize all the information about your influencers, past campaigns, collaborations, emails sent, influencer rates, and more. Just as a sales team wouldn’t work without a CRM, influencer marketing professionals rely on an IRM as it facilitates communication and management with productivity tools to your team, makes collaboration easier and more centralized, and avoids relying on a bunch of static spreadsheets.
3. Audit Tool
A good audit tool is another valuable weapon in your arsenal. This tool helps you analyze an influencer’s audience as well as the content they post. You can also use the tool to analyze whether an influencer’s audience is genuine or if it has been bolstered by fake followers.
Once you have started collaborating with an influencer, you can use your audit tool to evaluate how well they are performing. That way, you can identify any adjustments that you need to make to your campaigns or your choice of influencer.
4. Tracking Tool
A tracking tool works in much the same way as an audit. Ultimately, it’s about finding out how well an influencer is performing and whether or not they are effectively promoting your brand. In fact, of all the influencer marketing tools, this is arguably one of the most valuable.
There are a few ways to do this. You can use an influencer tracking tool to monitor the content your influencer is posting and see how it is performing in terms of reach, engagement, traffic, sales, or any other KPI. You can also track keywords, hashtags, or mentions to find new influencers who are talking about certain topics.
5. Reporting Tool
Once you’ve conducted your audits and tracked the success of your campaigns, you need a tool for gathering your data in the right format so that you can measure and quantify your results. That’s where an influencer reporting tool comes in.
An influencer reporting tool is a form of social listening and reporting tool that provides you with real-time analytics relating to your published campaign content. Reports often evaluate metrics including click-through rate (or CTR), engagement, and shares so that you can instantly measure the success of each influencer campaign.
Conclusion: The Best Strategy for Influencer Marketing
Influencers are helping a lot of businesses build brand loyalty and achieve more sales. It’s easy to catch the audience’s attention when someone they follow and admire shows a product or service, and it can be more effective than brands doing it themselves.
So if you want to build brand awareness and reputation and reach wider audiences by launching influencer marketing campaigns, check out these few effective strategies before you do so!
Featured Image by Diggity Marketing on Unsplash
