The 21st century is an era of influencer marketing. It was born in the early 2010s and keeps on growing at an incredible pace. Nowadays, it is one of the biggest spheres in digital marketing and many brands choose to invest in it as the primary method of marketing their products and services.
The cost-effectiveness, efficiency, global audience reach, simplicity – these are some of the benefits that make influencer marketing strategy attractive to businesses. Even though influencer marketing is highly profitable for multiple industries, creating a strategy that wins is challenging and often troublesome for novice marketers. How to come up with a strategy that converts the audience into customers with influencer marketing? This is the place where you learn the most about key components of strategic influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing Strategy Structure
All marketing strategies consist of more than one element. They require many steps and hours of planning. Influencer marketing strategy is no exception – brands need to invest their time, resources (both human and financial), and influencer marketing platforms and tools to achieve success. There are several templates of strategy that beginner marketers can use on the internet, but not all are equally useful.
Typically, a good template will include the following elements:
- Objectives: the outlines of the specific goals and objectives that the brand hopes to achieve through influencer marketing.
- Target Audience: the pool of your customers and the outreach of the future collaborator.
- Budget: money necessary for executing marketing campaigns, such as influencer fees and product giveaways
- Influencer Selection: the criteria for choosing the right influencers, such as reach, engagement, and relevance to the target audience as well as their fee for the service.
- Influencer Brief: the key message (pitch for the influencer), product or service, and desired outcome of the influencer marketing campaign.
- Campaign Timeline: the schedule of the campaign, dates, and deadlines for all strategic steps including influencer outreach, content creation, and post-campaign analysis.
- Metrics and Reporting: the key performance metrics (KPIs) that will be used to measure the success of the collaboration. Frequent KPIs are reach, engagement, and conversions.
- Adjustment plan: what has worked and what has failed? What needs to be adjusted right away, what part of the plan can wait and what should you keep up doing or cease immediately?
Having a well-structured template can help brands achieve their marketing goals and maximize the ROI of their influencer marketing campaigns.
What Defines A Winning Influencer Marketing Strategy?
There are some basics and some specific details, characteristics of your niche, and the industry you operate in. However, the basics are things everyone should consider to create a strong fundament for the upcoming campaign. Some of them include targeting, selection, CTA, budgeting, timing, and more.
Define Your Target Audience:
Before you start developing the strategy, you need to know everything about your audience. If you do not identify your target group you will collaborate with the wrong influencers and end up with little to no conversions. Think about the people you want to reach with your marketing efforts, what are their interests, values, and lifestyle habits?
The best influencer marketing strategy finds the audience overlap between your brand and your collaborator. You will need to work with an influencer that has the same type of follower base as your target audience. It often means finding an online persona with the same interests and preferences as your buyer personas. For instance, mattress brands reaching out to popular ASMR artists on YouTube.
Choose the Right Influencer:
As you get your audience research and you create your buyer personas you are one step closer to your influencer marketing strategy. Next comes the influencer selection process. You want to look for those people who could be truly interested in your brand or who will find your products and services genuinely useful. You have to think about their followers if they are likely to buy your product or service.
The influencer should also have a strong follower profile, good engagement rates, and a positive reputation in the industry. When doing your influencer outreach program, think about brands like Dossier reaching out to influencers who do perfume reviews on social media.
Develop a Plan of Action:
An action plan is part of every digital marketing strategy. It is a detailed outline of what has to be done, how it has to be done, and who is responsible. Of course, you can modify your action plan in any way you like, but some elements need to be there.
An influencer marketing strategy action plan must include your marketing goals, budget, content plan or content calendar, details on influencers, and expectations. This will be your guide for any marketing campaign you plan to launch in the future.
Measure Your Results:
Many people forget about the importance of assessing the outcomes. It is part of the strategy, moreover, many marketers create expected outcomes and key performance metrics (KPIs) in advance, to evaluate the success of their marketing campaigns. This will help you understand a lot of things about your strategy:
- Cost-efficiency – was it worth the money invested?
- Effectiveness – did it outperform other marketing strategies executed in the past?
- Profitability – did it generate considerable profit?
- Revision – was there anything that could improve the results?
Analyzing the metrics and data will let you refine your strategy for future use and benefit more from your next collaborations.
Engage with Your Audience:
Don’t forget about your audience. Even though influencers are the direct points of contact in your strategy, their followers need to feel a connection with your brand. Get engaged with them in different ways: answer their questions, reply to their comments, and create customized content that approaches them and their pain points. You need to take care of the customers that come through an influencer marketing strategy and convert them into loyal clients.
Be Authentic:
Be authentic. This is something you may hear everywhere but especially in marketing it is a key to a brand’s successful promotion. People can easily sense whether you are fake or genuine, yourself or a copycat. Authenticity should be felt in all of your marketing campaigns and it will attract people who truly care about your brand, product, and service. In an influencer marketing strategy, you can provide freedom to your collaborators and let them be themselves, too.
Advantages of Influencer Marketing
There are so many important aspects of perfect influencer marketing. If you think about it, word-of-mouth marketing has slowly but surely taken the form of influencer marketing. People might not be meeting up for a chat on Sundays after church or a golf match, but they all spend a lot of time scrolling through their phones every single day. With social media active users stats, you have the chance to reach out to a wider audience.
Increased brand awareness:
Influencer marketing is one of the best methods for increasing brand reputation and awareness (not to mention its ability to bring in new clients). Influencers have large and engaged followings, so partnering with them is a cost-effective way to reach a new audience and raise brand recognition.
Trust and credibility:
Influencers are seen as trusted and credible sources of information by their followers. When an influencer promotes a product, their followers are more likely to believe their recommendation and trust the brand.
Cost-effective:
Influencer marketing is often cheaper than other forms of advertising and can be more cost-effective than paying for traditional advertising campaigns. Brands only pay influencers for the content they create and distribute, meaning they don’t have to pay for overhead costs such as production, distribution, and media buying.
Targeted audience:
Influencer marketing allows brands to target specific audiences, such as those interested in fashion, beauty, travel, and so on. By working with influencers in these niches, brands can reach an audience that is likely to be interested in their products and services.
Increased engagement:
Influencer marketing typically results in increased engagement with followers. This includes likes, comments, shares, and purchases. The influence of an influencer can inspire their followers to take action, making influencer marketing an effective way to drive conversions.
Long-term brand relationships:
Influencer marketing can help build long-term relationships between brands and their customers. By partnering with influencers, brands can establish a deeper connection with their target audience and increase customer loyalty.
Measurable results:
Influencer marketing can be easily measured, allowing brands to see which campaigns are performing well and which areas need improvement. This helps brands to optimize their marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is a highly effective way to reach your target audience and achieve your marketing goals. By following the steps outlined above, you can develop the winning strategy that will help you reach your target audience and achieve your marketing objectives. With a well-planned campaign, the right influencer, and a focus on engagement and authenticity, you can build a successful collaboration that will guarantee increased visibility, authority and sales.
