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To pull off an effective influencer marketing campaign that targets your audience, you need to work with the right social media influencers and know the right social media strategy.
Our team at BeautyClout wants to show you how to target your audience by following these tips about influencer marketing.
But before we get to influencer marketing how-tos, tips, and tools, let’s start with the basics.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that involves businesses and influential people working together.
A company usually collaborates with an influential person to promote something that they sell. It could be anything from a product, service, or campaign.
In today’s digital world, there are content creators with niche audiences that can often offer value to brands. Influencers have dedicated and engaged followers on social media, which is why brands seek them out.
The digital world has made it easy for everyday people to influencer others in significant ways.
What is a social media influencer?
An influencer is someone who can influence others through social media. As a brand, you’ll want to build trust and drive engagement through your influencer marketing. It’s critical to work only with social media influencers whose vision aligns with yours as a brand and who create original, engaging content. Regardless of an influencer’s followers, the point is to work with those that make sense for your brand.Finding the Right Social Media Influencer in 5 Easy Steps
It’s important to know how to find the right influencers to target your audience successfully. Put in the work to find the right influencer for your brand needs and check out these five tips for finding the right influencer.
Step #1 Consider the Three Rs:
Relevance
An influencer shares content relevant to their audience. They will also post content relevant to your business and industry. They need to have an audience that aligns with your target audience.
Reach
Reach is the number of people you could potentially reach through the influencer’s follower base. It’s important to know if the influencer you’ve chosen has the reach you desire. If not, consider working with someone else or with several influencers to reach more people.
Resonance
This is the potential level of engagement the influencer can create with an audience relevant to your brand.
Bigger isn’t always better in the case of influencer marketing. A huge follower count is meaningless if those followers aren’t engaged with the influencer. A smaller follower count can be mighty if the audience is involved.
Influencers with a low follower count can have very dedicated and engaged followers.
Step #2 Know Who you’re Trying to Influence
Your influencer campaign can’t serve all people. An effective strategy requires you to speak to the right people using the right tools.
You’ll need to know who your target audience is. The first step is to define who your audience will be for this specific campaign. Who do you want to reach?
Step #3 Look for engagement and trust with the right audience
The key is trust.
To make any significant sales, you’ll need to gain trust between you and your audience. By using influencers, you can do that.
Your audience should trust and respect the opinion of the influencers you work with.
Without trust, your audience will not engage with you or your campaign. You’ll struggle to see a tangible impact from your efforts.
How do you tell if your potential influencer is trusted? Engagement.
Step #4 Go for a consistent look, feel, tone, and values
You need to find someone who’s producing content with a look and feel that complements your brand.
The tone must also be appropriate for the audience you’re trying to reach. You’ll need to think about the way you present your brand to potential customers.
Step #5 Keep an eye out for sponsorship saturation
Take a look at what your potential influencers are posting. How often are they sharing sponsored content?
If they’re already hitting followers with tons of paid posts, their engagement rate may not last very long.
Look for plenty of organic content to keep followers interested, enthusiastic, and engaged. Keep this in mind when thinking about what you’ll ask the influencer to post. Asking for too many posts in a short timeframe will make your offer hard for the influencer to accept.
Now that you know all that, you’ll need to know all the best influencer marketing tips to achieve the best campaign possible.
Choose Your Best Performing Platforms
There are many social media platforms out there for brands to use, but the best for any company are Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Facebook.
If you are looking to build a loyal following through the use of images, Instagram is the best platform to use. On Instagram, you’re able to use different features to showcase your brand, products, and overall message.
Youtube
Looking for deeper connection through long-form content? Head over to YouTube. Many big-time influencers jumpstart their careers on Youtube. It’s an excellent place for companies to find influencers that create stellar content.
Snapchat
If you want to connect with a younger audience, that’s all about the fast life, Snapchat is the place to be. Depending on your brand, snapchat might be the breeding ground for success.
Lastly, Facebook will always be one of the most popular platforms out there for widespread sharing of any content.
Facebook is a platform that encompasses everything you need at once. When you realize what platforms you want to use, you can start making your strategy.
Determine Your Goals
Brand influencers are an excellent source for brands, but before selecting top influencers, you should set goals.
First, define your target audience. Who are you trying to reach with your influencer campaign? Once your target audience is established, set a budget, and search for influencers.
Influencers expect to be well compensated for brand partnerships, so figuring out the budget is essential. After determining your budget, select which key performance indicators to measure.
Some KPIs to consider are audience reach, views, engagement, follower count.
Plan Effective Publishing Schedule
The influence of social media is so profound that scheduling is critical to any successful influencer campaign.
Once you have selected an influencer or influencers, your strategy needs to impact the influencer network. Determine the best times for posting using key performance indicators and demographic trends to ensure that all influencers are posting regularly and at reasonable times.
Influencer marketing should be integrated with the rest of the marketing strategy to create a cohesive campaign that expands your brand reach and boosts brand awareness.
Give Influencers Creative Freedom
The best partnerships between influencers and brands are mutually beneficial. In a successful influencer partnership, the brand and influencer receive exposure that expands their reach and showcases their creativity. When choosing an influencer, brands should select someone that is a natural fit for the brand. This means their content should reflect the brand values before the partnership. This means that their creativity should already align with what you have in mind. Part of why influencers are so successful is their authenticity, creativity, and genuineness. Brands should allow influencers to retain their creativity and personal style during content creation. Influencers gain their audiences due to their original and exciting content, and content that is branded takes away the influencer’s natural appeal to people.Review & Optimize Influencer Content
Influencers should retain their original content style, but brands still need to ensure that their content is high-quality and on point. When partnering with influencers for a marketing campaign, brands should also make certain their influencers are posting content aligned with the marketing values and goals. Triple check the content before allowing it to go live.Measure Results
Track and measure the performance of the Influencer campaign so you can see what works and what doesn’t. It’s important to track results frequently so you can develop a crucial understanding of what your audience enjoys. By doing this, you can improve and enjoy the benefits of your campaigns. There’s always something to learn and do the next time differently! Also, it’s essential to do a post-campaign report. A post-campaign report consists of a few things. This report gives you the ability to determine whether the campaign was a success. You should pull up all the metrics you set out to track and check the results. Take time to see whether you’d change anything for future campaigns. It’s also important to look at how each part of the influencer campaign performed, and how the campaign performed as a whole to pull out insights and key takeaways.Follow the rules
Before you dive into influencer marketing, it’s essential to understand the rules. In the United States, those rules come from the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC takes disclosure very seriously. Make sure you build disclosure guidelines into your agreements with influencers. Influencers must identify sponsored posts. However, Truth In Advertising found that many do not do so. Some do disclose, but not in a way that meets the FTC requirements. Here are some key points from the FTC: Video reviews must include both written and verbal disclosure of the partnership. It must be within the video itself (not just the description). The built-in tools on social media platforms are not enough. #ad and #sponsored are great hashtags to use for disclosure. But make sure they’re highly visible and not just tacked on to the need of a long string of tags.Use Influencer Marketing Tools
Now that you’re ready to get started with influencer marketing, here are some tools to make it easier for you and your team!Hootsuite
Hootsuite search streams can help you discover influencers by monitoring conversations relevant to your brand across different channels. Once you have an initial set of influencers in mind, track what they share and who engages with them. This will help you understand how these influencers are relevant to your audience while highlighting other potential influencers to work with.Right Relevance Pro
This app can search for content shared by influencers based on topic and location. Use it to identify leaders in the influencer industry. You’ll discover potential influencer partnerships based on the quality of the content they share.The Takeaway
Influencer campaigns are no joke! They take a lot of work. Working as an influencer has shown me that it all works best when businesses take it seriously. Working for a company has shown me the other side of things. Your target audience matters, a lot. To have influencer campaigns on social media, you have to be willing to take a different approach to market. You’ll need to research who your audience is and what they want. Influencer marketing can change the trajectory of your business, but only if you do it right. Are you a company that works in influencer marketing? Let us know what methods you use as a business! We’d love to hear you in the comment section!Share This