If you are on this page and reading this PopStar Blog article, we assume that you already understand what influencer marketing is all about and how it can enhance your small business in many ways and benefit from it.
We believe you may have tried, or want to try your luck at influencer marketing, but have doubts about whether it’s the right thing to do.
One thing to underline is, influencer marketing is a brilliant tactic that can help your business achieve unexpected results such as increased sales and other benefits that will also increase for your small business.
To make sure you don’t miss any of the important influences in influencer marketing, we break down 10 things small businesses need to pay attention to before launching an influencer marketing campaign.
1. Create a Clear Goal
First and foremost in influencer marketing is the goal or objectives to be achieved. The clearer and more specific the goals to be achieved, the easier it is to determine the strategy to achieve them.
Some common goals that businesses, especially small businesses, want to achieve in influencer marketing are:
- Increase brand awareness or brand awareness
- Attract new prospects
- Introducing new products
- Increase sales
2. Identify Target Audience
Once the goals or objectives of your influencer marketing campaign are clearly defined and specific, it’s time to target the right market.
This is the phase where you will want to make sure that you have done some deep market research and have a good understanding of the audience you are trying to reach.
If your business already has a website, you can start leveraging it by extracting data from it to better understand the behavior of the average visitor—to assist in conducting good customer research.
You can start by looking at what type of content or audience demographics are most interested in your website. Apart from that, you can also start accessing the target market from your competitors and do a short research on their performance.
3. Set a Budget
Determining the total budget that you will spend on influencer marketing is also one of the important things. However, one thing you should know is that influencer marketing tends to be cheaper than other marketing tactics, so you don’t need to worry.
Determining this budget usually depends on one important factor: The number of influencers you plan to invite in your campaign, along with the reputation of each one.
For example, nano and micro-influencers are usually much cheaper, and they may accept payments other than cash. Most nano and micro-influencers are very open to accepting just a free product in exchange for a review.
4. Create Personas
This one is a must-have before launching an influencer marketing campaign. So, when your campaign is running, people have seen what makes you different from competitors.
Today’s audience loves business accounts that have a distinctive persona, including how they treat their followers or customers on social media or in cyberspace in general.
5. Use Appropriate Social Channels
To get the most out of an influencer marketing campaign, you must choose at least one popular social channel that is the main focus of attracting an audience.
Generally, Instagram is currently one of the platforms that is in great demand by both advertisers and influencers themselves.
As a comparative example, Snapchat might be able to be used as a platform to promote your business, but it can’t be used as the main platform because Instagram will give you much better results.
The Influencer Marketing Hub reports that in 2021 Instagram will continue to triumph in dominating the market, followed by:
- TikTok
- YouTube
6. Captivating Content Curation
The next thing to note is that you need to define what content you want to share with your audience. You must be able to produce appropriate visual and textual content.
The framework and structure of the content provided by influencers must be considered, and influencers must be given the authority to be able to provide creativity in presenting content.
For example, your ad campaign carries the concept of storytelling. That is, you have to ask influencers to introduce your product or service with a storytelling approach, not just an ordinary post.
7. Find the Best Influencers
This section, for us, is the most important part among all the points we will mention. Why? Because if you work with the wrong influencers, you will only be wasting your money, time and energy.
In general, brands want to work with influencers who have the following criteria:
- Great Engagement Rate
- Be consistently active
- Have a specific niche
It must be remembered that influencers are responsible for conveying the message of your brand and helping achieve your original goal of running a marketing campaign. Therefore, it is very important to find influencers who are in line with your business vision and mission.
8. Schedule a Campaign
You can’t start an influencer marketing campaign on a whim. There must be preparation regarding the best times to post, in addition to the other important things mentioned above.
Here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to campaign scheduling:
- Campaign period
- Influencer collaboration
- Content formats
- Post schedule
If possible, create a scheduling timeline for you to follow to ease the whole process once your campaign is up and running.
9. Monitor Your Campaign
You can’t just start a marketing campaign, then finish it when the campaign schedule has ended.
You should keep a close eye on how your campaign is doing after it’s launched. Is there anything that needs to be changed, fixed, added, and so on.
10. Measure Campaign Results
Lastly, evaluate the influencer marketing campaign you are running by measuring the results.
Gathering all available metrics and measuring the results is an important thing you need to do after launching an influencer marketing campaign. In this phase, you may have to analyze all the data that you managed to collect during the campaign.
Some of the important metrics you will need are:
- Click
- Conversion
- Impression
- Profile visit
Final PopStar Tip
Those are 10 important things you need to be aware of (and probably should do) as a small business before you start using influencer marketing for your campaigns.
The things we mentioned are actually quite simple and easy to follow. However, if you don’t have much time to go through the steps, we at PopStar have a team that can help you out! Let’s talk?
Send us a message or contact our Team at contact@pop-star.me for more information on how PopStar can help your influencer marketing here in the Philippines.