An influencer marketing campaign is a marketing effort wherein brands will partner with influencers to help boost sales, drive traffic to your website or app, or in most cases, brand awareness. It’s almost similar to a traditional ad campaign with content creation and distribution, but the only difference is you’ll be working with one or a couple of influencers who will use their own social media channels and have their own community.
Setting up an influencer marketing campaign is critical for your marketing strategy. Here’s a checklist on how to set up a successful one:
Established goals and KPI
Like with any marketing effort, determining goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is an important part of influencer marketing campaign planning. Think about your overall campaign, what end results do you want to achieve by the end of it? Is it to have new app downloads or more sales? Regardless of your business model, the ultimate goal for influencer marketing is to reach new potential customers.
According to the new report on branded content and influencer marketing by Advertiser Perceptions, the top 3 goals for most influencer marketing campaigns are:
- Reach/discover new target customers
- Increase product considerations
- Drive sales
It’s ideal to have primary and secondary goals but some campaigns can be targeted to meet more than one goal. Once you’ve determined your goals, think about how you’re going to measure success. This could be:
- Impressions
- Engagement
- Clicks
The right influencers
Once you’ve established your goals and KPI, it’s now time to find the right influencers. This is arguably the most difficult part of any campaign but exhausting time and effort for this is worth it because the wrong influencer will not only generate poor results but also possibly have a negative impact on your brand.
There are 4 types of influencers: mega, macro, micro, and nano. Mega and macro-influencers have 100k to 1 million followers. They have the highest reach but their engagement rates, brand trust, and loyalty are relatively low. Mega influencers are also very expensive. Micro and nano influencers on the other hand have 500 to 10k followers. Despite the small reach, these influencers have high engagement rates and strong credibility at a reasonable cost.
Picking the right influencer is a critical part of your campaign. Here are some things to consider:
- Relevance – shares content relevant to your business or industry. This provides the advantage of their audience being close or aligned with your target audience.
- Reach – number of people you could potentially reach through the influencer’s follower base
- Resonance – potential level of engagement the influencer can create with an audience relevant to your brand
Once you’ve decided on which influencer you’ll partner with, start the communication. Reach out to them and start building a relationship with them. Before you’re able to pitch them and get down to business, you have to have a foundational relationship with them so that it’s easier to be aligned with the established goals.
Track results
Assuming that you have already communicated with your influencers about what type of content you’ll be needing from them and shared with them the goal you’re trying to achieve, it’s time to launch your campaign. The next step is for the influencers to craft and publish content, the ball is in their court — does that mean the campaign is done? Not quite.
You’ve established goals at the beginning of your influencer marketing campaign planning and you have to track these KPIs. It can be tempting to focus on vanity metrics but let’s try to focus on your ROI to know the degree of success. Depending on your established goals, there are a couple of ways to do this:
- Track link or discount code use
- Analytics
- Engagement
Tracking these results will help you iterate your influencer marketing strategy accordingly. Optimizing your strategy will be a necessary step to bringing you the best results for your brand.
Final Thoughts
There are a lot more things happening behind the scenes when planning an influencer marketing campaign apart from these 3 on our checklist. While these are the narrowed primary steps to setting up a successful campaign, there’s a lot of time spent researching and tweaking in reality. We cannot stress this enough but to make your influencer marketing the best of your effort, learn how to trust your influencers to deliver the results you want on their own creative terms.
Need help on your influencer marketing campaign? Visit our website pop-star.me or email our Account Group Head at jamie.garcia@pop-star.me for more information on how PopStar Philippines can help you start on your influencer marketing strategy.