How Can You Use Influencer Marketing In The Most Effective Way?

You want to increase your product sales, improve your reputation, or grow your brand awareness and decided to use influencer marketing as an effective tool but how? There are roughly 10 million creators on Instagram with more than 1,000 followers and 2 million YouTube channels with 500 subscribers or more. On top of these, there are millions upon millions of talented and influential content creators across platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, Twitch. Moreover, most of those potential influencers will not be relevant to your brand. So, how do you find a needle in a haystack of data? 

First thing first, you need a game plan. There is a need for structure and clarity. Without a framework, and a roadmap, you won’t be able to address how influencer marketing fits with your overall marketing strategy. Mostly, brands conduct campaigns without planning their key aspects, such as clarity of end goals, geographic areas, and type of influencers. Campaigns are failing or producing limited results due to the lack of planning. Let’s divide this game plan into three steps. 

        Step 1 – Definition

        Step 2 – Medium

        Step 3 – Selection  

STEP 1 – DEFINITION

First, you will identify your primary marketing objective, target audience, and definition of success. These are very important to measure the success of your campaigns. If you can’t define it, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t iterate it. 

What is your marketing objective? 

The answers can vary according to your brand equity, industry, or short/long term overall plans. The answers could be awareness, conversion, action, or consideration. 

Who is your target audience? 

List the attributes of your target audience based on demographics, interests, and other relevant values. You can create profiles, personas based on this information.

How do you define success? 

Your definition of success is relating to your marketing objective and it will define your KPIs. Your KPIs should be S.M.A.R.T. In 1981, George T. Doran came up with this expression which stated your goals should be 

 Specific— What, specifically, needs to be done to create business value. 

 Measurable—Track, quantify, or at least suggest an indicator of progress. 

 Achievable—The objective is accepted by those responsible to achieve it. 

 Realistic—State what results you can realistically achieve.  

 Timed—Specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

What is your total budget for this project?

Identify your unit cost and all the related costs with the overall project. 

STEP 2 – MEDIUM

After the definition step, you need to decide on which platforms or channels you will convey your message and your creative strategy. Influencer marketing often goes hand-in-hand with two other forms of marketing: social-media marketing and content marketing. Most influencer campaigns have some social-media component, whereby they are expected to spread the word through their social channels. Although there are many social media platforms with active users and genius creators, Instagram and YouTube are still the biggest ones.

After you select the platform, creative strategies will follow. These strategies depend on the features of the selected platform. Posting a selfie with product placement and a discount code in the caption is not as effective as years ago. In less than a year Instagram launched Stories, Shopping, Reels, and Live Video. As a marketer, you must adjust your strategies according to these new features. For example, creative executions on Instagram may be as follows in 2021:  

1. Post Only Campaign
2. Story Only Campaign
3. Ambassador Program (Multi-Posts/Stories Campaign)
4. Going Live for Brand Authenticity
5. Driving Consideration Through Polls
6. Swipe-Up Lead Generation
7. Reels to Increase Reach
8. Increase Sales through Shopping
9. Using Influencers as Talent 

Most platforms don’t have their official guidelines. On the other hand, YouTube published suggestions with the outline of nine different and proven creative executions for brands that seek to work with the millions of talented creators on their video platform. These are: 

1. Product Tutorial/Demo Video
2. Product Review
3. Hauls
4. Unboxing Videos
5. Lookbook
6. Memes/Comedy Sketch
7. Game Play
8. Brand/Product Shout-Out
9. Favorites 

Examples can be more and more on the other platforms. But the key factor for this Step 2 is examining traits of these different campaign strategies and write down a list of 4-5 that suits your marketing objective, target audience. 

STEP 3 - SELECTION 

An influencer is someone who has the power to affect others' purchasing decisions because of their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience in a particular niche that they actively engage. In last ten years, 50 million people decide to be a creator across the digital platforms. You may think it’s hard to find a perfect match. But do not be afraid, you already achieved so much through Step 3. Number 1 thing you should do on Step 3 is creating your pool of talent. This long list will help you a lot. The ultimate goal of the talent pool strategy is to increase your speed of execution, quality, competitive advantage, business impact, and unlock economies of scale.

Let’s start with the type of influencers to create talent pool, some of the most common methods are by follower numbers, by types of content to separate different types of influencers.  

By Content: bloggers, vloggers, streamers, podcasters, social media posters only.

By Follower numbers: mega influencers, macro-influencers, micro-influencers, nano influencers. 

Mega-influencers have more than 1 million followers on at least one social platform but their engagement rate ([(likes+comments)/followers] * 100) is the lowest. On the other hand, nano-influencers have less than 1000 followers with the highest engagement rate. With that been said, the newest influencer-type to gain recognition is the nano-influencer. Nowadays micro-influencers and vloggers are the most popular ones. 

Your talent pool may consist of all these types in accordance with your overall marketing strategy. 

You can narrow your search by using relevant applicable filters—such as category, reach, engagement, demography, audience, and even brand affinity. After you apply these filters, your target influencer audience will have been narrowed by 99.9%, you are ready to fill your talent pool. 

After this step, you need to contact them. This is the real issue – how do you contact them? Through email, DMs, their rep, agency, or what. But email is the most suggested medium by industry experts. 

Regardless of which medium you chose, you need to ask for their press kit or one-sheet. A press kit is mostly consisting of about, partnerships, and contact information of influencers rolled up into a nice pdf. If this press kit aligns with your overall strategy, add them to your talent pool which may be used in any type of your campaign in at least 1-2 years, also you need to feed this pool consistently. 

Finally, you have a game plan! But this process is still complicated, not easy to follow, and should be more data-driven. Flash news! There is a faster, cheaper, and more effective way to do it. 

MicroGlobe is a data-driven automated influencer marketing platform for brands and influencers to create value-added collaborations and manage campaigns using real-time analytics. 

You can 

• Easily select your purpose,
• Filter your search from thousands of real influencers according to their engagement rate, audience, interests, and more important to their MicroGlobe Score and reviews to create your talent pool,
• Send proposals and choose the right fit for your campaign,
• Create impact and see the results to grow your business.

Get started for free on microglobe.io