Learn Successful Social Influencer Marketing In 6 Simple Steps
If interested in working with social media influencers that can help share spread your brand message among targeted audiences then first know how to find right influencers and connect with them.
Here we’ll discuss an effective influencer program in six simple steps
#1: Identify the Goal for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
Build a successful social influencer program that fits into your overall marketing goals. Every marketing channel needs a strategy for business promotion and social influencer is no exception to this rule. But businesses look for influencers only to promote product launches and events.
A study on social influencers cited following reasons for working with influencers:
• Content promotion
• Product launch
• Content creation
• Event management
• Corporate communications
• SEO
• Crisis management
Once a goal is determined, you need finding 2-3 key performance indicators (KPI) for these goals. For instance take content promotion for which you need determining abilities of your business in reaching social media, making engaging posts and building followers.
#2: Define Your Ideal Influencer Profile
Social media users with high credibility and large audiences are called social media influencers. They can easily persuade others with their trustworthiness and authenticity. And the biggest challenge in working with influencers is to find the influencers. Social media has many users with an excellent line of followers.
Here are the golden rules for selecting the potential influencers for a business:
• Having large number of audiences
• Relevancy to the business
• Audiences should be genuine
• The followers must be active on social media
• Having a tone and style matching with the brand to be promoted
You shouldn’t get confused with size and influence. The key to a success social influencer program is to align with the people who pay attention to their audiences not those that simply keep adding followers. Digiday published a report showing that reliable influencers have followers between 10,000 to 100,000 followers and not in millions.
#3: Find Potential Influencers
Now you know which social influencers are suitable for your brand but you need finding those influencers. Using influencer marketing software is an idea way to find social influencer for a business but you can try other ways as well.
Do a Hashtag Search
The most convenient way to find who your influencers are is to look for people posting about your brand online. A simple hashtag search is sufficient to know who’re advocating your brand. Also you can do a social media search using relevant keywords and find the influencers that make posts regarding your business or competitors.
Ask for recommendations
Social influencers have contacts with other influencers. Once you start working with influencers, you can request them to contribute to your search for social influencers. Some social media platforms will suggest influencers without asking. You can take example of Instagram that provides references for social influencers.
Use an Influencer Marketing Tool
There are many tools for identifying and connecting to social media influencers. Also keep you marketing objectives in mind when looking for software. Remember five key capabilities to determine value of influencer marketing technology. It is ability to:
• Discover
• Connect
• Engage
• Recruit influencers
• Measure success
#4: Reach Out to Influencers
Now you’ve the list of your brand influencers that can help in your social marketing efforts. You need making a good start by taking a direct approach. Know your influencers and also try building confidence.
Reach out directly
Businesses like hiring experts for marketing and it is these experts that contact and communicate with social influencers. But a majority of influencers like businesses to establish direct contact. They appreciate if they are contacted directly instead of through representatives like business managers. Influencers are more responsive to direct communication.
Get to know them
Brand influencer relationship is a business relationship and it should be mutually beneficial for both. Before you make a direct contact with your influencers, you should know everything about the influencers. It will help you understand potential of the influencers and you could align your marketing strategy to suit to your influencers. Objective of this exercise is to make your strategy more relevant for the targeted audiences.
Monitor progress
Use an influencer marketing platform to monitor progress or you can maintain a spreadsheet to keep details of the information and posts made by influencers. This management technique will not only help monitor the progress but also you can build confidence and maintain a healthy relationship with influencers.
#5: Provide Rewards
How will you value your influencers for their help? Here it will be wrong to say that all influencer would like to be incentivized with money and this is proved with Augure’s study. There are many factors that outweigh the cash rewards.
• 55% increase their followers
• 45% create quality content for their audiences
• 29% shape their image
• 25% get discounts and free samples
• 24% earn money
• 22% living new experiences
While cash rewards and products are preferred way to motivate influencers, businesses should find more ways to strengthen their relationships with their influencers. They can give freebies like short trips and discounts.
#6: Measure Your Results
Starting the influencer marketing program isn’t the only thing you need to achieving success as you need measuring the success to know how much the campaign helped in achieving your business goals. Go back to the KPIs in step one and see what progress you made on those metrics. If you want to measure success in content field, see how affordable cost of an influencer is in comparison to other marketing channels.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the game of connecting business to targeted audiences. It involves building visibility of brand; expanding awareness about products and striking right note with consumers. Studies have proved that social media can influence purchasing behavior of customers.
Today, social media platforms play in integral role in digital marketing. But in reality it is social media influencers that are influencing customers. They are creating brands and also helping companies in expanding and communicating with consumers in a more natural and effective way. In future, the influencers will take more responsibilities of influencing buyers.
