Table of Contents
Influencer marketing seems like the perfect combination of word-of-mouth marketing and traditional advertising. With the right partnership between a brand and an influencer, influencer marketing can reach its ideal demographic, producing a positive return on investment and driving trust with the influencer’s fanbase. However, as the nature of influencer marketing becomes increasingly fast-paced due to rapidly changing social media algorithms and disconnects in goal setting, influencer marketing can sometimes miss the mark. Read more to learn how to use influencer marketing strategies to make influencer marketing better for your campaigns!
Re-evaluate Your Key Performance Indicators and Set Specific Goals
In order to make influencer marketing better for your campaigns, it is vital to set specific goals and key performance indicators (KPI). This allows marketing campaigns to be based on measurable objectives instead of intuition or blind trust in an influencer. However, tracking ROI when it comes to influencer marketing can present a large challenge for companies.
There are many ways to measure ROI. For example, brands can measure if the audience took any action by liking, commenting, or sharing a post. Other examples include whether targeted audiences made a purchase or simply whether or not they clicked through to the brand’s website. Marketers must define what metrics are most important when it comes to their campaign. By setting concrete goals for the marketing campaign, it becomes possible to effectively measure the ROI of a campaign and create measurable objectives to work from.
For example, with a goal to increase brand awareness, measurable objectives might include:
- Increase email subscribers by X amount each month
- Increase the brand’s Instagram reach and impressions by X amount each month
- Increase click-through rate from influencer’s socials to the brand’s site by X amount for the duration of the campaign.
Other KPIs might include tracking brand sentiment, website traffic, subscriptions, and sales. Specific tools to measure KPI include having the influencer use a hashtag or promo code for the duration of the campaign, as well as UTM codes and tracking pixels for blogs. This allows marketers to draw up a full report at the end of a campaign.
Take Squarespace, for example. In this video, YouTuber Austin McConnell explores an influencer marketing strategy that seems to be aimed towards increasing brand awareness and sentiment, as well as driving website traffic. He gives an influencer’s point of view of the whole operation – from initial offers to end deliverables.
Enjoying this article? For more information, check out Influencer Marketing Mistakes Every Brand Should Avoid.
Properly Assess Influencers’ Suitability for a Campaign
When working to make influencer marketing better for your campaigns, brands need to partner with the right influencer. When it comes to assessing potential influencers to partner with, it can be easy to fall into the trap of relying solely on follower count. A beauty influencer with 10 million followers might look good on the screen, but how many of their followers are active? How many are commenting, sharing, and interacting? Importantly, how many are fake followers?
In order to avoid this, it is important that influencers be properly vetted, which requires human oversight in order to find the best match between brand and influencer.
1. Make sure their content fits the company’s brand.
This includes everything from what social media site they’re active on to what sort of content they post. Do they make Reels, TikToks, or long-form YouTube videos? Or maybe they post photos, carousel posts, or blogs?
This also includes taking a look at the messages they send to their followers. What companies do they already work with? Do they promote sustainability? Are they interested in modern affairs? Do they seem like a family person, or are they a solo creator?
Interested in how to create an effective social campaign for your business? Click here.
2. Take a look at their audience.
Do their comment sections look active and engaging, or is it a bunch of bots promoting other brands and accounts? Do their followers look like real people with posts and engagement of their own? Or do they look like fake accounts, or potentially bought followers? In order to make influencer marketing better for campaigns, the influencer needs an engaged audience who will be interested in the product or service the influencer promotes.
Looking to run an epic influencer marketing campaign on social media? NeoReach has the best experience in creating viral campaigns that convert on social media. Sign up here!
3. How legitimate is their influence?
Once you’ve taken a look at their follower counts and engagement, look for them on other social media platforms. An influencer with a truly loyal fanbase will have sizable engaging followings on various social media accounts. For example, well-known YouTuber Mr. Beast has 133 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel, and at the same time, he has 23.3 million followers on his Instagram. Clearly, most of his engagement and influencing happens on YouTube, but he still has a sizable following on Instagram.
Jimmy Donaldson aka Mr. Beast climbed a mountain in Antarctica in a collaboration with Shopify, a commerce platform that helps its users create, grow and manage a business. Shopify appeals to ambitious entrepreneurs – the same sort of audience who might be watching Mr. Beast climb a mountain.
As a different example, Dance Moms alumni Chloé Lukasiak has built her brand on beauty and lifestyle influencing. She sports 7.6 million followers on Instagram, her main platform, but she still has a sizable audience of 2.28 million subscribers on her YouTube channel.
View this post on Instagram
Chloé recently partnered with iHerb, an online wellness shop that sells vitamins and other supplements. The post gained over 23k likes, appealing to her audience interested in beauty and lifestyle. These influencer marketing strategies targeted the right audience because they partnered with the right influencer.
Find more successful influencer marketing examples here!
Whether it’s micro, macro, or somewhere-in-the-middle influencers, a creator with a loyal following will be interested in interacting with their audience across a variety of platforms. When it comes to a brand planning its influencer marketing strategies, this engagement with the audience is a great quality to look out for.
Interview potential partners
In order to make influencer marketing better for your campaigns, it is vital that brands know the influencer they are working with. Vetting and screening can only do so much. At this point, after taking a look at their brand, audience, and social media presence, it’s time to sit down face-to-face and interview the influencer!
Get to know their story – how did they get started in the industry? What are their goals? What values do they hold as an influencer? Can they provide references and other positive reviews? What is their working style? This helps brands know everything from whether or not the influencers can provide deliverables on time, to how much creative freedom the influencer wishes to have in the partnership.
If you’re ready to try out these steps, check out How To Negotiate with Brands as an Influencer.
Be Open to Creativity
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to influencer marketing strategies. In fact, it is important to run unique and personalized campaigns with your influencers. Take Olivia Rodrigo — former Disney Channel actress who became a pop star sensation seemingly overnight!
Olivia’s fanbase is made up of Gen Z teens who absolutely love her smash-hit songs. Her partnership with CASETiFY taps into her young fanbase. The campaign involves colorful phone cases, handpicked by Olivia herself. The cases and the whole campaign match her brand of edgy lyrics, purple butterflies, and broken hearts.
View this post on Instagram
Casetify knew that tapping into Olivia’s audience would be a sure-fire influencer marketing strategy to run a successful campaign. Giving Olivia a say in what cases were sold was a strategy that gave her creative freedom and allowed CASETiFY to drive trust with her audience. It also helps that the cases were made sustainably, as Olivia, and many Gen Z influencers work to promote sustainability.
Interested in this campaign? See more at NeoReach’s CASETiFY campaign teardown.
What’s the Bottom Line?
Between setting specific goals and drawing up KPIs, brands can make influencer marketing better for their campaigns from the get-go. When it comes to working with influencers, a combination of vetting and interviewing is the best way to identify influencers who would make the best partners. Finally, tap into the influencers’ audience with creative ideas, and be open to trying something new!
