Understanding your current audience is the first step to developing an influencer marketing strategy. Influencer marketing is a powerful tool to help your business reach more customers. But before you start an influencer marketing campaign, you need to know what it is and how to use it. This article covers everything from understanding your audience to defining their goals through tracking analytics and making mid-campaign adjustments. Read on if you want to begin an influencer marketing campaign for your brand!
Understand Your Current Audience
- Understanding your current audience is the first step to developing an influencer marketing strategy.
- Understand their interests, needs, and desires. What do they want? How can you reach them?
- Understand their demographics and psychographics (e.g., age, gender, location). This will help you determine who might be interested in working with you as an influencer marketing partner or brand ambassador.
- You also need this information when choosing which influencers should be included in your campaign – it allows for better targeting of potential customers who may not be aware of the brand before being contacted by one of its representatives on social media or elsewhere online!
Determine Your Goals
Now that you clearly understand what you want to achieve and why, think about how your influencer marketing strategy will help you get there. Use these questions as guidelines for setting goals for each part of your campaign:
- Plans for the campaign: What do we hope this influencer can do for us? What kind of posts will they create? How often should they post? Where are we going to publish them?
- Goals for each influencer—what are the expectations they’ve agreed on with us in terms of posting frequency, type of content (text or video), a platform where it will be posted, and other factors such as length or quality level required in their posts?
- In addition, ask yourself whether there are any additional considerations relating specifically to social media platforms such as Instagram Stories; Snapchat Discover; Facebook Live Video; Periscope, etc. If so, mention them here too!
Define Your Target Audience
Before you can build an influencer marketing strategy, it’s essential to understand your target audience. It would help if you focused on a specific demographic and niche market rather than trying to appeal across all demographics. You’ll need to do some research on the type of audience that you’re targeting and what their interests are so that you can customize your content accordingly.
For example: if I’m running an online store selling skincare products, my target audience might be women aged 30-50 who live in urban areas with disposable income of $100k+. In this case, my main goal would be creating content relevant for this group that includes reviews from experts like dermatologists or other doctors (or even celebrities), educational articles about skincare tips & tricks—but also fashion advice!
Decide Which Platforms Are Most Important
There are many different types of influencers, each with a unique audience base. Some people follow a celebrity on Twitter, while others prefer to read blogs or listen to podcasts.
The platforms you choose should reflect your target audience’s interests and needs. If you want to reach the millennials who love avocado toast, start promoting that on Instagram! But you’re trying to build awareness for your new product line. In that case, it might be better suited for Facebook instead of Instagram because there are more people with similar interests in that platform than others (and therefore more potential customers).
You can also use this information to see what other brands are doing right now regarding influencer marketing strategies—and make sure yours isn’t missing out on anything!
Investigate Key Influencers
Once you have a list of influencers, it’s time to look at their social media accounts. Use Google Search or a tool like BuzzSumo to find influencers whose audience matches your target audience.
For example, if you’re trying to reach women in their 20s who like cooking and baking but don’t have access to healthy food options in their community (and thus want more choices), then look for female food bloggers on Instagram with over 100k followers who are active on social media and have relevant expertise—like baking recipes or writing about health issues related to cooking/baking—and who also happen not only live near where these women live but also have similar interests as them.
Narrow Down Your List of Potential Influencers
To build the best influencer marketing strategy, you’ll need to know who your target audience is. The best way to do this is by creating a list of potential influencers that align with your brand and target market. This can be done through social media research, paid advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, or a niche website where only one person is active in the space (like ours).
Once you have your list ready, make sure they meet all three criteria above: large following, relevant content, and active on social media!
Contact Influencers and Send Samples for Feedback, Reviews, and Tutorials
- Contact Influencers and Send Samples for Feedback, Reviews, and Tutorials
- Follow Up with the Influencer After You’ve Received Their Response
- Give Them Time to Respond Before Moving Forward With Your Next Plan
Develop an Editorial Calendar to Track Posts, Organic Mentions, and Sponsored Posts
You’re probably already familiar with the importance of tracking your influencer marketing efforts. Still, if you still need to take the time to develop an editorial calendar for your brand or business, it’s high time that you did.
The key is simple: track everything! Track posts on social media and blog posts, as well as organic mentions in the search engine, results in pages (SERPs). And don’t forget sponsored posts—this will help measure how effectively an influencer brings new customers into your company’s doors.
But how do we do this? Several tools make it easy for marketers like ourselves (and anyone else who needs help keeping track). For example, HootSuite allows users to add specific keywords to their dashboard to quickly see which ones drive traffic back toward their site or blog post.
Then there’s Google Analytics; while not essential per se when developing a strategy around influencers because of its limitations when considering multiple platforms simultaneously (more on this later), having access to information such as what words were used most often by visitors returning after leaving over time makes sense when planning future campaigns too!
Monitor the Campaign’s Analytics and Make Mid-Campaign Adjustments as Needed
The best way to ensure your campaign is successful is by monitoring its performance. You can do this through analytics, which will help you identify essential metrics like followers and engagement rates.
You should also use this information to make mid-campaign adjustments if necessary. For example, if one influencer has been doing better than another in terms of following or engagement rate, it might be time to move them up or down on the list of influencers who receive updates from you in the future.
In addition to monitoring how well each influencer performs over time (and making adjustments where needed), it’s essential that you also consider their relative performance compared with other similar accounts: will they outperform or underperform? If so, what makes them so unique?
Follow simple steps to start an influencer marketing campaign.
- First and foremost, understand that influencer marketing is an excellent way for brands and businesses to reach new audiences. Influencers are experts in their field and can provide valuable insights into products or services that your audience may not know yet.
- For example, if you’re looking at the beauty industry as an example: You might find a blogger who has been using makeup for years but hasn’t written about it until now because she’s just discovered how amazing it feels on her skin.
- This could mean she knows more about what works best than anyone else out there right now—and once she shares this information with her followers (or potential ones), they’ll also be able to use those same products themselves!
Conclusion
We’ve covered some of the basics here, but there is much more to learn if you want to succeed with influencer marketing. If you are new to the field or just looking for tips on getting started, consider contacting a professional who can walk you through these steps in person.
