We’re Back to Share Three More Tips To Help Your Business Benefit From Influencer Marketing

In our last post on influencer marketing, we shared three tips to help you get started if you’re considering using influencer marketing for the first time. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out here. Today, we’re highlighting the first steps you should take when building your first influencer campaign. 

1. Know And Understand The Audience You’re Trying To Influence 

Chances are you already know the kind of person who would be interested in your product or service, but do you know which influencers they follow? 

To start, spend some time social listening. Search relevant hashtags, look at tagged competitor posts, scroll through influencer posts to see the types of people who are engaging in the comments or even send a message to the influencer you’re interested in working with and ask about their audience. 

Take the time to ensure your target audience follows the influencer you’re interested in working with. The extra legwork will help make sure the investment you make into influencer marketing pays off. 

2. Have An Overarching Message You Want To Communicate

Influencers know how to engage with their audience best. But it’s always helpful to provide a guideline of the key messages you’d like to see them communicate. This helps ensure your brand’s voice is understood by the influencer and aligns with how you’d like to see your brand portrayed online. 

While it’s always helpful to provide influencers with key messages, you don’t want to script their posts. Dictating the exact wording of a post is the quickest way to lose authenticity. Instead, give directions on which key points, specific hashtags, and other important bits of information have to be in the post, but let them write it. Some influencers may ask for more direction, if that’s the case, give it. But let them use their voice to share your story.

Remember, you’re using influencer marketing to help your brand reach new audiences. You want the first engagement they have with your brand to feel authentic and the best way to do that is to keep it as genuine as possible. 

3. Set Your Goals And Be Realistic About Them

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Everyone wants to go viral but the truth of the matter is that most posts won’t. 

Instead of aiming for a viral social media post, set your goals to be realistic metrics you can track. Examples of this can be an increase in website traffic following a post, purchases from new customers, an increase in your social media followers or simply engaged comments from the influencer’s followers on the post. 

In our previous blog post, we talked about the importance of asking influencers for their post insights. Having access to this will help you set goals for what a successful campaign should aim to achieve. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a three per cent engagement rate or higher – you can calculate this by dividing the total number of interactions on a post by the number of followers and multiplying that number by 100. The engagement rate gives you an idea of how many people who saw the post actually engaged with it through likes, comments, shares and saves. 

Navigating influencer marketing can be tough, but we’re here to help. We’ve worked on influencer campaigns with businesses ranging from Fortune 500 companies to local small businesses and we’re experts at understanding the ever-changing landscape of influencer marketing. If you’re looking to get started with influencer marketing for your business contact us and we’ll be happy to help.