The last two years' have seen the rise of Influencer Marketing from an out of the box tactic to an essential part of any marketers strategic arsenal. Having proven its effectiveness, it is essential to understand what launching a successful influencer campaign entails. Do you have the right toolkit to succeed? Using the right tools will help raise your bottom line, reach the relevant audience and save you time.
At Audiense we understand the steps required to getting your influencer marketing campaign off to the right start :
- Influencer identification.
- Influencer evaluation.
- Influencer engagement.
- Performance measurement
Each step requires certain tools to ensure the best results.
1. Influencer identification
Stage one can only begin once your target audience has been defined. You are able to define your target audiences through the Audiense platform or import audiences from other active listening tools such as Crimson Hexagon or Pulsar into the Audiense platform to successfully achieve stage 1!
Once defined, understand who your audience is, highlighting unique and common characteristics. Generating such an in-depth understanding of your audience will allow you to identify influencers with the greatest relevance to each of the segments within your audience. In turn, your approach to influencer marketing becomes hyper-targeted.
With the growth of influencers and influencer marketing, it is increasingly difficult to identify relevant influencers. The challenge is several marketing tools categorize influencers by industry and community size. Unfortunately, this does not take into account how relevant these industry leaders are to an audience let alone a specific segment. Nor do these tools allow for audience or segment comparisons failing to identify the undercover heroes, relevant micro-influencers.
For example, it is not necessary that a previous influencer or a competitor’s influencer will be the best choice for an upcoming campaign as audiences continuously change. If you ignore audience relevance, the identification of influencers becomes a Russian roulette!
Here at Audiense, relevance is at the core of everything we do. We specialize in the identification of micro and macro-influencers. As a result, we make stage 1 cost-effective and efficient whilst ensuring influencer relevance.
2. Influence evaluation
After identifying the relevant influencers for your target audience, it is necessary to analyze their viability. Evaluating their patterns of growth and acquired influence over time allows you to decide how relevant they are to your campaign. Develop an understanding around image alignment. Ask yourself does influencer X embody the image you are working hard to create and portray? If YES then ask yourself what proportion of community overlaps with that of your competitors? Answering these questions will not only inform your strategy but ease the selection process significantly.
Take it a step further and import your influencers into your content dashboards within Pulsar or Crimson in order to discover historic and real-time shares and interactions.
3. Influencer engagement
This phase has two elements to action:
- Channel identification
- Influencer nurturing
Channel identification
When looking to engage with your prospective influencers it is essential to identify the social channels where they are the most active in order to establish rapport whilst aiming to kick off your campaign.
Influencer nurturing
There are a variety of tools (Niche.co, Linqia, Launchmetrics or Onalytica) available to nurture one to one relationships with a number of influencers simultaneously. Such platforms centralise influencer nurturing from campaign briefings and creatives to cost/payment management providing the ability to scale the practical application of your findings effectively.
You are able to import your identified influencers from Audiense into these tools allowing you to use both services simultaneously to achieve the best results. You are also able to import a list of prospective influencers to Twitter’s tailored audiences to ensure all your outreach efforts are viewed by the members of the list.
4. Performance measurement
Measuring campaign performance has always been a core factor to consider when determining the success of any campaign. Performance analytics is comprised of two halves: quantitative (metrics such as reach, impressions, spend) and qualitative (audience relevance, are the users a part of your defined target audience). Whilst analyzing the quantitative data takes centre stage often, the qualitative aspect seems to take a back seat.
Although tools such as Launchmetrics or Onalytica provide you with quantitative information about the campaigns, it is necessary to have a holistic analytical approach to the conversion funnel which you are able to achieve through the use of Talkwalker, Shareablee, SocialBakers, Google Analytics or Hubspot to name a few. Any of these tools have the ability to provide you with a transparent view of both earned media and the purchasing funnel.
In an effort to validate the audience that has interacted with your campaign, a tool like Audiense Insights is ideal as you are able to establish whether the audience reached was relevant and if it is worthwhile modelling future campaigns on the same principles.
What does your influencer marketing campaign toolkit consist of? Would you like to experience how Audiense Insights can be the ideal solution for you? Sign up for a FREE Audiense Insights account and discover the ideal influencers for your brand.
This blog is a translation from the Spanish original, written by Paz Segura, for the Audiense Spanish blog.
