When Warby Parker was looking to turn granny glasses into the hot new thing, they used influencers to increase engagement, awareness, and interest. The authenticity and genuine interactions between smaller influencers and their audiences generated a 4% engagement rate that reached 800,000 new potential customers.
Did you know that 61% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations while 38% trust branded social media content?
Influencer marketing has taken over online marketing. People look to someone they trust before making a purchase. When they get an unfiltered look into the lives of people they like or admire using your product, they’re far more likely to believe in its benefits.
Developing an influencer marketing strategy is a key component of a killer overall marketing strategy. Smash your revenue targets and develop a powerful brand with this How-To Guide to influencers.
When you know your audience, your marketing strategy practically writes itself. With clearly defined goals and an in-depth look into your target market, you can begin exploring the best influencers to serve your business.
Who is your audience? What are they talking about? They could already be following the perfect influencer to meet your needs. You might also be able to find potential influencers that already follow you – regular people who have a following and love your product. With a little more information about your demographics, you can use deep segmentation to find high-value opportunities your competitors are missing.
So, how do you find the potential influencers most relevant to you? By exploring influencer spaces and checking out who’s using hashtags relevant to your brand, scanning your competitors for influencers they may be using, and recruiting through your website or LinkedIn pages with forms for potential influencers to fill out.
After generating a comprehensive list of the influencers who align with your marketing goals and brand, you can start reaching out with offers to collaborate.
While you might think we’re talking about the number of followers these influencers have, what we actually mean is their brand alignment, voice, and engagement.
For example, you might find an influencer with millions of followers, but they aren’t known for their expertise in your industry. Or they don’t engage with their comments or messages. These types of influencers are considered less trustworthy than those who actually talk to their fans on a more personal level. Engagement is much more important than followers here.
Choosing the right influencers will make or break your strategy. So take your time to research your options. With the right influencers on your side, you’ll see increased reach, improved credibility, and great ROI.
Many companies are moving away from celebrity influencers to regain their audiences and project more authenticity from their brands. Many are seeing more success with nano and micro-influencers than ever before.
When Dyson was looking for the perfect target audience to expand its market, pet owners were the top contenders. Unsurprisingly, pet influencers take up a lot of the social media market and hold powerful sway over their followers. Using nano-influencers, some of which only had 2,500 followers, Dyson relied on influencer engagement and creativity to increase sales.
With a loose brief that simply required a little humor from influencers as they cleaned up after their beloved pets, this Dyson campaign enjoyed one million views, 115k likes, and an overall engagement rate of 10%.
One company that saw massive success with the reach of micro-influencers is Iceland. This UK-based food company used celebrity influencers for its marketing strategy and saw a plunge in approval ratings. The brand revamped its strategy with a transition to regular-Joes to get some more authentic user-generated content.
After a year-long campaign, they saw a retention rate nearing 60% among their customer base and a massive increase in approval ratings from 10% to 70%.
So what are the defining characteristics of each type of influencer? Check out the breakdown below:
If you’ve been applying our guide up to this point, you should have a few names on your list that mesh with your brand identity. Now it’s time to put Audiense to work and find what kind of content resonates with your target audience in order to collaborate with influencers to ensure a successful campaign.
Anyone who already uses Audiense knows that our platform provides a ton of affinity data that can help you discover what your audience is interested in besides your products or services. You can pull reports that link a specific influencer to your brands and explore basic audience demographics, as well as:
Create an audience-centric campaign for both your audience, as well as your influencer’s audience.
When you reach out to an influencer for a collaboration, it’s best to have a plan ready to go – even if you won’t be sharing all the details with your influencer list right away.
Reach out to influencers with an offer that includes a general overview of your brand and company, and why you think they’d be a good fit.
If they express interest, you can schedule a meeting to discuss details like compensation, marketing strategy, post suggestions, timeline, and goals which you prepared ahead of time.
(Just keep in mind that the final details of your collaboration may differ from influencer to influencer depending on their audience, experience, rates, and schedule.)
Your template may look something like this:
Hello {First Name of Influencer or Handle},
I’m [Name] with [Company Name]. We’re a [Business Description] company, and we [What You Do]. Someone on our team saw one of your recent posts promoting [Brand] and suggested that we reach out for a collaboration.
We’re looking for people like you to partner with us and help spread the word about [Company Name]. We think you’re a good match for us because [List of Reasons].
Is that something you’d be interested in pursuing?
Let me know if you’re available and we can schedule a call to discuss compensation, strategy, and timeline further.
Thanks,
[Name]
Make your initial message personalized and detailed. For example, look into the influencer’s previous posts and call out specifics to show that you’ve done your research. Or, check out all their platforms and specify which ones would work best for your campaign.
Compensation for influencers depends on a number of factors related to your specific campaign, but we can provide a few guidelines to help you generate an initial offer. Some influencers already have a schedule of rates available, but you can always negotiate based on your marketing strategy. Some of the more traditional forms of payment for influencers include:
To give you an idea of what you can expect from each influencer level, consider this graph:
There is some variation among these average prices depending on the exact number of followers, frequency of posting, and length of contract. Some influencers may be willing to accept lower rates in exchange for more consistency.
If you have a smaller marketing budget to dedicate to influencers and social media, the best strategy to take is specificity. Plan out your campaigns in as much detail as possible to help create estimates of what it would take to reach your goals and where you need to allocate your funds. Consider these sample budgets to guide your own program:
While these strategies show you have to utilize a small budget in conjunction with lower-level influencers, you can still create a campaign with celebrity and mega influencers – even if you don’t have a million-dollar budget. Some strategies that may convince higher-level influencers to lower their rates include:
If you want to keep your ROI high while immediately redirecting poor-performing campaigns, you need to keep an eye on the impact of your influencer marketing strategy. It can be tough to track the success of an influencer campaign, especially if they aren’t promoting direct sales with a specific coupon code.
Some marketing experts track influencer success by reach, impressions, and engagement. In addition to more traditional analytics tools that measure these, we also recommend staying in close contact with your influencers to see if they’re noticing any significant trends. They can offer on-the-ground feedback about which posts tend to resonate with audiences or what times of day their posts garner more likes.
With all this data, you can reorganize campaigns on the fly to ensure you’re maximizing every post and dollar. You can also make the most of your influencer campaigns by reusing content as much as possible. Reshare their posts on all your platforms, add their posts to your website’s blog, and use their posts for ads.
83% of buyers report buying a product or service after first seeing family, friends, or influencers talking about it on social media. With 93% of marketing professionals turning to influencers for strategy support, you’re one of the only ones who isn’t taking advantage of this revenue stream!
Tons of brands are already taking advantage of the market: Fabletics managed to increase engagement by 10%, Hulu managed to reach more than 1.3 million people with the help of just one influencer, and Bob’s Red Mill utilized a score of micro-influencers to generate over 2,200 clicks to their website. You can too with these strategies:
Get a leg up on your influencer marketing journey, and join these success stories, when you start Audiense free today.
