All marketing needs strategy and planning. Failing to comprehensively plan your marketing strategies will render them less effective, less efficient, and likely lose you money through the engagement you’ve missed out on.
As a brand, you want your marketing investments to provide the greatest possible value for money, right?
Influencer Marketing is no different. In fact, not properly researching and planning your Influencer Marketing strategies might lead to the biggest losses of investment. Influencer Marketing is a fairly new mode of marketing, and so it can be easy for the uninitiated to make costly mistakes.
Influencer Marketing strategies are, on occasion, also susceptible to losses through fraud; you are, after all, dealing with living people and not algorithms.
But don’t let that put you off! As you might have learnt from our introduction to Influencer Marketing, it is currently one of the most effective marketing modes out there! Influencer Marketing had a market size of $9.7 billion in 2020, and is expected to grow to $13.8 billion this year.
Implementing the following steps can help you take advantage of this extremely effective and potentially rewarding marketing mode.
Finding Relevant Influencers
Pick a platform
To go about finding relevant Influencers, you have to first think about which platform you want your Influencer Marketing to be done from.
You need to ask yourself: which platform is best suited to your brand or product?
Consider the user base of the platform and whether or not it suits your target audience – for example, according to statista, 62.8% of Instagram’s global users are 18-34 years old whereas only 55.4% of Facebook’s global users fall in that age bracket.
With these statistics in mind, if your target audience is young adults, you might choose Instagram over Facebook for your Influencer Marketing.
Platforms are not just relevant to target audience, but brand type too. Beauty and fashion brands see success on Instagram and Youtube, likely due to the strongly visual nature of these platforms. Twitch, however, being built primarily for the streaming of video games, would undoubtedly be more suitable for a gaming-related brand.
Once you have your chosen platform, then you can go about finding an Influencer with a presence on that platform.
Consider the Influencer’s following
When choosing an appropriate Influencer, bigger isn’t always better.
Take Instagram, for instance. All quality Influencers’ sponsored Instagram posts average an engagement level of 4.7%, no matter their following size. Sure, an Influencer with a bigger following will mean that 4.7% is a larger number of people, but their fees will be much higher as a result. So, your ROI might end up being bigger with a smaller Influencer.
It all depends on cost vs revenue and traffic, so make sure to research what size Influencer will be the most cost-effective for your brand before you go ahead!
Here’s a breakdown of Influencer size brackets:
- Nano: 1,000 – 10,000 followers
- Micro: 10,000 – 50,000 followers
- Mid-tier: 50,000 – 500,000 followers
- Macro: 500,000 – 1,000,000 followers
- Mega: 1,000,000+ followers
Are they real?
Fraudulent accounts, on any social media platform, are, sadly, all too common. But there are clear signs to help spot fake accounts, the most tell-tale one being engagement ratio.
If an account has a poor engagement ratio to their follower count, and if the comments on their posts appear spam or bot-like, it’s likely they’re a fraud.
You can also scroll back through their feed and see if they have created sponsored content for reputable brands before! That way, you can be confident of their validity.
How much will it cost?
The fees of the Influencer will be almost entirely dependent on their following size and what kind of sponsored content you want them to produce.
In terms of price per sponsored post, the average cost is as follows:
- Less than 1,000 followers (smaller than Nano): $82.60
- 1,000 – 9,999 (Nano): $107.50
- 10,000 – 99,999 (Micro/Mid): $240.20
- 100,000+ (Mid/Macro): $763.30
1M+ Influencers will cost exponentially more as their follower count increases. In the heady heights of Kardashian-level followings, for example, prices can reach an eye-watering $1M per post.
Sponsored posts aren’t the only content an Influencer could create for you. However, because sponsored posts are the most well-established form of sponsored content, their average costs are more thoroughly reported on and, as a result, the easiest to budget for.
What’s your message? Setting goals for your strategy
Setting goals is crucial to your Influencer Marketing campaign. It will help you stay focused during the course of planning and executing your strategy; what do you want this campaign to achieve?
Vague goals like ‘increase brand awareness’ and ‘boost sales’ are good goals to have, but too broad to deliver a focused and effective strategy.
Goals like ‘increasing customer base of 18-25 year olds’, or promoting a specific single product, for example, are more precise. Influencers have the ability to reach very specific audiences; use that ability to target your brand more precisely!
Your message is also vitally important to your Influencer Marketing campaign. What do you want your target audience to learn about your brand or product? What is the reason they should engage with your brand through this sponsored content?
Precise goals will lead you to being more focused in your strategy planning and execution, ultimately increasing the effectiveness of your campaign. A strong, clear message will help succinctly and directly appeal to the sponsored content’s audience.
Contacting Your Influencer/s
Contacting your Influencer should only be attempted after you have a thorough plan. Approaching an Influencer with only a vague idea of what you want them to do for you can be off putting; you want to seem as credible and professional as possible to invoke their trust and encourage their partnership.
More established Influencers might have an enquiry/business email address listed on their profile. Otherwise, it’s usually acceptable to just direct message (DM) on their social media platform.
Ask them about their rates to check whether their services will suit your budget.
Remember to be polite, professional and friendly; first impressions can make or break a potential partnership! They have the right to refuse to work with you, for whatever reason, so make sure you have a number of different Influencer options when you get to this stage.
To Summarize
Planning is everything when it comes to creating an Influencer Marketing strategy.
From choosing a platform, to selecting a target audience or picking an Influencer, make sure each is a reflection of your brand’s image, goals and message. Having a clear sense of purpose and brand identity will inform good choices at all stages of your planning.
And once your strategy is in action, keep tabs on it! The most successful Influencer Marketing Strategy is one that can be tinkered with to increase effectiveness, and learnt from, to maximizing your future strategies!
If you need help with your online marketing strategy, or need some tips for your brand’s social media presence, take a look at Floodmaker’s services.