How to Organize an Influencer Marketing Campaign?

Over the last few weeks, we have been talking about different things related to influencer marketing, and what it constitutes as a next-level strategy for your business scalability. If we were to define influencer marketing to you in layman terms, we’d say that it’s a process that banks on the ‘word of mouth’ marketing effect when performed through people who “influencer” their followers to buy your product or services.

Think of it as an online celebrity endorsement effect. The difference is that social media influencers have a bigger outreach and an appetite for redirecting their platform’s online traffic to any web business within a short duration. As a result, such businesses get to presell their services or products to the referral traffic, while also being able to convert a percentage of those people into repeat customers.

Any type of influencer marketing campaign is a combination of different things. On top of that, it takes deliberate planning, audience targeting, and smart content to eventually succeed.

If you are someone who has never run or monitored any kind of influencer marketing campaign before, do not start off by sending freebies to your friends and their acquaintances through social media accounts. You will probably get a small chunk of traffic and a limited-time “buzz” effect, but any hype concerning your brand’s popularity will frizzle away.

Key Elements of Influencer Marketing Campaign

As we mentioned earlier that there are different aspects of an influencer marketing campaign; all of which allude to making up for a wholesome effect. We recommend adding these variants to your influencer marketing strategy for the best results.

a. Smart Content:

When it comes to content, almost every type of social media influencer profile is littered with stuff that helps to create a connection with the audience. While you are out there looking for influencers, maintain focus on those individuals who have a knack for creating high-quality & laser-focused content for their audience.

For instance, does the influencer create professional thumbnails for each of his videos? Is the actual content engaging and provocative in the sense that it intrigues the audience? What about the overall number of followers present on the influencer’s profile? You need to sift through such details before signing up for a partnership agreement with any or such influencer.

Also, not all type of content is capable of delivering high conversion results. If you are in the makeup industry, it’s best to touch base with influencers who have such an audience and content created in that realm.

To further the effect of a well-crafted content strategy, make sure that your strategy aligns with one of the following patterns:

• Giveaways
• Guest Blogs
• Sharing Discount Codes through a Social Media Influencer
• Brand Ambassadorship Collaboration
• Video Content for Referrals

Bear in mind that it is not easy to multiple social media content strategies simultaneously. Create one strategy at a time, and collaborate with one or two influencers accordingly. Once you have successfully executed a particular content strategy, move on to another one while maintaining the same level of focus on the overall content quality and brand messaging.

b. Budgeting:

How does one know that an influencer is supposed to be paid exactly X amount of money for an influencer marketing campaign? Is there a predefined scale that outlines the budget for your business?

Influencer compensation varies from one group to another. Speaking of groups, social media and online influencers are divided into three main categories:

• Mega Influencers: They have approx. a million followers, a decent engagement rate, and an overall active social media profile.

• Macro Influencers, or Mid Level Influencers: These influencers have a follower count between 500K  – 700K. Their content pattern aligns with sponsors’ interests. One week, you may be seeing a macro influencer talk about a “favorite” food app that he/she recently discovered. Next week, the same person might be endorsing some other brand or service from any other niche.

• Micro-Influencers: These influencers are brand new, up and coming, and have roughly between 5K to 10k followers. In our expert opinion, micro-influencers are best for organizing influencer marketing campaigns because they have an active engagement rate of 5%, lower compensation rates, and an overall flexible attitude.

Influencer prices also depend on the industry you are looking to work in. Fashion and beauty bloggers charge relatively more as compared to the rest of the bunch. However, to find out the exact rate, you’re going to have to contact a bunch of influencers and find out yourself.

For reference, back in 2017, Influence.Co experts shared Instagram influencers’ pricing details. Take a look below:

• The total price per post averaged at $271
• Micro-influencers charged $83 per post
• Macro influencers, especially the ones with more than 100K followers, charged $763 per post

Finding influencer marketers is not that difficult. The key is to find the “right” people who have, a. The right level of engagement and “influence”, and b. have their pricing plans aligned with the budget you have in mind.

The research part constitutes setting up a plan around your network and actually finding, or shortlisting a bunch of influencers that you are eventually going to work with.

Here is a small checklist of items that you need to keep in mind while looking for influencers:

• Niche relevancy is important. Finding an influencer who works with an audience within the same niche as your business will help you a lot. If you have an F&B (Food & Beverages) service, you better look for an influencer who produces content about dining out, the food he/she loves to eat, and vice versa.

• Next up, comes the legitimacy part. Is the influencer legit and has an active profile? Many so-called influencers have a bloated profile – as in, they have bought the ‘Likes’ and followers by paying someone else for that.

As of right now, there are thousands of service providers who can send shoutouts, bot followers, and fake likes to your Instagram posts for a very nominal fee. No wonder if you see a “mega” influencer with tons of followers, but literally 0% audience engagement, you may as well skip it.

• Lastly, make sure that the influencer has not worked with your competitor before. You can sift through the influencer’s old content and see whether they have promoted your direct competitor’s service earlier, or not.

It wouldn’t look natural to the audience to see the influencer of your preference promoting a product and then talk about someone else’s product within the same niche. Vet your influencers before you start working with them. It’s super important.

As we said earlier, stick to creating one type of smart content at a time. If you have a team big enough to handle simultaneous projects, go ahead with multiple content programs. However, it’s better to start small and then expand as you go.

The type of content that you need to focus on when working with influencers, could possibly be categorized as:

• Blog Posts

The influencer will feature your product on his/ her website through a blog post. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a review, but for this type of collaboration program to work, you need to fill the influencer in on:

• The type of product and services you are offering
• Your unique selling points
• Your products’ main features
• Pricing details for your product/services
• Your design philosophy
• A bit of background information about the business

The influencer, on the other hand, will create a post and share a draft version with you. Review it, suggest changes and ask for the post to be published on an agreed date.

• Influencer Referral Program

Such types of collaboration programs are based on referrals where you share a unique link with the influencers. This link will help the influencer to net a commission based on each sale – i.e. whenever someone buys your product or signs up for your service, the influencers get a small percentage of the total payment as a referral fee.

For such content collaboration programs to work, you do not have to pay a flat content sponsorship fee to the influencer. Since this is the type of content that generates revenue without any specified ceiling, the influencers are usually more than happy to assist different brands and services.

Gmelius is popular for running such types of content strategies that work entirely through referrals.

• Video Content

The influencers talk about your product, or services through video content. The idea is to portray your brand under the positive limelight so that you end up with additional referral traffic that eventually converts.

You need to set up details on how the product features will be covered. Sometimes, brands provide influencers with a pre-defined script. However, we recommend leaving the “script” part to influencers’ discretion. Limiting them to a cookie-cutter approach often hinders creativity.

• Product Reviews

This is another category of influencer marketing campaign content where the influencer reviews your product in detail. While partaking in such programs, make sure that the content doesn’t seem biased and too much in favor of your product.

Let the influencer talk about your brand/ product in a natural manner. Allow them to talk about the pros and cons of the product so that you don’t end up deceiving potential customers eventually.

The most effective way of monitoring influencer marketing campaign results is through data analytics tools. It is important because, at the end of the day, you need to know a certain level of specifics that will help you to create better content, engage your potential customers in a better way, and keep tabs on your hottest selling products, etc.

All of such information and much more can be unlocked by doing an in-depth analysis of the social data coming in from influencer marketing campaigns. If you are running a collaboration program with an influencer through his/her blog, then fall back to the referral traffic stats, entry pages, exit pages – so on and so forth.

Start by maintaining a sheet of influencers you work with. Ideally, this sheet should define the basic KPIs, such as; Influencer A is given a target of reaching 7,000 potential users, while Influencer B is given a target to reaching out to 15,000 potential users.

At the end of each influencer marketing campaign, track the results by seeing which type of content was responded to, the most, and how many referrals each influencer netted.

It is not just about getting a return on investment, but also seeing how your brand/ product can potentially establish trust with customers. This way, you can always have them as repeat customers by incentivizing them through outreach emails, campaigns, and vice versa.

Moving on, we take a look at the influencer tracking tools. Now, there are a bunch of them that are paid, but you can also gather insight through free tools like, Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.

The key is to implement unique tracking URLs and tags and then monitor all incoming traffic segmented by different channels. If you are working with more than one influencer at a time, it is best to group their performance so that you know which ones are worth re-hiring and which ones aren’t.

Last but not the least, we strongly recommend establishing contact with all the referral traffic coming in through any influencer marketing campaign.

The best way of doing so is by maintaining your visitors’ email addresses and then connecting with them afterward through newsletter emails. Believe it or not, email marketing is still relevant and works better than most of the generic marketing campaigns that companies like to talk about.

As we always say, influencer marketing is the need of the hour. By the year 2025, it is expected that there will be more than 300 billion active users who will receive at least one update from an influencer on daily basis. It roughly translates to billions of opportunities for your brand to reach out to potential new customers.

The question is, how many of those opportunities are you seizing at the moment? Take the proactive approach and get in touch with an influencer marketing campaign expert to define your goals and gauge your results for a decent return on investment.