If you work in social media marketing, you’re probably familiar with influencer marketing and its growing popularity among companies of different sizes.
Influencer marketing has become an integral part of many social media marketing strategies in 2022. No wonder why marketers are eager to learn how to create a successful influencer marketing campaign.
But before we jump into the 8 steps needed to launch an effective campaign, let’s first find out what influencer marketing is about.
Influencer marketing is a marketing and advertising strategy. It involves companies finding content creators and working together with them on a marketing campaign.
And the good news is that you don’t need Ryan Reynolds or any other celebrity to kickstart an influencer marketing campaign.
According to some estimations, there are around 42 million influencers in the world. And this number is expected to grow even further.
This rapid growth is not surprising: not every influencer is a Hollywood celebrity. In fact, if you have more than 1,000 followers on Instagram, you are already an influencer.
Although it might seem that only campaigns with mega influencers, or celebrities, can deliver tangible results, multiple studies confirm that micro-influencers have higher engagement and better conversion rates than macro-influencers.
Besides, nano- and micro-influencers have built communities around specific interests (for example, fitness, nutrition, animal facts, etc.). By partnering with smaller influencers, brands can reach these niche audiences.
The short answer is: It works.
Influencer marketing is a rather versatile tool that is used by companies to achieve different marketing goals:
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to influencer marketing because every campaign is unique.
Nevertheless, there are 8 common steps that every successful influencer marketing campaign follows.
Let’s have a look at each of these steps in more detail.
Before launching an influencer marketing campaign, make sure that you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve.
Do you want to increase brand awareness? Boost engagement? Gain more followers on social media?
Depending on your goals, you need to set realistic key performance indicators (KPIs). It’s better to limit the number of KPIs to 3-5 per goal. Otherwise, it might get overwhelming to track too many different indicators.
If you’ve never run an influencer marketing campaign before, you might find it challenging to set a KPI. In this case, you can use publicly available benchmarks for similar campaigns. For example, many influencer marketing agencies share the results of their campaigns and provide either expected or actual KPIs.
While a goal sets the general direction of your campaign, the target audience sets its tone. That’s why a marketing campaign should start with a clear understanding of your target audience.
There are other reasons why knowing your target audience is important:
Once you have a specific goal in mind and know your audience, it’s time to create a brief.
Although it’s difficult to cover every possible recommendation in the scope of this blog post, there are several things to keep in mind for your brief:
When it comes to finding influencers, you might already have someone in mind. Large corporations prefer to outsource influencer marketing to agencies or subscribe to an analytical platform but smaller companies usually try to find influencers either with Google or social media search.
To shortlist influencers, you need to develop a list of criteria:
Once you shortlist candidates, it’s time to reach out to them:
Is your influencer marketing campaign successful? You’ll never know if you don’t constantly monitor KPIs before, during, and after the campaign.
Influencer marketing campaigns are multi-level and complex. Some of them will have a long-term effect. Therefore, not all results will be visible straight after your campaign finishes. In some cases, you’ll need to wait a few months.
Besides, if you constantly monitor KPIs, you’ll be able to spot some areas for improvement while the campaign is still running.
On top of that, you can study the results and decide what can be improved in the future. It’s the learning by doing approach at its finest.
While your influencer campaign is running, it doesn’t mean that all other marketing activities should stop.
You can support your influencer marketing campaign with organic content. There are at least 10 ways how you can build a strong social media presence and increase engagement.
You can leverage and repurpose the content that was generated during your influencer marketing campaign.
You can use influencers’ posts in a social media paid campaign or produce quotes from influencers’ posts, GIFs from their product review videos, Twitter threads based on their tips, etc. You can also use Kontentino’s advancedanalytics tool to keep an eye on how well your repurposed content is performing.
These 8 steps are the milestones of your influencer marketing campaign. There are many smaller steps in-between that should not be neglected. This list was created to provide you with an overview of how a successful influencer marketing campaign is planned, launched, and coordinated.
Influencer marketing is a complex process that involves several parties, is time-consuming and multi-level.
But if combined with a thoughtful strategy, powerful tools, and consistency, it can complement your social media strategy and boost your marketing efforts.
We know the struggles of social media managers: juggling multiple accounts, keeping up with content creation, and never quite having enough hours in the day. 🥵 Well, we’ve got your...
Find out how to reach the right people with Facebook Ads target audiences.
With the ever-changing landscape of social media, you have one more headache to tackle – keeping your images up to date with the latest image size guidelines for optimal visibility....
