Following advice given by influencer marketing experts is a simple way to clearly define the key points of your campaign. In order to get the best results, it’s obviously much easier to work with professionals from this sector who have already faced the many different challenges this particular form of marketing can entail, but even just knowing this advice may help your brand and your campaign stand out against the crowd.
In this article, we’re going to provide a global vision of what does and doesn’t work in influencer marketing campaigns, as well as the best practices and tips for putting together campaign strategies with influencers.
With the following influencer marketing advice and best practices we’re going to share with you, you’ll be more than prepared for avoiding the majority of mistakes which are commonly made with these types of campaigns.
The fact that influencer marketing is extremely profitable doesn’t mean that all campaigns will work or meet initial expectations. Just like with other forms of advertising, such as Facebook Ads or Google Adwords, there are many different ways to implement influencer marketing strategies, with some being much more effective than others.
In order to avoid rinsing your budget on ineffective campaigns, we’ve put together a compilation of our best tips and tricks for influencer marketing. Pay close attention and your campaign is sure to come out on top!
These are the five main pillars of advice which you should bear in mind if you want your campaign to achieve optimal results.
Why is it so important to define your campaign objectives?
It’s simple; depending on the objectives you chose, there are a series of effective marketing actions you can include in your strategy.
Defining your objectives is key for campaign success for the following reasons:
Although very important, defining campaign objectives is relatively easy. The difficulty begins with our second piece of advice for influencer marketing campaigns: choosing the right influencer.
This is arguably the decision which is going to have the biggest impact on the eventual success or failure of your campaign, hence why it’s so important to study the potential candidates’ profiles in-depth.
Once you’ve define your campaign’s target audience, you’ll need to study a wide range of variables of influencers’ whose audience has the same demographic:
Doing so in a manual way is a mammoth task and one which is not at all cost-effective, both in terms of time and effort. It’s for that very reason that more and more professionals are seeking help from tools and software to carry out and automate these actions. Software, such as Influencity, is able to process all of this data and, through the use of its algorithm, help brands select the best influencer profiles.
Although the final decision is to be made by the brand, using tools such as Influencity saves a lot of time and effort and provides reliable information to help make important decisions.
Influencer marketing is much more than just posting a picture of your product on a popular Instagram account.
The content created is a fundamental part of a campaign’s impact.
Trying to put together a series of predefined content can sometimes turn into a disaster. There’s nothing wrong with having an initial idea of what type of content you want to share, but it’s always much more effective to work on elaborating content with the selected influencer.
No one knows their audience better than an influencer. Whilst the brand will have analysed the audience’s data, influencers have gotten to know their audience on a personal level and know how to evaluate their reactions. They therefore know the impact that certain content will have, which tone is the best to employ and what should be avoided.
Influencers know the impact that certain content will have, which tone is the best to employ and what should be avoided.
Metrics should be analysed throughout the entire campaign:
By analysing campaign data in real-time, you can boost actions which have proved more effective and cut those which haven’t achieved the desired effect, therefore optimising the campaign budget.
This evaluation is done by analysing metrics such as engagement rate, web traffic increase or increase in sales (for example, with discount codes).
With this data, you can get an idea of how profitable the campaign is and whether or not you should collaborate with the influencer again in the future.
Our fifth and final piece of influencer marketing advice refers to not limiting collaborations with influencers to one single campaign. If the results have been satisfactory, forming a long-term relationship is much more beneficial for the brand. Why?
Getting better results with your influencer marketing campaigns all falls down to choosing the best influencers and applying good practices. Here are some of the best practices that will help you get the most out of your campaigns.
Despite still being the reigning champion of influencer marketing platforms, you shouldn’t just limit your campaigns to Instagram.
Platforms such as Youtube and Twitter can provide excellent results and are interesting alternatives for reaching different and wider audiences.
Related reading: How to find the right influencer with data
An influencer’s most valuable asset is their followers and they must communicate with them in the most transparent way possible in order to feed and nourish this relationship.
There’s nothing wrong with the influencer announcing that they’re promoting a product in return for economic compensation; in fact, quite the opposite. Their followers will appreciate their honesty and the element of intrusive advertising will drastically decrease.
Specifying that a post has a commercial purpose through the use of hashtags, such as “Ad Post”, increases the bond between influencer and audience, since their followers will know to differentiate between commercial and personal posts.
An influencer’s most valuable asset is their followers and they must communicate with them in the most transparent way possible
If an influencer provides valuable information such as the main features or uses of the product that they’re promoting, this will be much more effective than just simply posting a picture on their feed. It will also show their followers a genuine interest in the product and their recommendation will be much more credible.
When deciding how the influencer is going to promote the product, creativity goes a long way and will determine the impact of the campaign.
Amongst the most frequently discussed tips and tricks in influencer marketing, this particular piece of advice is not often mentioned, but the truth is that the more detailed and specific the contractual relationship between influencer and brand, the less margin for misunderstandings.
The brand should make it clear what they expect from the influencer and how they plan to compensate them, along with the negotiated conditions in a legally valid document which should be signed before kicking off the campaign.
Not only is this an efficient method for optimising your budget, but often micro-influencers can be more effective for your campaign from a credibility point of view.
Despite not reaching such a big audience, choosing profiles with a certain level of authority within their sector can help achieve better results, since in many cases their audience is more inclined to trust more “down-to-earth” profiles than celebrities.
Now you know the best practices and top tips for influencer marketing, you can dig a little deeper into this marketing phenomenon by reading these articles: