Influencer Marketing Best Practices to Maximize ROI

Influencer marketing has been around for a number of years now. This has given brands and marketing departments enough time to work out what works well, and what doesn’t. As a result, there are now a number of established influencer marketing best practices that can help you improve the performance and results of your campaigns and maximize the ROI of your business.

Let’s take a look at 5 of the most effective influencer marketing best practices that you need to know.  

Choose Niche Influencers Who Align with Your Brand

The first of today’s influencer marketing best practices relates to who you choose to work with. Make sure you pick an influencer who aligns with your brand and the values that it represents. It’s also important to make sure they have a clear vision for their influencer marketing strategy that aligns with the goals of your campaign. Plus, they need to have the right audience made up of authentic followers who are likely to take an interest in your brand message.

One of the best ways to ensure alignment is by collaborating with a niche influencer. A niche influencer is someone who has built a reputation for promoting specific types of brands relating to a niche segment of the market. This might be fashion, beauty, fitness, or nutrition, for example. If you pick an influencer who specializes in the same niche segment of the market that your brand belongs to, then they will have much more experience in promoting content that will best resonate with your target audience. 

Another effective strategy, if you are targeting an audience in a specific geographic location, is working with a local influencer. This is someone who has established themselves as a respected member of a local community and whose audience is based in the same area as your business. This strategy works particularly well for small, local businesses such as restaurants or coffee shops, for example.

Focus on Engagement Not Audience Size

We’ve said this before, but it’s so important that it’s worth repeating. Never pick an influencer just because they have a high number of followers. For one thing, a small number of unreputable influencers falsely inflate their numbers by purchasing fake followers or using bots. Plus, even if an audience is authentic, just because an influencer has a lot of followers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be interested in your brand. 

You get far more insight into the likelihood that an influencer will work well for your campaigns by focusing on engagement, not audience size. Make sure the influencer you pick has an active audience with relevant interests that interacts with all their posts.

Establish Clear Goals for Your Campaigns

Another essential influencer marketing best practice is making sure you establish specific goals for your campaigns and communicate them clearly to your influencer. That way, they will know exactly what you want to achieve, and they can design their posts accordingly. 

Your goals should be SMART. SMART goals are objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Aim for one overarching SMART goal, such as obtaining 1,000 new followers on your Instagram page, then break it down into actionable, measurable objectives. 

Consider the following when you define your goal:

• What you want to accomplish
• Why the goal is important
• The resources that you will provide the influencer with
• If there is a specific deadline for reaching your goal

Establish Guidelines but Give Influencers Creative Freedom

It’s important to establish certain guidelines for your campaigns to avoid any potential confusion. These might include using certain hashtags, tagging your brand’s social media account, and disclosing the fact that the post is a sponsored campaign. You might also have a specific call-to-action that you want them to promote or want them to include certain links or discount codes in their post. 

However, it’s equally important to provide your chosen influencer with a degree of creative freedom and control. After all, they know their audience far better than you probably do, so they should have a good understanding of what sort of campaign will resonate best with them. Aim for the right balance between guidance and freedom. That way, you will hopefully get what you are looking for, without stifling their creativity and ability to inspire. 

Analyze Your Performance at Different Levels

The work doesn’t stop once a campaign has been launched. Although an influencer is likely to be monitoring their own performance, and perhaps providing you with some feedback, you also need to conduct your own research to make sure things are running as expected. This means you need to keep a close eye on all your campaign’s performance metrics in real-time. These metrics should be aligned with your objectives so it’s important to identify which ones you will be tracking in advance. This will make it much easier to compare current performance with your anticipated return.

The best way to get maximum insight into the ROI that your campaign is generating is to analyze campaign performance at a number of levels. For example, with Influencity’s reporting features, you can compile all your campaign metrics in a single, intuitive dashboard so that you can compare the performance of various strategies in order to see what works, what doesn’t, and what aspects may need to be improved. 

This includes:

• Campaign-level metrics: the number of accounts included in a campaign, the number of publications, and the total number of reached followers. You can also see the number of interactions (likes, comments, etc.) achieved by a campaign and the engagement rate (particularly useful if you are using an attribution strategy to track performance). 
• Social media-level metrics: a breakdown of the percentage of interactions that can be attributed to each social network. 
• Influencer-level data: the reach and engagement that a specific influencer has achieved with their sponsored posts. 
• Post-level data: post-campaign analysis that can help you evaluate what worked well so that you can make strategic adjustments with your next campaign. 

Hopefully, by following all these influencer marketing best practices, you will get the best results from your campaigns and maximize the ROI of your business.