Influencer Marketing: everything you need to know before launching your campaign

Have you heard about the incredible results that Influencer Marketing can offer? Fancy trying it out for yourself? Well done – you’ve made a great decision! However, just like any other type of marketing campaign, it’s important to do things right.

Before getting carried away with the excitement of it all, make sure you know what influencer marketing consists of and how to launch a campaign in the most efficient way possible.

Download Influencity’s free success case from the retail sector

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is kind of like recommending a product you’ve used to a friend, but with a few differences:

• Firstly, it’s not a spontaneous act. Companies encourage specific users to recommend their products.
• Secondly, users are not chosen at random, but rather carefully selected, based on their online audience and the impact their recommendation could potentially have.

Find out more: How to find the right influencer with data

For that reason, influencer marketing is just as natural as recommending a product you’re satisfied with, but with an extra step; careful research into the person who recommends the product, as well as the audience who will receive the message.

When did influencer marketing become a thing?

The origins of influencer marketing are directly linked to the emergence and expansion of social networks.

When social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube became more popular and large communities started to form around certain users, marketers began to realise the potential that these people had to make an impact on their target audience.

Instagram arrived a few years later, but, as we saw in a previous post, it has become the preferred platform for influencer marketing campaigns.

And generating content through social networks certainly has a different effect to traditional marketing tactics.

How is influencer marketing different to other forms of online marketing?

Online marketing has a great advantage in comparison with marketing on more traditional channels, such as television or radio; the audience doesn’t feel saturated by ads.

Online marketing, however, doesn’t stop being just that; marketing. The audience is aware that a brand wants to sell them a product or service but, in many cases, they chose to ignore that. Whilst classic online marketing formats have limited efficiencity, influencer marketing achieves spectacular engagement rates. Why?

• The message or recommendation comes from someone the target audience follows, admires or with whom they have a relationship.
• It’s non-intrusive marketing.

In other words, how can you ignore an ad if you don’t even recognise it?

That right there is the differential advantage of influencer marketing:

• Messages don’t come across as imposed or false.
• Recommendations are not forced or unnatural.
• The recommendation comes from someone the audience trust or respect.

The audience receives recommendations for useful products related to their interests. Influencers have the advantage of creating original and unique content that allows them to share these recommendations and the company benefits from the sales derived from the campaign, as well as achieving other objectives.

A win-win for all

How can you make the most of collaborating with influencers for your marketing strategy?

An influencer’s profile is a crucial element for the success of a campaign. There currently exist many different types of online profiles and brands must establish different relationships with each one:

Brand ambassador

Brand ambassadors are relevant profiles with a big following and whose values are in sync with those of the brand that wishes to collaborate with them.

Relationships between brand ambassadors and brands range from medium to long-term, involve many key PR actions and entail compensation in the form of money and product, as well as invitations to events held by the brand, or other more large-scale events, such as trips or festivals. In return, the brand ambassador generates content predetermined by the brand throughout the duration of the commercial relationship.

Influencers

Influencers, on the other hand, are not directly linked to a specific brand, nor do they tend to establish long term agreements, but rather specific campaign actions.

With influencer profiles, it’s important to distinguish between macro-influencers, whose public relevance makes them appealing to brands due to their great potential impact, and micro-influencers, profiles with a smaller following but whose credibility is solid and who are able to stand out in specific audience segments as opinion leaders.

Related reading: What are micro-influencers and how can they benefit my brand?

Advocate

Finally, we have Advocates, a much more modest profile which corresponds to users who are satisfied with the brand and who don’t hesitate to recommend products of their own accord and without any economic compensation. It’s important to locate and efficiently manage these profiles in order to establish a fruitful relationship for the brand, through some form of collaboration.

Depending on your target audience, the type of content these profiles post to support your campaign may vary considerably.

Why should you chose an influencer marketing strategy?

At this point, we’re sure Influencer Marketing is starting to sound even more appealing. But the best is yet to come. It’s even better when you see all of the benefits an influencer marketing strategy can have for your brand, in comparison with other types of campaigns:

• It has much more credibility than conventional marketing
• It allows you to segment your target audience
• It helps you improve your online reputation
• It’s non-intrusive marketing
• It allows you to increase brand awareness amongst ample audiences that are genuinely interested in your product
• It differentiates you from your competitors
• It gives you fairly accurate predictions regarding the profitability of the campaign
• It offers you a much higher ROI than other types of advertising

Made up your mind? The next step is launching your campaign in the most efficient way possible, so that your investment is truly profitable.

How to launch an influencer marketing campaign and profit from your investment

Just like with any other marketing campaign, developing a campaign with influencers requires previous planning, execution and careful control of the results.

• The planning involves clearly determining the objectives, investigating which influencers are the best match for the brand in terms of their audience, the values that represent them and the platform on which they work.

It also requires you to study what type of campaign actions you need to carry out, as well as choosing the best content to post and combining your campaign objectives with your strategy so you can truly profit from your investment.

• The execution or launch of a campaign requires you to effectively carry out said actions, track influencer activity and analyse the impact of these actions by collecting and evaluating data.
• During the evaluation phase, you’ll be able draw conclusions regarding campaign results and see which actions were more effective or profitable and which ones had a lower impact. This information is valuable feedback which will help you design your future campaigns with much more precision.

The most practical way to manage these campaigns, which involve a large amount of data, is to use an influencer marketing software such as Influencity

The ability to choose between hundreds of influencers and base your decisions on numbers and statistics, manage different campaign possibilities and see the profitability that each one has to offer, or receive real-time data regarding the results derived from the implemented campaign actions, are just a few of the many benefits that Influencity’s software has to offer.

Making your investment in an influencer marketing campaign profitable is so much easier when you have all of the information at your fingertips and the flexibility to implement immediate changes in your campaign when necessary.

If you’re about to launch your very first influencer marketing campaign, perhaps you’re interested in finding out the results you can achieve with Influencity beforehand.  Download our free success case from the retail sector and take a step towards success.