All digital marketing medium requires strategizing as an essential for marketing success, and influencer marketing is no different. It is not enough to locate influencers, choose, and properly pitch your brand to them. You must pull together a string of strategies to ensure that your hard work in identifying appropriate influencers for your brand won’t be a waste. Some of these strategies are discussed below.

Appeal to the Emotions of Your Audience

As much as humans love to be in denial, we favor emotions more than logic in many of our purchase decisions. Influencers can appeal to the emotional side of their audience, telling your brand’s story and how inspiring it is, going from the bottom to a great stage, and even gunning for more greatness. If you have properly gone through the arduous process of selecting an influencer for your brand, then you must have gotten a creative influencer. The creativity and uniqueness of your influencer can do a lot for you in this regard as they will be your storyteller. They will present your brand’s story in an inspiring way that their audience will want some sort of connection, defying logic if need be. Business owners must learn to exploit emotions a lot because it largely accounts for purchase decisions.

Freebies and Giveaways

Another way to pull attention towards your brand is through giveaways and contests. People love free things, even if they are in a good financial position to purchase that item multiple times. If they could, they will rather get it for free. Don’t you like free things? Contests with hashtags can be held to win certain products, audiences can be made to do a video of them saying or doing something related to your brand. If you run an online pizza outlet, you can make a contest, asking users to mention all the types of pizza available in a video with a hashtag “#PizzafestivalWithYourBrand,” and you will select at random, a few. This will generate a lot of traffic on that social media platform, even beyond your audience. Since it’s free, as many people as possible will participate, they have nothing to lose. Contests are usually good for awareness campaigns as many people will get to know about the product you sell or the service you render, even if they don’t really care about it. Giveaways can be targeted to a more specific audience to reward their loyalty. It could also help increase the followers of the brand if there already exists a social media page. Although one major drawback of giveaways and contests is that because of its huge reach, it could attract many people who aren’t your target audience, thus giving you a wrong metric to judge success from.

It is important. Of course, your giveaway item should be valuable to attract people to the campaign; if it is not, you risk a huge waste of money and effort.

Use multiple Influencers simultaneously

After your research and you come up with a list of influencers for your campaign, you can use a couple of influencers within the same niche to promote your product at the same time. This strategy works well because of the multiple audiences you can reach at the same time. It is, however, important that despite taking influencers from the same niche, their content must be distinct. Because they are in the same niche, their posts may talk about the same subject matter many times, but the distinct approach of each influencer will get him his own separate followers. Although the followers of different influencers may intersect at some point, uniqueness will ensure that the level of audience repetition is small. When a campaign is run by multiple influencers, it feels like your brand is everywhere at the same time, hence doing a proper job of awareness for you.

Use Influencers who already like your Brand

A good strategy to approach the world of influencer marketing is using influencers who already have a thing for your brand. Collaborating with those influencers makes them an official brand advocate because they will speak in your favor even more, and because they have been doing it slightly before, it won’t seem like a forced plan. The question now is how to find influencers who already make posts about you online. You don’t want to be combing through the entire internet for that, so you can use social monitoring tools like HootSuite or brand watch to see who has been talking about you and what they say about you. Choose one or more, and watch the increased growth your brand will experience.

Use Hashtags

Hashtags are very important in influencer marketing for a couple of reasons. Your hashtag should be so unique that it catches the attention of people when they see it. Apart from the fact that it gives your campaign an online drive, probably hitting trend tables if you are organizing a contest, it gives you an avenue to monitor your influencers if you are using more than one for a campaign. When you search for your hashtag, the results will contain all influencers’ posts, so you can see whose posts are gaining more attention, indicating who is doing something right.

Reviews

Reviews from people, is a very good way to achieve excellent social proof. People love to feed off the experience of others to make decisions, they use this as a means of looking before they leap. A review gives the perfect opportunity for this, and if it comes from a trusted figure like an influencer, even better. Reviews are important for new businesses because your products haven’t really been tested by people, and they may be skeptical about trusting you with their money no matter how great your offer seems. Giving your influencers a few products to test and give honest reviews is a great strategy, as they see exactly everything with the product, and they can capitalize more on the exceptional things your product has to offer that are different from others. This will inspire a number of their audience to try out the product or a firsthand experience of the product, thereby giving you a whole new customer set. I need not emphasize the importance of making unique products because if there is nothing special about your products, it will make the task of selling your brand to an audience a difficult one. It is important to note that when you create review content, it shouldn’t sound too promotional, consumers can smell it a mile away.

Sharing User-Generated Content

User-generated content is a collection of content posted by your audience rather than your influencers or your brand account; because this content does not come from your affiliated account, they are usually very powerful and will probably boost your reliability far better than your own content. Getting your influencers to interact with these posts and bring up some engagements around posts like that is a great strategy at improving social proof. User-generated content is very useful because this content comes from fellow users of the product. Typically, we do not want to miss out on any trend, so properly harnessing these contents will boost your brand’s credibility on social platforms. Hence, positively impacting purchase decisions towards your products.

Adequate Knowledge of the Brand

Any influencer needs to be in the business of promoting you to have deep knowledge about your brand. The influencer would be communicating with a wide audience and may need to clarify or answer questions. The influencer mustn’t assume. Instead, he makes decisions based on facts and figures because one message communicated wrongly can harm the entire campaign. It is imperative to properly lecture them about your brand and products, simulate questions that people may ask to make sure that you are prepared for nearly all scenarios. Information you let out on the internet is almost impossible to retract, so your influencer mustn’t relay the wrong information to your audience.

Co-create content with your Influencers

While you pay influencers to run a campaign for you, it is important that you just don’t leave them to “do their job.” This is a mistake that many businesses make. Although it is important to give the influencers freedom to ensure the best of their creativity for quality content, it is also just as important to work with them to share your ideas to ensure that they are properly handled from start to finish in your campaign. Two good heads, they say, are better than one, so a collaboration between you and your influencer will improve your working relationship and help you develop better strategies.

Competitor Analysis

Check out businesses in your niche, study their influencer strategies, and the type of influencers they employ, identify what works for audiences that your niche pitches to. This helps you avoid ineffective methods and focus on things that will produce maximum results based on the insights you get from your analysis. It also gives you a metric to judge your campaign and know how well you’re doing.

Stay in touch with your Influencers

You must keep the influencers working on your campaign updated about the latest happenings within your company to ensure that they give their audience firsthand updated information, increasing their credibility and getting their audience more attached to them, making your campaign and subsequent campaigns successful. You can offer them incentives and coupons for their audiences to remain in their good books and help you properly connect to their audience. Staying in touch also improves the relationship with the influencers, making it easier to relate with them and even foster better negotiations for future campaigns.

Use Calls to Action

Calls to action are usually one-button command prompts. After sharing your link via your influencers’ posts, you should have some set of phrases, very conspicuous and short. In your link, you can add a command that says, “I want to benefit from a 20% discount bonus”. You want to make it easy for the people from your audience who love your influencer’s posts and want to know more about your company to have a one-click method of doing that, even better if it comes with a discount or coupon code. This can also boost your website authority for search engine optimization.

Respond to Comments

Good customer service is a universal tactic for a business that works every time. If you have a brand social media account on your favorite social platforms. It is important to request tags in posts of the influencers and adequately get your social media manager to respond to a select few. Thank people for positive reviews, promise to render better service to those who have complains – good customer service often make customers attached to your brand. This will keep you in a cordial relationship with your audience and boost your business’ reputation as a trustworthy one.

Product Demos and How-To Tutorials

If you have released a new product for public usage, especially one that could be technical or involving some sort of set up. Making your influencers educate their audiences, especially on platforms like YouTube, can bring about very high engagement. Especially showing special features that they never thought of, or even easier handling methods that are different from the regular method. This is a very useful tactic in the technology and gadgets industry. A video’s title could be “5 things you didn’t know about your Brand Ear buds” would do.  Because it’s a video, they can see a live and easily digestible representation of how that equipment or gadget works. Even if it’s not just your product that has these special unknown features, because you have content about it by an online authority, it will shape the decision of many to buy your product. You mustn’t go all out listing how great your product is because most people will get bored with that. It is better to show them content that will intrigue them and draw their attention. The high number of engagements generated from it is a great boost to your online authority.

Pitching Your Brand

After getting a shortlist of influencers you’d like to work with, you need to make great offers that are inspiring to the influencer while meeting your goals and in line with your budget. If you keep making offers to influencers without success, then there is a good chance that you aren’t properly selling yourself. Make the influencers know what your brand has to offer. People who are good with their craft won’t promote you across their channels if you are unclear about your offering because they want to maintain credibility and influence within the social space. It is also possible that your brand has had some negative reviews in time past that makes people skeptical about associating with your brand. This is why you have to pitch your brand properly, with an influencer brief to make them see your offers, expectations, guidelines, performance indicators for judging success, and many other things that the influencer needs to know. If you have had a difficult reputation in the past, the first part of your campaign may be to give out freebies, giveaways, contests and get your name on people’s lips. A human largely have a bias towards recent things, so make your intention and plans to regain your image known, and if you can achieve proper clarity, you would get influencers willing to work with you. 

An influencer brief is a set of documents that you send to influencers to pitch your brand after gaining their attention. In this document, you are expected to “brief” the influencer about your project, how you want to partner, your expectations, and the metrics by which you’ll judge success. Disclaimers and clauses are also expected to be part of the brief, as the influencer needs to know his task from the very beginning. This will summarize everything that will be explicitly outlined in the contract; hence clarity is important to avoid confusion and foster a smooth working relationship.

A brief also makes it easy for you to judge a campaign’s performance before even considering analytics. Since you have properly outlined goals, an evaluation will be straightforward as you only have to review your objectives.

What your Influencers’ Brief Should Contain 

• Basic information about your brand and what you offer should be the first thing in your brief. You must state your values and what you aim to achieve, the products or service you’d like to focus on, and why you are contacting them.
• Give the influencer a lowdown of your projected campaign, explicitly describing what success means to you; if they are popular amongst several platforms, be sure to be specific with the platform you’d prefer for the campaign. You should also include the duration of the campaign hashtags you want your campaign to be associated with; if you have one, make sure you let them know if you want your handles tagged and even followed by their audience.
• Be sure to indicate your website, links of landing pages you want people to click on, etc.
• Give specific information about all details, and while you should give a guideline, you shouldn’t be too rigid, as influencers need a bit of freedom to be at their creative best.
• Remuneration type is a very important topic; the influencer should have information on how much he will be paid, what products he will be getting, etc.
• Indicate where you want to claim legal access to content, probably for use in other marketing mediums. Reusing content that you don’t have authorship over may cost you some legal fees.

CONCLUSION

Generally, influencer marketing is a lucrative marketing channel due to its direct contact with the audience. It boasts billions of dollars, and it is perfect for increasing revenue and increasing brand awareness if proper strategies are applied. On every successful influencer marketing campaign, an average of 500% ROI can be made.

Influencer marketing utilizes recommendation, the popular word-of-mouth marketing model, which directly convinces people to use a product or service based on other users’ experiences contributing to the huge success of this medium of marketing. So, erase your doubts and get your influencer marketing campaign started. Good luck!

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