Influencer Marketing for Beginners: Influencer Marketing Series

Have you always wanted to learn / start influencer marketing? 

Influencer marketing focuses on transmitting your brand message to an audience segment that follows a key leader.

Upon aligning your brand with an influencer, you are positioning your product or service for display to his or her already-established large network of individuals who trust what that influencer has to say.

Influencer marketing can help amplify your brand visibility, generate awareness in an attention strapped economy, give you access to a niche but potential buying audience.

This post is for those brand marketers who have just embraced influencer marketing - and want to learn more to kick-start their influencer marketing program. We are not talking about celebrity endorsers, just influencers at present [What is the difference between mega, macro and micro-influencers - read here]

Some things that you need to bear in mind while commencing your influencer marketing journey are:

1. Choosing your influencer

Consumers respect transparency and appreciate ethical marketing. Choose your influencer wisely. This is perhaps the single most important decision in your entire influencer marketing program. You are aligning your brand with another individual, therefore, your brand DNA needs to be similar to the influencers' DNA. 

Things that you need to consider are 

• Fitment: If your brand is a natural fit with the influencer's area of expertise. Ill-fitting brand endorsements can hurt your brand's image more than help.
• Niche in which the influencer operates: area of expertise, speciality, topics covered, depth of content, ability to create unique, authentic content
• Followers & reach: Should not be your only metric. As they say, better to have a small highly engaged audience that a large, disinterested one.
• Engagement Rate: Very important determinant in your decision making. How much is the audience engaging with the influencer's content?
• Resonance: How can you escalate your influencer's reach to outside the core TG captured by the influencer [to like-minded audience segments?]

You also need to bear in mind the evolution of the brand and how it might align with the evolution of the influencer him/herself.

How to find an influencer in your niche:  You can try Influence.co [for Instagram], Buzzsumo,  Klear, amongst others.

2. Charting out the terms of engagement
For example, if you are launching a fitness / health supplement, and you are looking for micro-influencers, you may want to engage with the top health / fitness influencers on the most prominent social media channels. Once the outreach has been established, its essential for you to cover your bases - charting out the terms of engagement - the nature of promotion, frequency, the types of campaigns, usage rights and so on. Though your legal team would work out the legalese for the terms and conditions, you need to establish, what are the deliverables from the influencer's side, what are the inclusions / exclusions.

3. Identifying the content collaboration workflow
Content is the soul of the entire influencer marketing campaign.  You need to strategize and create unique compelling content that leverages the voice and the power of the influencer. There are multiple ways in which you can cascade the communication through the influencer: sponsored content [posts, videos], sharing content, joint-content creation, product reviews, contests with give-aways, event promotion.

4. Distribution
Escalate the life and the after-life of the campaign by optimizing the distribution of the influencer marketing content. Think beyond social media: how about a PR campaign that weaves in the story seeded in social media, you could also promote a specific content piece in your brand's events, further elevating the voice of the influencer. 

Putting it all together
Influencer marketing can be daunting - to say the least. But it is predicted to have massive impact on purchase decisions. Take small steps by engaging with the influencer groups with the least risk [Read about influencer groups here]. Once you have found your feet with influencer marketing, soar higher. Hope you find these pointers helpful in creating your influencer marketing strategy. Do check out the other posts on how influencer marketing can help your brand and type of influencers and share your comments below.

References

Influencer Marketing for Beginners: A Guide for Brands and Agencies, Considerable Influence, https://considerableinfluence.com/img/upload/ConsiderableInfluence_ebook_for_agenciesandbrands.pdf

https://influencermarketinghub.com/the-beginners-guide-to-influencer-marketing-on-instagram/

https://www.jeffbullas.com/influencer-marketing/