Questions to Ask When Building an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Want to incorporate influencer marketing into your overall strategy, but not sure how to get started? Want to sell the idea to your manager or client and prove ROI? Read these 6 questions to ask yourself while building your influencer marketing strategy.

1. What is Your Goal?

Any good strategy should start with an end goal. Ask yourself, what do you want to accomplish when working with an influencer? This will also help determine whether the influencer collaboration was successful or not. Some examples could include:

 
• Raise brand awareness
 
• Drive brand engagement
 
• Drive traffic to your website
 
• Increase product sales
 
• Collect email addresses
 
• Create visually appealing content for your brand
 
• Promote a new product, service or an upcoming event
 
• Grow your own social media presence through engagement and followership

The goal of the collaboration should be communicated to the influencer through the project brief, and KPI’s should be measured at the end. More on that, later.

2. Who Is Your Target Market?

When working with an influencer, the demographics and psychographics of their followership on social media should be very similar to your target audience. How do you determine this, exactly? Ask the influencer for their media kit. Macro influencers (those with a large following) will typically send you a pdf that shows you the age, gender, and location of their audience. If they’re a micro-influencer who’s just getting started, you can ask them to navigate to ‘insights’ on their Instagram page and take a screenshot of their audience statistics.

3. What Is Your Budget and Timeline?

Will influencers be a part of your ongoing monthly marketing strategy? Or will you only use them for campaign-based initiatives, such as promoting a new product or service? By determining your budget and timeline, this will help you establish the type of influencer you are able to work with. It will also help you plan ahead. Negotiations, contracts, and content creation can take time. If working on a monthly budget, make sure to plan for events up to two months in advance. If your influencers are creating Christmas content before Halloween, you’ll be in a good spot.

4. What Type of Influencer Will You Work With?

Mega Influencers: You’re talking about the Kardashians and the Cristiano Ronaldo’s of the world. They have millions of followers and can charge a very large sum per post. It was reported in 2019 that Kylie Jenner is paid around $1.2 million per post. Macro influencers: This could range from anywhere from 50,000 to 1 million followers.Micro-Influencers: This could range anywhere from 1,000 - 50,000 followers.Nano Influencers: Typically under 1,000 followers. This could work if you are looking for someone to create content that looks like it’s user-generated, or if you are a small business wanting to reach a niche local audience.Be sure to look for red flags with your influencer prospects. Are their followers fake? Is there a post from a year ago that could end up in a negative PR storm? Cover your bases and check for anything that could go wrong.

5. What Do You Want The Creative To Look Like?

Take into account what your goal is, what their original content looks like, and what your content looks like. To create real influence, you want the content to look as realistic as possible, and it should fit within the aesthetics and theme of both brands. Influencers and marketers do have to consider FTC regulations, so they should disclose when their content is a paid partnership. This can be achieved through hashtags such as #ad #spon or by tagging your brand as a partner through Instagram’s partnership tool.An effective way to achieve a desired outcome for the influencer content is to create a guide. Include everything they should know about your brand, give them direction on do’s and don’ts, and provide mood boards or visual examples of what their content should look like.

6. How Will You Measure ROI?

If your goal is brand awareness, engagement and/or follower growth, create a spreadsheet and make a record of the numbers achieved within 3 days of posting to Instagram. Measure impressions, likes/comments, and followers against the amount you paid. A simple way to create value for this would be $0.10 per impression, $0.50 per like, and $1 per comment.If your goal is e-commerce sales or web traffic, make sure you provide a UTM code for the URL they are directing traffic to. You could also give them a unique discount code and track how many purchases came from it.Whatever your goal is, make sure you keep track of the numbers to determine which of your influencer partnerships were most successful, and this will give you insight as to who the right kind of influencer is for your brand.Influencer marketing is by no means easy, it can be time-consuming and there are legal matters to be considered. However, it’s all worth it when you see the unique content they create and when the results start flooding in.‍

If you need an agency to help take care of your influencer marketing needs,

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