The next stage is to design and agree on the campaign after you’ve found and contacted a relevant influencer. Certain issues may develop because this procedure is so important to the collaboration. As a brand, your goal is to get your message through as clearly as possible through your influencer marketing plan, and we’ll help you achieve that with our comprehensive guide to influencer marketing.
At the same time, the influencer does not want to lose their own voice or personality. The most crucial thing to help with the process is to have a very clear vision of what you want to get out of this campaign for your business, and then plan to make it happen. When discussing the type of content that will be generated, you will be able to make brief offers to the influencer in this manner.
This is significant because their material will motivate your followers to create similar content using your products, establishing a User Generated Content strategy for your company. For example, with a 16.03 percent boost in conversion rate, Unisa, an international shoe brand, highlights the clear benefits a brand receives when they recognise and reward their online community.
However, your influencers and how well you interact with them play a big role.
One of the most important findings from influencer research is that the majority of influencers value brand collaboration when it comes to developing a message. As a result, it’s critical to provide them with precise instructions on the type of communication you want to achieve.
Provide them with information they wouldn’t get from other sources, such as brand trivia and product history, as well as professional resources like product photographs or the opportunity to call on a production team. This does not, however, imply that the influencer should merely share a message that the brand has generated. The message should be the result of a collective effort.
Working as a team entails using the best of what each individual has to contribute in order to produce a quality final result. You know your brand, your product, and the benefits it provides; the influencer understands their audience (which is also your audience) and how to approach them. Make the most of this combination of expertise.
According to a 2018 study by Launchmetrics, 63 percent of influencers cited “useful content for my business” as their top reason for collaborating with a company. As you can see, influencers place a high value on the assistance provided through content cooperation.
These days, content development is a demanding process, and everyone wants to create new content. As a brand, here is where you have an advantage. You’re giving them something different, and if you’re imaginative, you might be able to give them something tempting – for both of you. The relationship is thus primarily about creating a win-win situation in which both you and the influencer benefit professionally.
So, how exactly do you plan an influencer marketing strategy?
1. Establishing goals
The first difficulty with your influencer marketing approach, as with any other strategy, is to clearly grasp what you want to achieve. Your goal could be as simple as collecting a particular number of likes on a photo to something much more ambitious like attaining a certain amount of daily sales. Other campaign objectives might include gaining new customer loyalty, creating buzz around your brand, increasing sales conversion rates, establishing a public relationship, improving B2B ties, increasing the number of app installations, and getting a certain number of users to post on your hashtag, to name a few.
This first step will define the entire influencer marketing approach, therefore it’s critical to have everything straight before moving on to the planning stage. Set reasonable, quantitative goals that can be measured over time so that you can analyse the data later. (Which means your campaigns are just getting better!)
2. Creating a campaign
The entire plan will unfold from the fundamental campaign objective, as stated in the previous section. The rest of the approach will emerge once you’ve defined what you want to accomplish.
The budget for your campaign is one of the most critical aspects to consider. First and foremost, you’ll need to figure out how much money you’re going to put in before estimating the return. Remember that costs can include things like research, product samples, public promotions, and the cost of the strategy-planning process itself. In the same Launchmetrics study on influencers, 60% of professionals acknowledged that their influencer marketing expenses will increase in the coming year.
So, how about you? Is your financial situation improving? Is your marketing multi-message or single-message? Is it better to have one big-name influencer or a slew of smaller-scale ones? Do you have enough time to plan the substance of your campaign or do you need to move straight away?
Many firms choose to send a product sample to an influencer and wait for the corresponding post to appear in the world of influencer marketing strategy. In the short term, this strategy can result in unsatisfactory outcomes, such as an insufficient message. However, in rare occasions, it might produce an instant hit, particularly when timing and spontaneity are utilised.
Planning a campaign that will be sustainable over time is a different, and generally more effective method of doing things. Many fashion campaigns serve as a wonderful example of this. In this case, outlining a campaign many months before its launch, including all seasons and collections for the next year, and anticipating its focus, tends to yield greater results.
But what type of material will you want from your influencers? Do you want to host an event? Do you want to promote yourself on social media? What are affiliate links? Are there any sponsored posts?
Sponsored content is the most sought influencer service, according to 85 percent of influencers. But, in the end, it’s all about what you want to accomplish. Don’t just do it because you’ve heard it works — figure out how it works and why it works. Instead of merely having the right to declare that you used influencer marketing, you’ll obtain actual results.
