In recent years influencer marketing has become all the rage. The rise of social media, especially Instagram, has given businesses a cheaper alternative to traditional marketing platforms and some have had huge success utilising it.
But not every business that has made a foray into influencer marketing has been successful. Whether it’s choosing the wrong influencer or using the wrong platform, running a successful campaign is not as easy as it appears to be. At Haines we are experienced in running influencer marketing campaigns that get results, so we’ve written up a few tips that can help businesses get a return on their influencer investment.
Assess Your Brand
It sounds obvious but arguably the most important aspect of influencer marketing is choosing the right influencer. That means you have to know your target market and know which accounts they are likely to follow.
Research Your Influencers
Doing due diligence on influencers is an absolute must. It’s incredibly easy to buy followers these days so doing some research on an influencers following is vital to make sure you’re getting the most out of your budget. Tracking their follower growth and their like and comment ratio will help give you a good idea about whether or not someone has bought large amounts of followers.
Results Aren’t Instantaneous
Too often people expect a massive rush of orders right after a post, but sometimes it can take a bit more time to get results. Social media users have become a lot more skeptical and aware of social media influencers. Often it can take multiple posts over multiple weeks before a customer has enough trust in the product and the endorsement to actually purchase it.
Think Outside The Box
There are so many brands and influencers out there that in order to gain consumers attention you need to think outside the box. Whether its creative copy, creative images or a creative choice of influencer, something different will usually help get attention. It’s also important to not be too rigid in what you want the influencer to say, letting them speak in their own tone and voice generally makes their endorsements more believable.
Set Goals And Track Results
Before you start sending out product to influencers you need to know what you want to get out of it. Do you want more visitors to the website? Are you trying to get more sales? Or are you trying to increase your brand awareness and get as many people to see the ad as possible? Once you have figured out what your goal is you can set up ways to track whether or not an influencer has been. Discount codes can help track where sales are coming from and Google Analytics is helpful is tracking web traffic, but there are lots of different ways to do it.
Don’t Be Afraid Of Micro Influencers
Too often businesses just hire the influencer with the most followers when trying to sell a product, but regularly it’s the people with smaller followings that deliver better results. Because of their smaller following micro-influencers usually have a much higher engagement rate than people with a million followers, this gives their followers a much closer connection to them and often leads to trusting them more and giving their recommendations a lot more credibility.
At Haines we are experienced in running influencer campaigns that get you results, get in contact with us today if you believe influencer marketing could be right for your business.