What is an influencer marketing campaign?
An influencer marketing campaign is a time-limited marketing initiative that uses social media influencers to reach some marketing goals. Typical goals for an influencer marketing campaign are to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, generate sales, create hype about a new product launch and more.
An influencer marketing campaign is the tactical implementation of an influencer marketing strategy. On the other side, a complex influencer marketing strategy that consists of many different campaigns is called an influencer marketing program.
What is an influencer campaign brief?
An influencer marketing campaign can be broken down into a few simple components and codified into a document you can share with influencers. This document is called a “campaign brief”, and it should help influencers understand in detail what your brand is about, what you want to achieve with this campaign and how and why they should collaborate with you.
On top of this, an influencer marketing campaign should answer questions such as; What are your goals and objective? What media are you going to use? What is your key message? What are your target audiences, and conversely, what are the ideal influencer profiles you want to work with? Also, what are the compensation methods you are going to offer?
With the help of the Make Influencer all-in-one solution, you can manage your workflow in one place, discovering the perfect influencer, managing relationships and tracking their performance.
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How do I create an influencer marketing campaign?
For many businesses, excellent influencer marketing campaigns are critical to successful marketing. Influencer marketing has been the talk of the town for many years now, and it has quickly replaced certain forms of traditional advertising. Many companies have now realised they can increase their reach by collaborating with social media users with large followings on their websites and social media platforms.
Even if influencer marketing has been a well-known form of marketing for many years, some people still don’t know how to work with influencer marketing successfully. Below is how you create an influencer marketing campaign in eight easy steps.
1. Determine your goals
When setting up a successful influencer marketing campaign, you first and foremost need to identify your target audience, set your budget and establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Some KPIs that you could consider are:
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Impressions
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Views
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Engagement
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Click-throughs
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Audience reach
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Increase in followers
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Sales
When it comes to audience, you might want to reach more of the demographics already purchasing from you, or you would tap into new niches, for example to promote a new product line. This depends entirely on you. However, we recommend you formalise very clearly the type of people you want to reach, that is your buyer persona, by answering questions such as:
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Who are they?
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Where do they live?
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How old are they?
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What do they do in their free time?
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Etc.
You can use our free buyer persona template to answer these questions.
Identifying your target audience and buyer personas will help you find what we call “ideal influencer profiles”, which are influencers who can reach and persuade your ideal buyer persona because their audience matches yours. Finding influencers that can reach your target audience is one of the most critical factors to a successful collaboration, yet many brands often overlook it.
2. Choose the proper social media channels
Choosing the right platform is very important. Different platforms are used to reach different audiences and demographics and market different products and services. For example, on Instagram, Influencers publish small posts with great pictures of your product. At the same time, on Youtube, you can benefit from longer videos that can go more in-depth about your brand and product benefits, such as review videos. When you choose the right social media channel for your marketing goals, you can target your specific group of customers.
Also, consider the type of engagement you want to achieve. Different social media platforms offer different types of engagement possibilities.
3. Identify the influencers
Choose an influencer that will represent your products in a way that suits your brand and can reach the audiences you are interested in. Always do thorough research before approaching a potential influencer. Look at their social media profiles and at what type of content they produce. Also, make sure they are polite and careful and write well-researched posts.
Remember to base your decision on something other than the number of followers. Nano-and micro-influencer marketing could be just as effective, or even more effective, as macro-influencer marketing.
This is because macro influencers usually have much more heterogeneous audiences, meaning they cater to a broader but less defined crowd of people. Their reach and engagement rate is usually lower than those of micro influencers. Collaborating with an influencer with fewer followers is also much cheaper.
Are you looking for an easier way to find the perfect influencers for your next influencer marketing campaign? Make Influencer is a platform that connects brands with influencers and helps them create successful collaborations.
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4. Choose an influencer
As mentioned above, the influencer's tone of voice needs to align with your brand so that the advertising feels authentic and trustworthy. When looking for influencers that match your brand, you can do a hashtag search to find out who is already posting about your brand. You can also do a keyword search on the different platforms, use influencer marketing tools and ask others for recommendations.
Once you have discovered some potentially good candidates based on their content, tone of voice, etc, you will need to qualify them. This means you will need to ensure that what appears on the surface is backed by solid performance by looking at their data insights from Instagram (or whatever platform you are interested in). In particular, you will want to look at audience demographic insights and performance insights such as impressions, reach and engagement.
This is a critical step to ensure that you collaborate with professionals and ensure that the user is not using shady practices such as buying followers or bots to boost their look on the surface.
Unfortunately, most of these data insights are not available to you immediately, but you will need to ask the influencers to share them.
However, we have created a playbook to help you make sense of the different data points and learn which ones matter when it comes to choosing the right influencers for your brand.
Or you can use a platform like Make Influence, where you will have access to this information before contacting the creator because all influencer on Make Influence have connected their Instagram accounts and agreed to share their insights publicly with the brands on the marketplace. Quite a significant advantage, isn’t it?
Create a free Business account today
Of course, an influencer will also need to choose you. When talking to potential influencers, ask about their positive past results for similar work, what motivates them and how they usually work. Remember to share a short campaign brief right away so that they can get an idea of how it is to work with you right away!
5. Approve the content before publishing
Some brands might want to approve the content before an influencer publishes it. This is done to ensure the content aligns with your campaign requirements and brand guidelines. However, remember, creative freedom is always essential.
This will help the influencer produce unique and authentic content. We recommend asking to share content before publishing only as part of bigger collaborations focusing on brand co-creation rather than small micro-influencer collaborations concentrating on sales. In any case, the better the communication and your campaign brief, the less need to approve content you will need. After all, it’s their job to create content, and they know what works with their audience.
6. Measure your results
It’s always important to measure the results of your influencer campaign, especially in terms of your chosen KPIs, and consider if you have reached the goals you set for the campaign. Have you made progress? Which post is performing the best? Are any influencer collaborations not giving you the results you hoped for?
Measuring results can be complicated if you do not know how to set up tracking correctly on your website. Tools like Make Influence can help you track your results painlessly without resorting to complicated google analytics setups.
Successful influencer marketing campaigns in 2022
Below are three of the best influencer marketing campaigns launched in 2022, which gave the companies great results.
Musclehouse
Musclehouse is a danish e-commerce store selling various fitness and health products from different brands. In 2020, they decided to turn their focus to influencer marketing; today, influencers are their primary marketing channel. Despite only having two employees dedicated to influencer marketing, in 2022, they achieved:
- 380,000 clicks
- 60,000 sales
- 6.1% conversion rate
- 8.8 ROAS
The key to their success is simple, and it’s based on the growth marketing cornerstone principle: test quickly, fail fast, and reiterate what works. On top of this, they built a highly effective campaign brief and onboarding process that allows them to recruit influencers quickly and with little effort.
Today, they test around 30 new collaborations every month, thoroughly tracking and analysing content created and results. After two months, the influencers with the best results or content are invited to participate in a long-term collaboration, where they get extra benefits. This year alone, they tested over 300 influencers, with over 60 ambassadors on their permanent campaign at any time.
Curious to learn all the secrets to Musclehouse successful influencer marketing program?
Download their business case here!
Mountain Rose Herbs
The herb company Mountain Rose Herbs came in 2022 with the winning strategy to turn customers, professional herbal educators and real brand fans into affiliates. The campaign rewarded the participants with a 10% commission for each sale they drove.
The results were:
- $330K+ in revenue
- 900+ conversions
- 95K+ clicks
Since 1987, Mountain Rose Herbs has served its customers with high-quality organic herbs, species, teas and more quality products. As the brand grew bigger and bigger, it invested in affiliate marketing, intending to expand its customer base and continue to stay relevant.
The affiliate strategy included developing genuine relationships with customers, professional herbal educators and real brand fans – and turning them into affiliates. When engaging these target groups, they share the company's message and prompt the brand while showcasing their lifestyle on social media.
Revolve
The cloth company Revolve was very successful with their winning strategy, “ A robust ambassador program”. They launched an ambassador program that allowed band fans and customers to participate in their influencer experience.
The results were:
- 3,000 new members
- 10,000 applicants
- Increased traffic, sales, and insights
In November 2022, the ambassador program was laughed at and made it possible for ambassadors to receive rewards and prizes for engaging with their favourite brands. The program also offered commissions and incentives like early access to new brands and participating in their influencer trip #RevolveAroundtheWorld.
The ambassador program came out at a time when brands focus on evergreen campaigns and long-term brand partnerships over one-off campaigns. The program has a community-focused approach and is a smart move, as the definition of ‘influencer’ is still evolving.
Let Make Influence help you with your Influencer Marketing Campaign
We have created the perfect platform for brands who want to market their business, product or service with influencer marketing campaigns. Besides finding the ideal collaborations, we also offer valuable tools that will guide you along the way.
Our platform allows you to build measurable programs around your KPIs, such as impressions, clicks or sales. We also track all relevant conversion events and will enable you to tie compensation to those same KPIs. Build impressions & click campaigns, lead gen campaigns and conversion campaigns.
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